“The mad king betrayed by his children.”

“‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.’” It was obviously a quote from something. Plath didn’t recognize it.

“You’re fighting them?” Vincent asks.

“Who, the gods?”

“The Twins. Nexus and the Armstrongs,” Vincent said. “The whole mess.”

“What is it you really want to know, Michael? This once you ask a question. After that, you take orders. One question.”

Vincent waits. He knows the question, but he isn’t sure it’s what he should ask. He’s not sure Lear won’t hear the question and simply walk away.

He doesn’t want Lear to walk away. He realizes it. He wants this. Vincent wants this …purpose.

“Are you good or evil?” Vincent asks.

“We, Michael. All of us. We,” Lear corrects him. “We, Michael, are good and evil. But we are less evil than them.”

Vincent hears this and—

“Goddamn it!” Plath cried. The memory ends there. She pushes the pin slightly deeper and finds only an unrelated memory of a funeral for a neighbor’s cat with a very young Vincent solemn in attendance.

“What?” Nijinsky asks.

She can’t tell him. Lear’s identity is sacred, defended by Caligula. She can’t even admit she came close.

Vincent had gone looking for it. Vincent had wanted in. He had chosen this path. Did that make him better than Plath? Or had he always been a bit too close to crazy?

“That’s enough,” Plath said. “I’m pulling out.”

She sent her biots toward the exit, toward the long walk through Vincent’s brain to the optic nerve.

“No. There’s no time for that, Plath. Stay in there,” Nijinsky orders. “Biots in place. Take a break. Have a sandwich. Play some music. Whatever. Then get back to it.”

Farid learned a number of useful facts after being shot in the mouth.

Fact One: Even with lidocaine being injected into your cheek, sewing up a bullet hole hurts.

Fact Two: Even with novocaine, grinding a shattered molar down to a stump for a temporary crown hurts.

Fact Three: His father was nominally in charge of the embassy, but when the attaché for cultural exchanges—in reality the Washington station chief for Lebanese intelligence—gave him an order relating to security, it was obeyed.

By the time Farid got back, exhausted and rattled, to his bedroom at the embassy, his laptop was gone. They’d taken his phone while he was still at the hospital.

The TV news was all about the bookstore massacre wherein— according to reports—an unidentified suspect falsely claiming to be a federal agent went on a shooting spree, severely injuring a Washington, DC police officer, and killing three others.

“You are going home,” his father informed Farid.

“Father, you don’t understand what . . .” Farid has started to say. But how was he going to explain any of it? Confess to being a hacker? He would never get access to another computer.

“I understand that you were almost killed by some madwoman! This country is crazy. You are going home!” His father had hugged him so hard it hurt. Then he had drawn back almost as if to slap Farid. Then he had burst into tears.

Fact Four: he was going home.

Fact Five: he would not be the person deciding the fate of the American president, others would. They would know he was off the grid, and they would know he was being sent home. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that what he had learned would not simply disappear.

“I feel funny, Anthony.”

“Do you?” He had goggles on that covered his eyes and half his forehead. His hands were in thick gloves. A tangle of wires ran from a strap around the back of his head down to what looked like an old Xbox. More wires ran from the gloves to the box.

“I feel . . .” She bit her lip.

“Tell me what you feel, baby.”

He had six of his nanobots in her brain. The wire was everywhere

in the hippocampus and in the nucleus accumbens. It had become overgrown, like a cable laid through a jungle. The wire was still bright where it showed, but much of it was completely obscured. Lymphocytes had swarmed as they usually did, but they had failed to either absorb or rip open the wire and now only a few sniffed around the alien intrusion.

A much bigger problem was the brain cells themselves. They came in various shapes and sizes, none as large as a nanobot’s sensor array, but some like stretched octopi, others like cross sections of kitchen sponge, or lichen. All, of course, had been artificially colored by the software, creating weird tableaus of broccoli green, and a sort of pulsating maroon, and a vivid blue unlike anything in nature. The corpses of lymphocytes were painted pearly white by the software, like cow skulls in the desert in an old cowboy movie.

Like vines the cells grew over the wire and encrusted the pins that stuck up like so many arrows shot into pulpy soil. It was like discovering the ruins of a long-abandoned factory deep in a jungle.

The nanobots had to move hand over hand, so to speak, pincer claw over pincer claw, perhaps, in the environment of gently circulating cerebral-spinal fluid. Losing your grip could mean floating away. It was a bit like an astronaut working in zero G.

Two claws to grip, two claws to rip.

Six nanobots. Six sets of visuals, front and back, twelve screens in his goggles. Bug Man controlled it all, all at the same time. It was nowhere near as cool as battle, but it was enough for now, because he was doing something new. He was unwiring a brain.