BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

He took her in his arms. She put her arms around his waist and pressed against him, the side of her face flattened against his chest. She breathed deeply. She felt her breasts flattening against his abdomen.

He was breathing in her hair.

“So it’s cold in your room,” she prompted.

“Sorry?”

“You were telling me about normal.”

“Was I? Sorry, I was busy thinking about football. Desperately thinking about football. Remembering all the details of a particular match . . .”

“Mmm,” she said. “You like sports?”

“Yes. I find sport to be an excellent distraction.”

“From?”

But she had lost interest in banter, really, and he didn’t bother to answer. Instead he ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her close for a kiss.

Her heart wasn’t in it. She was distracted.

“What?” he asked.

“Keats …Noah …Those beaches we were talking about. What if it was possible? I mean, what if I had a way to—”

A scream.

Keats and Plath froze. “That’s not Vincent,” she said.

“Billy!”

They bolted for the stairs.

Billy saw the palm of his own hand as an unworldly terrain, gently rolling hills crossed by an irrational crosshatch of ditches, some shallow enough that his nanobots could step over them easily, others deep enough to hide a nanobot from view.

He experimented by closing his hand slowly. The land curved up around his nanobots. It lifted him at the same time as it began to shut out the strong light. Fingers …They looked so huge! Like someone had made sausages the size of Metro trains. They were even segmented like a train, each section of finger like a car. They came together as they closed, blocking light, creating deep canyons in the sky. The surface was again covered in slashes, left right, diagonal, in every direction. It looked like some arcane script, like writing in a language he could never hope to understand.

He opened his hand slowly. The massive scarred fingers swept back and away, like watching one of those time-lapse things of a flower opening its petals, bud becoming blossom.

Light flooded over his troops, his nanobots.

His tiny army.

But enough of palms and fingers, he wanted to see more. He

wanted to see what the older BZRKers had always talked of in awed tones. He wanted to go down in the meat. He wanted to confront the beasties. He wanted battle.

He wanted game.

He glanced at Burnofsky. The man looked at him with an expression that reminded Billy of rats he had seen in the alleys behind his foster home. Knowing. Wary but not fearful. Contemptuous.

Billy sent his nanobots speeding across his palm—leaping, cavorting, even lowering the center wheel for a bit, though this proved to be not a practical idea on this terrain. He cartwheeled a couple of the nanobots in the process of learning this fact.

The nanobots raced madly, legs motoring along like blue-tinged cavalry. He picked the middle finger to climb. And it was a climb now: when they slipped the nanobots fell backward, like Jack and Jill falling back down the hill. But gravity hadn’t too much meaning for nanobots. A slip, a fall, meant little, which gave him a reckless courage. He laughed.

“Fun, eh?” Burnofsky said. “Hurry and get off your hand. Get somewhere more interesting.”

Billy shot him a suspicious look. Burnofsky prodded him. “Don’t be scared, little boy,” he crooned. “You’ll be part of history. A first. And I’ve got a ringside seat.”