“Get off me, you cow!”

“Standing orders, sir: we step into a fight between you two. Your own orders.”

“He’s let them take him. They’re inside him, and he’s let them do it. He’s weak! He’s always been weak!”

She put her knee on the hand, yanked the chair close, and fastened Charles’s hand to the crossbar.

“Following your own orders, sir,” Sugar pleaded, but she didn’t look as if she believed it. She was darting glances at the door, like she was counting steps, like the elevator door a hundred feet away was the doorway to paradise.

Benjamin was weeping now, blubbering like a baby.

“He’s here!” one of the TFDs yelled, and Army Pete, a teenaged boy wearing a droopy army surplus jacket, was practically hurled into the room.

Sugar said, “What the hell took so long? You, twitcher! You’re going in.”

Army Pete was a mediocre twitcher and a first-rate smart-ass. But he knew enough as he surveyed the scene—the bloody boy on the floor and, far worse, the terrifying spectacle of a handcuffed Charles still trying to beat a raving Benjamin—to avoid favoring everyone with his wit.

“Got a twitcher chair? I can’t do shit without my gear.”

“Damn!” Sugar yelled. “Get a chair up here. Now!”

Army Pete started to object, but no one heard him for the rush of TFDs racing to comply. Or at least racing to get the hell out of the Tulip.

THIRTY

“I’m with you, Vincent,” Nijinsky said.

With him on the street, holding his friend, propping him against a wall.

And with him now as his two fresh, undamaged biots ran to the rescue.

“Too late,” Vincent whispered.

Nijinsky stared across a half centimeter of space that felt like a city block, at Bug Man’s forces. Two of the nanobots were slowly, maliciously dismembering Vincent’s biot.

Nijinsky felt each ripped limb through the shuddering form of his friend.

Eleven of Bug Man’s nanobots.

Two of Nijinsky’s biots.

Maybe. Maybe. But Nijinsky was not Vincent. He would almost certainly lose, and if he lost, then he would be where Vincent was now: a shattered man, helpless and vulnerable.

Bug Man did not attack. Bug Man did not want this battle, either. He didn’t need it. By now his spinners would be deep within the president’s brain.

The two of them stared at each other through alien eyes, Bug Man and Nijinsky.

Nijinsky made his lead biot open its arms in supplication.

Bug Man’s nanobots stood still for a long minute, doing nothing at all.

Then they lifted the body of Vincent’s second biot and shoved it through the fluid. It floated on the current, and Nijinsky was able to grab what was left.

Carrying the legless, eyeless, mutilated body, he turned and ran away.

Up in the world of streets and skyscrapers, Vincent said, “Jin … Jin …”

“Yes, Vincent.”

“Take me to Anya.”

When they found her, Plath had two pins left, and no more than a single long strand of wire.

She had built a cat’s cradle of pins and wires in Benjamin’s brain. It extended across roughly one square centimeter of the hippocampus. It would take an experienced nanobot twitcher no time to find her, but quite a while to actually reach her.

But in the macro her time was up. Someone had finally had the sense to question the two bums who had flushed Keats. And some bright AmericaStrong thug had decided it was time to take a closer look at the Dumpster.

The lid flew open and powerful hands dug down into the trash until one of those hands closed over an ankle.

Then there were loud cries and warnings, and Plath was hauled bodily up and out, dropped onto the ground, and kicked once very hard in the stomach.

In the elevator going up to the Tulip they decided she needed roughing up. She took a backhand to the face that split her lip. They didn’t want the bosses thinking they had gone soft.

The elevator door opened onto a scene of wild contrasts. Within the soaring heights of the Tulip the Twins had built a world. Offset layers of platforms hung overhead—bedrooms, bathrooms, display rooms—each connected by a short, double-width escalator. The ground floor was thirty-six thousand square feet, most of it sunk in gloom. But she had glances of amazing things back in the unlit distance: what could only be a tank, an entire carousel, a Predator drone hanging from wires, large animal cages, a firing range.

But the space directly before her, the corner of the cavernous room, was what fascinated. Half a dozen TFDs. A woman who looked as if she had just stepped out of the J. Crew catalog by way of a spa. A massive desk that had been overturned so that she could see the screens built into its surface, and see a nano battle raging, and an entire Christmas tree of police and fire department lights at the UN, and other things she didn’t recognize.

She saw them, the Armstrong Twins, as broad as two men, tall, powerfully built, but fused together in a way that made the mind rebel.

TFDs were manhandling a massive chair, like the world’s highest-tech La-Z-Boy. Others were hauling monitors, trailing wire, searching for an electrical outlet.

Keats sat on the floor. The beagle sniffed at the pool of his blood.

The TFDs threw her down beside Keats.

“You didn’t have to bring the chair up here,” a kid in an army jacket objected. “I could have run it from downstairs.”

“What?” the J. Crew woman demanded.

Army Pete shrugged. “Dude, I just needed someone to act as a pathway. One of your guys could have come downstairs; I could have put my boys on him, right? And then—”