“To be making the decision himself, not leaving it up to all of us,” Nijinsky snapped, drawn out of his circular contemplation. Interrupted in the act of chasing his own tail.

“And what would his second choice be?” Keats asked, looking Nijinsky in the eye, very steady.

Nijinsky resented it. “What would your brother want?” he shot back. “If we were talking about operating on—”

“He’d want me to make the call,” Keats said. “If he couldn’t do it himself, he’d want me to do it. I don’t know Vincent very well, but my guess is he’d want you to decide, Jin. He’d want you to try and rescue him from where he is.”

“Like I failed to do when it mattered,” Nijinsky said. “When Bug Man had him. Rescue him now like I didn’t do then.”

There was a long silence.

“Yeah,” Keats said finally. Because someone needed to.

The strange thing was, Nijinsky was relieved at the answer. He had needed his guilt recognized.

Wasn’t that what they were fighting for? The right to feel every jolt of pain life had to give? The right to suffer? To not be sustainably happy?

“I’m not the right person to lead this,” Nijinsky said to three blank faces. “Unfortunately none of you are, either. So, I’m it.” He nodded and felt his chin quiver and decided it didn’t really matter if they saw that. “Send your model four out to take on a load of sulfuric,” Nijinsky said to Plath. To Wilkes, he said, “Go make sure Dr Violet is with Vincent. Have her prepare the acid for Plath. Then stay there with him, report to me.”

Wilkes ran off immediately, leaving Plath and Keats with Nijinsky.

After a while Nijinsky realized the awkwardness was all about him. He excused himself.

But he went only as far as the stairs, waited there out of sight, listening. Because that’s what the right person would do. Because the right person would want to know what Plath and Keats said to each other.

He overheard.

“Don’t do this,” Keats said.

“I have to try to—”

“Like hell you do.”

Plath felt like the basement was out of air. She clenched a fist until

the nails cut into her palm and thought, Jesus, just like Wilkes. She said, “I thought you were saying it was the right thing to do!” “For Vincent, yes,” he said. “For you …You have to get out of this,

Sadie. I see it in your eyes, you want out.”

“I want us both out,” she said in a near whisper.

She had turned away. He didn’t want to talk to her neck. He took

her shoulders and turned her around. It was not roughly done, but it was more definite than Keats had been before. He wasn’t asking her to face him, he was demanding.

“Together?” he asked.

“Yes, together,” she said, shaking off his grip but facing him nonetheless.

“But you said—”

“Don’t fucking tell me what I said!” Her head jerked forward with the force of it, making him back up. “I was making sense. I was being mature. I was trying not to hurt you or hurt me.”

“And now, what? Now you don’t care?”

“Listen to me, Noah,” and all at once it wasn’t Keats, it was Noah. She repeated the name, defiant. “Listen to me, Noah. If this works, if we save Vincent, we may be able to save your brother. And someday we may be able to save each other.”

“Don’t do this for me or for my brother,” he pleaded. “Don’t. You can get out. You can escape. This doesn’t have to be your life.”

She took his face in her hands.

He closed his eyes.

It was not a kiss as prelude to desire. It was a kiss that sealed fates.

EIGHTEEN

The new version-four biot—biot 4.0—moved more slowly with its internal bladder filled with acid. It was also carrying a separate bladder full of acid, just a sort of plastic trash bag really. It moved slowly back along the tortuous path it had followed earlier. Across the frozen lake of the eye with its below-the-surface rivers of swollen capillaries.

Follow the long curve, down beneath the eyelid, a long walk it was, it felt like a mile. Around and around until the muscles, like bridge cables, merged into the slickery ice surface now more pink than white.

The muscles twitched. Vincent’s eyes, well, he didn’t sleep much, which all by itself made him twitchy. More so when he was strapped down. They had cut down on his meds to let him react more normally. At the moment, to react normally meant to laugh softly, madly, to himself, to occasionally bark like a seal, and other times simply to roll his eyes up as far as they would go. It felt to Sadie like he was trying to turn his eyes all the way around and look back at his brain. Which given what he knew made a certain amount of sense.

Plath’s biot could not make out human speech very well, less well when she was down in the meat. She heard what she knew to be a voice, a soft, soothing voice, Anya no doubt, but it was like hearing a truck rumble by on the street outside.

A routine move (God, how had she come to think of this as routine?) down the optic nerve. The nerve cells were jittery, firing gigabytes of optical data beneath her biot feet. She hesitated, looked down with her biot eyes, and saw the cell beneath one foot begin to divide. It was surprisingly sudden in the final phase, looking like invisible hands were ripping soft bread dough in half. She almost laughed at how much it looked like something she’d seen in high school biology.