My heart hammered so fast I struggled to focus on what that implied. “The other lobes? The parts that regulate breathing, heart rate, consciousness, language…reflexes?”
Reflexes were involuntary. If that was the case, Michio would be able to control the functions that kept him alive, right?
I reached up and cupped Michio’s face with both hands. “Can you hear me? See me? Michio, please look at me.”
“He perceives everything, Eveline, but he can’t look at you unless I allow it. He blinks on his own. His lungs work because they have to. His heart will flex and contract until it no longer can. But I control the voluntary muscles, the actions that require conscious thought.”
Beneath my hands, Michio’s face contorted into a vicious scowl. His lips drew back, his fangs jutted out, and his breath hissed against my face.
I yanked my hands away and stumbled back. I couldn’t help it, even though I knew the Drone mentally molded Michio’s expression. I’d never seen him look so terrifying. “This is how you control them? You bite them, and it gives you access to their brains?”
“Yes and no.” The Drone stepped away, kicking drops off his shiny black shoes and shunning the water like an aphid. “Wash your hair.”
What would happen if I splashed him? His hands and face were the only parts of him exposed. Maybe his skin would bubble and boil, but was it worth his wrath and the certain end of this conversation?
My head swam as I looked around for soap, willing to do anything to keep him talking.
Michio’s expression returned to vacancy, his hand reaching down to grab a bottle from a bucket against the wall. Mechanically, he squeezed a dollop of shampoo on my head. I rubbed it in with shaking fingers, knowing the Drone had commanded every movement Michio just made—every movement he’d made since he’d snatched me in Missouri.
None of the beatings had been initiated by Michio. If he was consciously aware… Oh God, he would’ve watched with horror every time his fist reared back, would’ve felt each time my body gave and buckled beneath his strikes. It would destroy him.
I looked at the Drone with disbelief. “Your control must be limited by distance. And how many men can you realistically direct at one time?”
“There is no limit.” He licked his shriveled lips. “When a man is bitten, it doesn’t matter if he’s on the other side of the planet. The venom hits his brain, and it instantly and permanently belongs to me.”
I struggled to digest that. “There’s no way you can coordinate all of the movements of that many men.”
There would’ve been long periods where most of them just stood around, as if in sleep mode.
“I give them a series of basic commands, like a computer programming language, if you will. They can do what they want as long as they don’t deviate from the orders I set in their brains.”
Shit. These men were like robotic extensions of his body. He didn’t have to ever leave here. Didn’t even have to wipe his own ass, if he didn’t want to. I felt sick.
“If anything happens to me, the programming lives on.” The Drone paced around me, avoiding the spray of water, his hands folded beneath the cape on his back. “I’ve programmed the entire brain of every man who’s contracted my venom through a bite. That is, every man but Dr. Nealy.”
A dark-haired man with a snake tattooed on his neck stepped away from the wall. Without warning, he began to choke, his mouth gaping as if the air had been vacuumed from his lungs.
I wrapped my arms around my waist, my breaths escaping in spurts. “You’re strangling him?”
The man’s body held completely still, hands at his sides, as his face turned purple and blood vessels popped in his eyes.
“I stopped his lungs.” The Drone cocked his head, calmly studying the stages of suffocation.
Oh God. Did I want this stranger to die? Was he a good man who had been brainwashed? Or an inherently evil man who willingly signed up to kill for the Drone?
A moment later, the man gasped and stepped back to the wall like nothing had happened.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “How do you recruit them?”
The Drone resumed his circuit around me, the cloying scent of his insanity burning my nose. “I have hundreds of spiders across the country—”
“Spiders? That’s what you call the men who are bitten?” I scanned Michio’s face, stark in its blankness, but still gorgeous in his fearlessness. He was not a fucking spider.
“Yes. My spiders are out there right now, offering superhuman abilities—speed, healing, strength—in exchange for servitude. Dr. Nealy aside, no man is forced to join me.”
“They join out of greed.”
His eyes darkened. “I call it ambition.”
“Do they understand the level of fanaticism they’re signing up for?”