Only Plath had any idea what was happening with Vincent’s biots. She had sent all three of her biots along with Vincent’s aboard Wilkes’s hand, and transferred from there to Bug Man’s wrist. Wilkes’s own biots were hanging back, waiting in the grooves of Bug Man’s palm.

Plath’s job was to watch Vincent’s biots make their approach, then to peel off and gain access to Bug Man’s eye and see what he saw. It seemed insane to her—an apt word, insane—that Vincent could still be nearly comatose in the macro but responsive in the nano. But she could almost understand it. (Which might also be insane.) A biot was not an “other.” It was not outside of you, it was part of you. It was like a finger or a leg.

Still, accomplishing the mission would require Vincent to understand at some level, to know where his biots were and why. Did he understand? If not, Bug Man would destroy him once and for all. There would be no coming back from further losses.

Vincent was going into a fight he absolutely had to win, and yet he might not even know the fight was on.

“He’s moving,” Plath reported. Everyone glanced at Vincent. She corrected, “When I say he’s moving . . .”

“Yes, his biots,” Keats said. He smiled at her.

She did not return the smile. She knew how vast the brain was down there, down in the meat, and she knew that Nijinsky could easily enter her brain and lay wire without Keats’s own biot having spotted him. But it was still hard to shake the suspicion that Keats had known what Nijinsky was up to and had just concealed it from her. Could she really trust even him?

The rational, reasoning part of her knew better, understood that because Nijinsky knew the location of her aneurysm he would of course easily avoid Keats’s biot. Keats would never have known. And yet . . .

“Down the rabbit hole,” she whispered to herself, “And all of us as mad as hatters.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Vincent was running free. So good to be running free. He was two, a twin, but not identical. Half of him was familiar, the sights, the sensation, the speed, but the other half over there, no right here, was faster, stronger, and saw more clearly.

Two halves of him. The real, true him, running wild over dead skin cells, threading through widely spaced, dark spikes like branchless palm trees, bent almost parallel with the ground.

He was conscious of another creature, much like himself, but different, following behind, keeping pace. She—and he was somehow sure it was a she—was no threat. A friend? Possibly, but certainly no threat, no, he had an image of the threat; he remembered them, the other game pieces, the ones with the center wheel, the machines that zoomed along on six legs or lowered that wheel.

He remembered their dangerous claws and spikes and vulnerable visual array.

There was something else, too, a vision in his head of large, slowmoving, gloomily lit creatures arrayed in a semicircle. Noises came from them. Sometimes he almost understood those noises. And sometimes they reached toward him with long five-pointed starfish hands that never touched him, not him, the real him, the mismatched twin him that raced now toward an ascending wall of impossible height.

Up the arm. Onto the shoulder. Toward the neck, yes, he knew what all those things meant: they were geographical features of the game space. They were roads that sometimes presented obstacles but not now as he ran like a tornado across an Oklahoma wheat field.

Somewhere ahead would be the frozen white lake and the pulsing capillaries and then on to the darkness within. Down in the meat.

Down in the meat. Back to the game. The thought of it triggered feelings in him. Fear. Or was it anticipation?

Joy? Something like it, not joy, but something satisfying, something that flooded him with a dark, wild urge that balanced the fear, that turned fear into rocket fuel.

One of the gloomy dark creatures in that other reality made a noise. “Look: he’s smiling.”

Ropes coiled down from the lead helicopter. Before the rope ends touched the deck, the Royal Marines were descending. They came down so fast it was as if they were simply dropping from the sky.

The first of them hit the deck and was instantly overwhelmed by the mob that poured from the open spheres.

The second saw what was happening as he dropped. He fired off six quick rounds over the heads of the mob, warning shots aimed carefully toward the open sea. His bullets made tiny splashes in green-gray waves.

He slid down to rescue his buddy but was knocked to the deck by aa middle-aged woman and had his hand stomped by a furious little boy.

The mob was unafraid, unimpressed, enraged, energized by some power that went even beyond the motivations of loyalty to the Great Souls: they were human beings who had been locked in a cage, had their brains crudely rewired, had been fed a diet of propaganda and carefully avoided feelings that sometimes rose up from within like a geyser, feelings of fury and loss and confusion.

And now they had targets. They had someone to attack and permission to unleash all that was buried deep inside them, all the emotion that had been papered over by sustainable happiness.

They were fearless because in that moment, caught up in the hysteria of the mob, they were insane.

A teenage boy bit into the hand that had been stomped. The marine shrieked in pain.

A flash-bang grenade went off, a noise like the crack of doom. But out in the open the flash meant little.

More ropes coiled down and with shocking speed the marines dropped to the deck. First two of them managed to link up, then a third, then a fourth to form a little square, back to back, hammering with their rifle butts at every target that presented itself, men, women, children, smashing and yelling and now the professional discipline was paying off against the untrained civilians.