The biots clambered down over his upper lip. And again, he regretted the goo of lip gloss. It was sticky and slowed his boys down. But now they reached the barrier between skin and mucous membrane.

Time for tongue.

He’d seen a tongue down at the nano once before. It wasn’t his favorite thing to see. Carefully, slowly he stuck the tip of his tongue to touch his lip.

Through his biots he saw a dark mass coming down out of the sky.

Imagine a tight-packed army of hooded men. They are so close together the bottoms of their hoods almost touch. And the hoods themselves are pink. Sharp at the top. Cones of waxy pink flesh.

Imagine within those tight-packed, rough, waxy-pink cones there are things that look like tiny Styrofoam noodles, the floats you might use in a swimming pool. And alongside those segments of tube are short strings of beads. Mardi Gras down amid a serried rank of pink-hooded Klansmen.

And those noodles and beads are the bacteria that make their home on the tongue.

It took an effort of will for Nijinsky to send the biots rushing to leap aboard that alien landscape.

A stab of pain and Nijinsky couldn’t hold in the groan.

He drew his tongue quickly into his mouth, and his biots were flooded with a gush of pearlescent saliva. The tongue curled at the sides, warping the landscape.

“He’s awake!”

“Don’t let him touch you!”

Nijinsky drew in breath and spit. It was a hurricane-force blast that picked up saliva and biots with it.

The spittle flew the two and a half feet from Nijinsky’s forward-thrust mouth to Sugar’s stiff blonde hair.

He felt the biots land as if it were his own legs absorbing the impact.

“No!” Sugar cried. She began beating at the back of her head.

The impact actually helped by pressing tall, rough-textured hair trees down toward the scalp.

“What did you do?” she demanded, turning to rage at Nijinsky.

“Did it get on you?” one of the thugs cried.

The smart move, Nijinsky knew, the winning move for them was to shoot him right here, right now. They didn’t do that. Which meant that something was stopping them.

They didn’t want him dead; they had some other idea in mind, and that knowledge gave him power.

His biots were racing across the dead leaves of Sugar’s scalp, scurrying through a sort of birch-tree forest.

Ears, ears, nose. Which way? The nose was the easiest in terms of direct route, but the most dangerous: a sneeze could be deadly. And indeed Sugar now tried to force a sneeze, blew air out of her nose frantically.

“Pull over. Pull over,” she cried. She pointed to an all-night Duane Reade. “The drugstore. You. Go in there. Get me … um … um, bug spray. And Purelle. Q-tips. Hurry!”

She kept beating at her head, and indeed the forest was having unusual weather as the trees slammed down, flattened, sprang up again. Then she started scraping at her scalp with her fingernails.

This was dangerous.

Nijinsky kept his biots close together. He wanted a single field of view to deal with.

The trees parted and suddenly, moving with impossible speed, was a fingernail. Sugar kept hers moderately long so that only the fingernail and not the fingertip now tore through spongy scalp skin.

The nail was a wall of ridged, dead cells, flakes held together by the rough glue of keratin, and over that a translucent layer of clear nail polish that from his perspective seemed as thick as a sheet of ice.

The edge of the fingernail was like a monstrous plow. It ripped up dead, fallen skin cells as it raced toward the biots. Jump right! The massive plow roared past. But now she was scratching her head like a madwoman. Fingernails everywhere, leaving oozing blood behind, platelets coming up out of the ground and resting in shallow furrows dug by huge claws.

Nijinsky saw a clearing ahead: the edge of her hairline. She hadn’t started scratching her face, at least not yet, so N1 and N2 bounded along through the last of the hair and out onto her forehead.

Then: luck!

A huge bead of sweat, ten times their own height, a tsunami, a crazy bead of liquid containing as much water as a swimming pool oozed up through her skin, shone in the dashboard lights, a drop, poised, quivering, like a skinless grape or a water balloon.

It would roll. And when it did it would move faster than any biot.

Nijinsky sent his biots racing toward the sweat drop, and then, rushing down, a second drop was already on the move! It would hit the first drop and join with it and then … almost too late!

N1 and N2 leapt, hit the side of the mass of water just as surface tension broke and the drop began rushing like a mountain river down toward Sugar’s eyeball.

Biots spun like socks in the spin cycle.

“Knock him out!” Sugar yelled, realizing belatedly that it was her only move.

The butt of a gun smashed into Nijinsky’s head, and with his last draining ounce of consciousness he saw the sweat surf spin his biots through the eyelashes and drop into the familiar comfort of an eyeball.

A blink and he was both unconscious and safe.

TWENTY-ONE

Plath was almost there before she clicked. She looked at Vincent. “Are we going where I think we’re going?”

He barely spared a second from texting and scrolling through news sites, or whatever it was he was doing. “Yes.”

Montauk had already shut down for the season. Kids were all back in school. At this time of year it was only the few bargain-hunting old people still around, and they didn’t keep the restaurants open this late.

The house itself was past what town there was. Down a winding private road. Gray shingles and black shakes on the roof, and pane windows, two full stories and rooms up there under the dramatically steep roof. A rich person’s house, no question about that. The nearest neighbors were out of sight behind a bluff. The ocean was right there down a path through grass-tufted dunes. You could hear it sighing and sweeping, and you could smell the salt.