Beneath all of that was the raw emotion. The humiliation. Bug Man wondered how many of the people sitting at the table knew that he had been smacked down by the Twins.

Were they all secretly smirking at an imagined image of his crying? The first one who gave him a wrong look …

It was time to put them in their places. Time to remind them who he was.

“You done talking, Jindal?”

Jindal stopped in midpoint, started to say something, decided to say something else, which was, “I’m all done.”

“All right then,” Bug Man said. “Everyone’s already heard I came real close to taking Vincent out. The only reason I didn’t was stuff up in the macro.” He glared at them, daring them to argue. One-up might have smirked a little. Maybe. And then, with an effort, he forced himself to meet the gaze of Sugar Lebowski.

“Yeah. That’s right, Sugar, a fuckup in the macro.” He spit the words at her, defiant.

She looked back at him like she was looking at one of her rumored three ex-husbands.

“Seems like none of Sugar’s boys can handle the Top Hat Man, the BZRK macro hitter,” Bug Man said.

Would she argue?

No. She would not. Because in the end she was replaceable. And the people in this room—especially Bug Man—were not. The world was full of thugs. But a great twitcher?

“Point is,” Bug Man allowed generously, “I probably still could have made a kill on Vincent. I had him. But I wasn’t focused. I wasn’t on my game, right?”

Yeah, they were looking at him with respect. Yes, they were. All except Burnofsky, because Burnofsky knew what had gone down. And Sugar, whose complexion was darkening toward angry red.

Well, time would take care of Burnofsky, time and the opium or the booze. Or maybe Bug Man would take care of him one day. And Sugar? He’d get in her head some fine day and wire her up. Maybe make her think she was itching night and day. Make her shred her own skin.

Bug Man stood up because his legs hurt too much to keep sitting on this poorly padded chair. All eyes were on him, even Burnofsky, who seemed sleepily amused.

“We all come from gaming, right? Every kind of platform. Games. So then we get the chance to play the ultimate game. Anybody here ever played anything half as good as twitching? Ever remember any game environment half as cool as being down in the meat?”

Nods of agreement moderated by indifference and distraction, about as much close attention as you were ever going to get from this crowd.

“Someone told me I needed to stop thinking about all the stuff up on that board like it’s just a game. It’s all serious now, all heavyweight. Real.”

He looked right at Burnofsky, leaving no doubt who he was talking about. “Yeah, that’s all bullshit. We all came for the game. We win by remembering it’s a game. What happens up in the macro? Who gives a shit about that unless it gets in the way of the game?”

He pointed at the board. “See that? It’s a game plan. Game, my brothers and sisters. Just a game.” He paused for dramatic effect. “But it’s one hell of a game. And we’re going to win it.”

Plath washed herself very carefully. With a washcloth and a bar of soap while standing at a sink in the narrow, unpleasant little bathroom that had been designated for her and Keats.

The eyes that stared back at her were crawling with vermin.

Footballs of pollen, all bright as Skittles, and eerie green fungi clung to hairs that grew from a fallen-leaf forest floor of dead skin.

She knew because she had seen all of that on him. On his face, his mouth, his eyes. She had seen him for what he was and knew that he had seen her in the same way.

Up in the macro he might have a hard, smooth chest and strong shoulders. Up in the macro she might be able to imagine touching him in those places. Up in the macro she could imagine kissing lips that down there, down in the nano, looked like aged sepia-toned waxed paper, like a wall of yellow-tinged—

She shuddered and closed her eyes, closed the lid tight, Oh, good, visiting time for demodex.

“Aaaahhhhh,” she cried, and scrubbed with the washcloth. She scrubbed at her eyelashes, scrubbed her face, couldn’t even really think about the rest of her body because God only knew what monsters crawled and clanked around the rest of her square miles of dead-surfaced flesh.

Think of yourself as an ecosystem.

You’re a rain forest.

You’re an environment. A world. A planet inhabited by life-forms more alien than anything invented in science fiction.

She threw the washcloth down and had to resist the urge to use her fingernails to scrape every inch of her skin.

It wouldn’t help. It would just create some new horror, ripping the trees from the soil, piling the dead skin in clumps, revealing blood-tinged undersoil, exciting the rise of lymphocytes rushing to close off contamination while bacteria propagated and viruses—thankfully they were too small to be seen even down at the nano—rushed to squeeze inside her, spread through her blood, and eat her alive.

She was panting, holding on to the sink with both hands and then wondering what the hell was growing on that sink. How would the cracked porcelain look down there, up close?

They’d retrieved her biot and put it back in cold storage. But she felt it still. Felt them both. Tiny windows would open in her field of vision, and she would see groggy biots barely moving, slowed by cold, on the pink plain of sterile medium.

She would have thrown up, but the thought of what might come out of her mouth …