“I wired the memories of the Towers, the Tulip, and your pleasure centers, all together,” Vincent said. “They were Lear’s orders. That’s what he wanted. I …” He looked at Anya, and now Plath was looking at Vincent through her own eyes and through Anya’s. “I—”

“Did you at least argue? Did you at least question?” This was Keats now, raging. “Did you not say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Did you not say, ‘How dare you?’ Did you not tell Lear to go fuck himself?” Keats looked as if he might beat Vincent to death right then and there.

“He’s been wired, too,” Plath said wearily. “We burned holes in his brain to save him, but someone else saw an opportunity in that. We never checked because … well, because we felt so sad and guilty. But Lear got to Vincent, Vincent got to me.”

“Who would have wired Vincent?” Keats asked, but even as the words were forming, he saw the answer. “Nijinsky. It’s like a disease. Lear to Nijinksy, Nijinsky to Vincent, Vincent to Plath. Like a virus.”

“Vincent, walk your biot out of me,” Plath ordered. “Do it now.”

Vincent said nothing, just looked at her, so Wilkes dropped down beside him, clapped a friendly hand on his leg, and in a flash there was a knife in her free hand. She jabbed the point against his carotid artery. “Do what the lady says, Vincent. Or I have to kill you. Give up the one you have in her, and your others, too. It’s either that or you die.”

“Do it, Vincent,” Anya pleaded. “For me, do it.”

Half an hour later Vincent’s biots were in a vial hanging from Plath’s neck. Vincent, the once-invincible Vincent, was still just seventy percent. But he was one hundred percent in Plath’s power.

STATE OF PLAY

Enough dots had been connected. But twenty-four hours after the day of the prince and the Pope, no one had an explanation. The prince was locked in a comfortable room in the palace and tranquilized to near coma.

His Holiness was locked in comfortable rooms at the Vatican, tied to his bed, and tranquilized to near coma.

Stockholm was fresh out of psychiatric beds in its institutions.

And then the new head of Wells Fargo bank drove her car off a bridge.

And several hours after that the Ayatollah Aliabadi was discovered amid broken glass cutting his wrists.

And the fashion model who leapt out of a tenth-floor window in Kyoto.

And the rock star who stormed offstage at a concert in Toronto, only to return a few minutes later, armed with a pistol, which he emptied into the audience, killing one and injuring four.

And the president of the World Bank who swam frantically into the Baltic Sea in freezing conditions. He was rescued but had to be confined.

It soon became hard to keep track of.

The Christmas Crazy, it was called, though it had begun earlier. The Season of Hope, as some faiths called it, had taken a very grim turn.

The world was on edge. The world was baffled and frightened but still somewhat amused, as it was only prominent people being affected by whatever bizarre syndrome was occurring.

But then a tenth-grade teacher in Larkspur, California, began attacking students with a knife. Five injured, one critically.

And a soldier at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, grabbed his AR-15 and began shooting up the officer’s club. Seven dead, three critically wounded.

The word was out: listen for people who claim to suddenly be seeing things in their head. Especially if they claim to be seeing strange insects.

Grab them, restrain them immediately, or at least get the hell out of the vicinity.

All over the world events were being postponed or canceled. All over the world people eyed each other with suspicion bordering on paranoia.

Then … nothing. For twenty-four hours.

Some dared to hope that it—whatever it was—was over.

Others wondered if whoever was behind this—aliens were the top choice—was just taking a break in order to build up to something even more unsettling.

The Centers for Disease Control and counterparts all over the world were in panic mode, searching for the cause, or at least the common thread. But it was a business consultant, who worked frequently with major medical clients, who made the tentative connection on his blog.

This person, David Schiller, sixty-three, suggested that, based on limited available data, it seemed those affected were more likely than the norm to have had lab work done. Medical tests. Blood tests. Urine samples.

He wrote this up on his blog. The dozen or so readers who saw the post wrote in comments that they would be very interested to see this developed further.

Sadly Schiller was unable to post a follow-up, as six hours after he published his blog post he was arrested by Chicago police for barbecuing one of his beloved Samoyeds on a fire he built in his front yard.

His blog was hacked and deleted.

The world was frightened. On edge. Desperate for some peace or some explanation.

The world was ready.

And so was Lear.

TWENTY-TWO

“I don’t know how I feel,” Plath said. “I feel …”

“It’s probably weird,” Keats said.

“Hollow.”

They had walked out of the safe house, both feeling that there was too little air in the place, both needing to be reassured that the outside world still existed.

They looked at each other, and Keats knew that a vast distance had opened up between them. He had wanted nothing so much as to close the much smaller distance that had persisted, even during the idyll on Île Sainte-Marie. Instead, he had dug the Grand Canyon and now looked at her across it.