Somehow he was convinced that none of this would ever have happened if he’d just found the onions sooner. Gotten home.

With a chill he remembered his mother coming down with a sinus infection a year ago, give or take. She’d had tests done. Her DNA, too, might be stored somewhere on one of Lystra Reid’s drives.

Her plan was now frighteningly clear. She had used her web of medical testing companies to acquire and digitize DNA from millions of people. Once you had the DNA, you could grow a biot derived in part from that DNA. The biot-DNA-donor mind link would happen—which would be disorienting all by itself. Suddenly having windows open in your mind … well, that was going to be disturbing.

But nothing to what came next. Lear wasn’t out to disturb or unsettle people, she was out to destroy civilization. For that she needed madness. Widespread, inexplicable, irresistible madness.

So once the biots were born, she had only to kill them. An electrical surge maybe, or extreme heat or acid.

Would it really work? Would one crazy woman be able to bring the whole world crashing down?

He turned on the television; it was all he had. Al Jazeera TV had a news bulletin. He reached for the remote. He did not want to see more video of that horror show in Stockholm.

Suddenly he felt Lystra’s presence and realized he was no longer hearing her from the other room. “Leave it,” she said, looking toward the TV screen. “I think something kind of, yeah, big just happened.”

Seven months earlier, the younger British prince had given blood in a public show of support for a National Blood Service blood drive. The NBS had been helped in their work by volunteers from Directive Medical UK.

Of course security for the Royal Family was very tight, so no one would be allowed to actually know which was his donation. It was labeled anonymously, just a numerical tracer, and sent off to the blood bank.

Except that the Directive Medical lab tech had already swapped it out with an earlier sample.

Now, as the television picture showed, the prince was in a gondola of the London Eye—the huge Ferris wheel beside the Thames—as part of an outreach to disadvantaged youth.

The gondolas were large enough to hold a couple of dozen people at once, and were in fact holding twelve specially chosen children of carefully varied ethnicities, who shrank in horror against the far end of the gondola as the prince repeatedly ran at the transparent wall and smashed his head into it.

Blood smeared the plastic. Blood completely covered the prince’s face and would have rendered him unrecognizable if not for the familiar red hair.

The Eye was slowly coming around, bringing the gondola back to earth, but that footage from three minutes earlier—brutal video of the raving royal slamming himself again and again and again—was competing in one half of the screen with a live shot showing him flailing, kicking, spitting blood in every direction as appalled Royalty Protection in plainclothes and uniformed London Met police tried to get him under control.

“That was excellent,” Lystra said. “You try to nail the timing, yeah, and arrange something spectacular, but wow, that was better than I’d hoped for. Yeah.”

Bug Man stared in horror. “I liked that dude. He was the fun one.”

“Who, the prince?” Lystra laughed. “Don’t go soft on me, Bug. Much more to come. I’ve got three officers at a nuclear missile base near Novosibirsk. High hopes. Fingers crossed, yeah?”

And yes, she had her fingers crossed. She left and closed the door behind her.

Bug Man watched as the prince was hauled away to a waiting ambulance. “Fuck you, crazy lady. Yeah? I liked him. He was a gamer.”

NINETEEN

“I need your help.”

Keats to Wilkes and Billy the Kid.

Plath was asleep. He had crept silently from bed to bed waking them, holding a silencing finger to his lips.

“Anything for you, pretty blue eyes,” Wilkes said, and yawned.

“Plath has been wired,” he said. He knew she might wake up at any moment. No time for delicacy. “She’s been wired, she knows it, but she won’t pull the wires. It’s got to her. We need to go in there and clean her up.”

Anya was not invited. Plath had a biot in Anya. Keats badly wanted to ask Anya if she had built any more biots for Plath. But Plath might have been watching through Anya’s eyes, or listening in her ear.

“You saying someone from Armstrong wired her?” Wilkes asked.

Keats hesitated. “This is lunacy. This is mad. But she saw something. Down in the meat. She doesn’t think it was a nanobot. I helped her look. I didn’t find anything. But I have found wire, a lot of it.”

He let that sink in. “She thinks Nijinsky—” Wilkes began.

“No,” Keats said. “Whatever it is, whoever’s running it, it’s still apparently active, so not Nijinsky. Someone else. Maybe one of you two. Maybe a traitor from some other cell.”

Wilkes got up, came over to Keats, and sat down beside him. Very close, uncomfortably so. “How do we know it isn’t you?” she asked. “You’ve had a biot in her for a long time, right? Fixing that hole in her artery or whatever? Could be you, right? And maybe you’re just lying in wait for one of our biots to come crawling along and, boom!”

“This is kind of crazy,” Billy said.

“Nah, this isn’t kind of crazy,” Wilkes said. “This is full-on crazy.” She heh-heh-heh laughed and said, “This is where it all goes, right? I mean, this is where it kind of had to go, didn’t it? You start playing with people’s brains, man.… How do you know? Right? Whole world’s going crazy. All those big brains. And now your prince dude.”