He smelled of booze. His pupils were the size of pinheads. So drunk and high. Nasty old geezer.

“This isn’t a game to the Twins, kid.” He slurred it.

“Yeah, well, as long as they keep you in dope, right?”

Burnofsky made a small laugh. Then he leaned in, too close, and said, “Yeah. Exactly. That’s my price. And yours is thinking you’re a big man, and that piece of ass you go home to every night. And Jindal? He’s an actual true believer, a true hive mind, Nexus Humanus sucker. And One-Up? More like you. More about ego. We all have a drug.”

“And Twofer? I guess they’re the dealers.”

“See, you’re not so stupid,” Burnofsky said.

The back of Bug Man’s legs hurt. The bruises made it hard for him to walk without limping. He had cried for the first time in … how long? A long time. Oh, definitely, he had cried, Anthony Elder, he had cried into his pillow and told Jessica to stay away.

They had lain him out like a little punk and whacked his ass.

Now here he was planning to take down the biggest target in the world. Final briefing. Final prep. And instead of getting what was his due, to swagger in as big as an elephant’s balls and have everyone kiss his ass, he’d had to hobble in like a cripple.

“Two ways forward now, Anthony,” Burnofsky said. “Rebel or excel.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?”

“You turn against them. Or you show them your true worth.”

“Rebel? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? AmericaStrong thugs would be down on me and really fuck me up. Maybe kill me.”

“Not maybe, Anthony.”

He was so sure that it made Bug Man take a step back. It was true. He saw it in the old man’s rheumy eyes. The Twins would kill him. And Burnofsky knew this with absolute certainty.

Because.

Because he’d seen it happen.

“Who’d they kill?” Bug Man pressed. “Somebody stood up against them? Who? You tell me. You tell me who it was.”

“She was as good as you.”

“Who’s this ‘she’? ”

“It runs in families, this talent we have, Anthony. This girl, Carla, yeah, lousy name to stick on a girl. Named after her father.”

Burnofsky’s pale, whiskered face was ghostly. And yes, right then, with the scientist’s face too close and the stink of booze sweat coming off him, and drilling into Anthony with those needle-hole pupils, yes right then Bug Man remembered that Burnofsky’s first name was Karl.

“Stood up to them, see, when she realized what was going on, what the real game was.” Tears were leaking out of Burnofsky’s eyes. “About your age. Like most twitchers. Gamer kid. They had her lace some juicy bacteria. The Twins had a grudge, see. A woman named Heidi Zulle, a shrink. You’ve heard rumors about the Doll Ship?”

“Some kind of …” Bug Man didn’t have the right word for it.

“A floating house of horrors, and Zulle was in charge of using drugs and so-called therapy to keep the victims in line. She had a change of heart that coincidentally came after the Twins had her … well, suffice to say, something much worse than they did to you, kid. She tried to give the Doll Ship’s location up to an intelligence agent. She failed, and then she ran, so, no more Heidi Zulle.”

“The Twins took her out?”

“They had Carla do the job. But they didn’t tell her what she was doing, what she was delivering. And I was there, too, and I didn’t know. Flesh-eating bacteria, a sac of it. “And, well, that was too much for Carla.”

“Christ.”

“You think you’ve seen some shit down in the meat, Bug Man? You’ve never seen that, or anything close.” Burnofsky shuddered. “Carla was a twitcher. Like you. But see, Anthony, she was still a human being. Unlike you. You? You don’t even know how many died in the stadium, do you? Doesn’t matter to you, because you’re a bloodless, amoral little piece of shit. All that matters to you is that you got spanked.”

The truth dawned on Bug Man. The truth of what Burnofsky was telling them. And the why of it.

“They want you to tell me this,” Bug Man said, and his voice cracked. “You’re threatening me.”

Burnofsky laughed delightedly. “Like I said: you’re a smart kid.”

“They killed your daughter. And you’re still their bitch?”

“Everyone dies,” Burnofsky said. “Some die clawing at their eyes in agony as the bacteria eat their brains and eyes from the inside out. Others … others die happy, floating on waves of soft, warm pleasure. That second death? That’s what Carla had. That was my price. That’s what her loving father got for her.”

“And you lecturing me about the dead. You should kill yourself, old man. You should kill yourself.”

“What makes you think I’m not?” Burnofsky asked dully.

They stared at each other until Bug Man could not look into those eyes any longer.

“Now. I believe we have a meeting to attend, Anthony.”

NINETEEN

On the screen was a diagram.

Across the top of the diagram were five boxes containing the names MORALES, TS’AI, HAYASHI, BOWEN, and CHAUKSEY.

Bug Man knew these were respectively the leaders of the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and India.

His first thought was that the Twins had pulled back a little. No Germany, France, or South Korea. It bothered him just a bit, because the plan had been to take down every head of state whose country had serious nanotech. This was a pullback. A pullback meant nervousness, and nervousness in others had a way of making Bug Man nervous.