They heard street sounds, alley sounds. Conversation, shouts and laughs and normality, and none of that helped because they were a million miles away from normal.

“I’m at the head. Shorter hairs,” Keats said. “Here’s hoping this dog doesn’t have fleas or lice or … Eyelid. I’m there. Demodex. I hate demodex. These are different, though. Jesus.”

Her neck was in his face. It smelled of French fries. And he could not resist the urge to kiss that neck as he raced toward the slow-blinking eyelid and the dark pool of a whiteless eye.

She felt his lips on her neck and sighed and did not resist as she raced at full speed, two biots, two windows open in her head, one seeing the other biot pull ahead, a bug that was somehow her. She was there, there in those creatures even as she shivered from his touch.

“I won’t let you go crazy, Keats,” she said.

“Too late,” he said. “We’re already crazy.”

She twisted around and kissed him as she recognized the shift from thin, wispy body hair to the chopped, torn stubble of a shaved face.

Was she on the face of the Armstrong Twins?

And if she was, what was she going to do about it?

She kissed Keats, and felt her body respond, and wondered whether she would commit murder.

And suddenly, there it was. A room, dimly lit, and two twitcher stations with two twitchers in place, gloved, reclining, helmeted, with screens hanging, showing nanobot armies on the march.

Half a dozen faces turned to stare at Wilkes and Ophelia. The twitchers didn’t notice them at first, but others did, and the reaction was quick but not as quick as Wilkes, who started shooting BAM BAM BAM!

“Fucking die!” Wilkes shouted, and fired at men and women and screens and walls.

Ophelia ran at the nearest twitcher, a boy or young man, couldn’t see his face, but she jammed her hand up under the mask and her two biots leapt onto a pimple like Vesuvius, an angry red mound.

The twitcher turned and ripped off his helmet and a Taser hit Ophelia, dropped her to her knees as a shoe swung hard and knocked her onto her back.

“Ophelia!” Wilkes cried, and fired and fired until the slide on the gun stuck in the open-and-empty position, and then she threw it at the nearest monitor.

Someone very large knocked her back into the wall.

Well, she thought, that was at least an A-minus.

Tatiana’s fingernail, a vast curve of scaly keratin, touched the bamboo-in-crusty-dirt skin of the president.

“Touchdown,” Nijinsky said.

“Go,” Vincent said.

They were in the crowd that had gathered at UN Plaza. A crowd of people who were there in vain hopes of seeing someone important, or of panhandling, or there to shout a slogan and wave a sign.

A large percentage of this particular crowd seemed to be very upset about something going on in Gabon, a country Nijinsky placed vaguely in Africa. In any case they were chanting with great enthusiasm and in a complex, catchy rhythm.

A smaller group was irate about global warming, and a third bunch was in a party mood and evidently about half in the bag. They had come to protest the closing down of nude beaches in France.

Nijinsky had no strong opinion on Gabon and not much interest in global warming, either, but he’d seen a few nude beaches, and given the types of people who liked to take their clothes off on the beach, he thought he might be with the French government on this issue.

The crowd provided anonymity. And twitching proximity to both the Hilton down the street and the UN itself.

The downside was that they’d both had to go through security to stand here, and that meant no weapons. That probably didn’t matter too much since their weapons were at this moment launching themselves onto the president’s hand.

Two biots each, racing along a very famous arm, zooming through thin hair, high-stepping over dead skin cells. Nijinsky had a sudden vision of being hauled in front of a congressional committee someday to explain just what the hell he thought he was doing scurrying across the presidential flesh.

The NYPD, who managed the crowd, were old hands at demonstrations, and they stood casually at ease, watchful but not paranoid. But both Vincent and Nijinsky assumed this crowd was about half made up of various security people: Secret Service and intelligence services from basically every other nation on Earth that could afford spies. In fact it was entirely possible that there was not a single actual civilian in the crowd.

So caution, Vincent had warned. Don’t think we aren’t being overheard. Don’t think just because the guy standing next to you is wearing a daishiki or flowing robes or a fishnet thong with an anarchist’s A tattooed on his bare chest, he’s not actually MI6 or Russian SVR or Mossad.

“I hear sirens,” Vincent said.

Nijinsky was taller; he could see over the crowd. Fire engines. A lot of them. And they were definitely turning in to the UN.

“Fire,” Nijinsky said. He noted Vincent’s tight nod. They both had a good idea why fire engines might be rushing toward the UN headquarters.

“They’re both tough,” Vincent said.

Nijinsky said nothing but wished he believed in someone who listened to prayers. Ophelia was irreplaceable. And Wilkes? She was a mess. Even by BZRK standards, she was a mess. But she was their mess.

“You prefer left or right?” Nijinsky asked Vincent.

“Left.”

“What do you think this is? Shoulder?”

Vincent glanced at a woman who was looking at him a little too closely. The woman was chanting along with something or other and her voice was into it, but her eyes were not.