“Stop them,” Nijinsky said. “You know what happens in this scenario. You can’t want that.”

“Give me a drink, pretty boy,” Burnofsky said. “Hold it to my lips and pour.”

Nijinksy froze, indecisive.

“Jin, give him the drink,” Plath said.

Wilkes snatched the bottle, stuck the entire neck of it in Burnofsky’s mouth, and upended it. Burnofsky gagged and swallowed and choked, but Wilkes kept the bottle elevated.

Finally she pulled it away. “Now talk. How do we stop it?”

Burnofsky coughed until the cough turned into a laugh. His voice was a harsh rasp. “I never said I’d tell you anything.”

“You guys need to help me,” Billy said urgently.

“Hah,” Burnofsky said. “They need to incinerate you, kid. That’s what they need to do.”

“What?” Billy asked, his voice quavering. “What does that mean?” “Nothing,” Plath snapped.

“You’re going to do this to a child?” Nijinsky demanded. “A child? A child, singular?”

“I don’t believe it,” Keats said, shaking his head. “No matter how degenerate you are, no matter what you’ve done, you can’t sit here and watch it happen.”

Burnofsky’s stare was from very far away. “Well, my little Limey friend, it won’t be the first, will it? The first time, I saw it very close and very personal. She looked at me…. She didn’t know …but she felt it, inside her …She felt death, you know, she felt it, even though she was young and what did she know about death? She looked at me and said, Daddy …And she never called me Daddy that way before. Not in a long time, not since she was a little girl . . .” He lost the thread for a minute, then recovered, lifted his chin up off his chest. “I’m doing it to them all, all the children. I’m doing it to the whole human race. All of life. I’m cleaning this filthy planet. All of you,” Burnofsky said. “All of everything. Welcome to the end of the world.”

TWENTY-TWO

“Give me that.” Keats took the nanobot controller from Billy. “We don’t have the code,” Nijinsky pointed out.

“I’m not trying to stop the hydras, I’m going to kill them. I’m

going to switch over and use the dozen nanobots Burnofsky planted on Plath. And I’m pulling my biots from Plath and Burnofsky.”

Burnofsky snorted. “Try to run biots and nanobots simultaneously? I don’t think so.”

“Wilkes?” Keats said as he slid on the twitcher glove. “If he argues, give him the brick again. Just don’t hit his right eye, I’m walking my biot out that way.”

“This isn’t a fight against Bug Man,” Plath pointed out. “These hydras are on automatic, right? Uncontrolled? I’m getting in on this, too.”

Burnofsky said, “Don’t be stupid. By now there will be too many for—”

WHACK!

Wilkes did not have to be prompted. The brick smacked Burnofsky’s head with enough force to stun him into silence.

“You two are not playing hero by yourselves,” Wilkes said. “I’m in, too.”

It was a strange battle muster. The forces were spread far and wide, and yet, in the macro they were all within a three-foot radius.

Plath rallied all three of her biots, two fresh from their nutrient baths and functioning normally. Keats withdrew his first biot from Plath’s brain and his second from Burnofsky. He took chargeof the nanobots Burnofsky had planted on Plath—these, at least, were controllable.

In Keats’s brain there was an explosion of awareness. He saw through K1 and K2, his two biots. One raced across Burnofsky’s eye. The other was racing to escape Plath’s brain. But at the same moment all twelve visual inputs from the nanobots appeared in his goggles.

He was seeing fourteen distinct visuals, the nanobot inputs unfamiliar, crude seeming, compared to the direct mind-to-mind control of twitcher over biot.

Fourteen creatures under his control, on Plath, on Burnofsky, all needing to be moved as quickly as possible to Billy’s cheek. It was somewhere between deadly serious and absurd.

The problem was: it was impossible. Keats knew that, felt his heart sinking as he realized that no one, not Bug Man, no not even Vincent, could manage this army. He platooned the nanobots, but if he was going to hunt down and kill every last hydra he would need to control his nanobots individually.

Impossible. He took a step back and must have seemed about to faint because Nijinsky caught him.

“Billy, haul that pew over here,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll do the transfer. First, I’ll touch Plath’s cheek to get the nanobots.”

“Yeah,” Keats said. Then, not meaning to say it out loud, “No way.”

He could control the nanobots well enough to race toward the massive finger that lightly touched Plath’s face. He could send them scampering along the polish-tarred fingernail. And having done that, he could march one biot down Plath’s optic nerve and another from Burnofsky’s eye through the fringe of eyelash trees. But not all at once.

The hydras would continue to replicate. Every passing second would mean more foes to be destroyed. And he would have to get them all, every last one. Leave even a single hydra alive to start the process all over again and Billy would be eaten alive.

Fail, let even one hydra survive, and they would have no choice but to destroy Billy themselves—kill him and burn him to ashes.