Authors: Michael Grant
The dream came back to her as she danced.
Buried up to her neck.
Napalm in her veins.
She hummed along with the music, which was really all beat
and not much melody. She looked past Anthony. There was a muscular man, black, maybe twenty-five, a gym rat, biceps stretching
his leather jacket. He was checking her out. Nothing new there, they
all did, but this one, this man, had something different happening.
His gaze was professionally observant. He wasn’t just looking at her
face, her breasts, her legs, although he was certainly doing that. He
was watching more closely. Sober. Thoughtful.
Suspicious. That’s what he was: suspicious. When he glanced at
Anthony, there was shrewd suspicion there.
So Jessica watched him back. It became a mutual thing. And then
he did something casual but deliberate. He twisted on his barstool
and let his jacket fall open. He had a holster and a gun on his hip, not
showy, professional.
He was a cop. Some kind of cop anyway.
Jessica disengaged from Anthony.
He turned when he saw her walking away. He followed her as she
walked—not sure why, not sure what she was planning—to the muscular man in the leather jacket.
“Hi,” Jessica said.
“Hey,” Anthony said. “Get back here.”
The man said, “Hello.” To Jessica, not to Anthony.
“Jessica, get your ass back out there with me,” Anthony snapped.
“I brought you here because you begged me.”
“I like the name Jessica,” the man said.
“Yeah, well, she belongs to me,” Anthony said, and grabbed her
arm.
The napalm in her veins caught fire. Suddenly it was as if all of
her was burning, burning away the soil that held her trapped. She
spun and delivered a stinging backhand to Anthony’s face.
The big man moved with trained speed. He stepped between
them, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s take it easy, right?”
Anthony, though, was not prepared to take it easy. “Fuck off, she’s
mine.”
And that’s when Jessica lost it completely. What happened next
she would never be able to recall in detail. All she remembered was
fists and kicks and screams of rage, and all of it coming from her.
Somehow she ended up out on the street in the cold night air. The
man set her down, held her out at arm’s length, and said, “Okay now,
relax, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” was as much a giveaway as the gun. Regular people
did not call teenage girls “ma’am,” that was cop-speak.
“Take it easy, he’s gone,” the man said. “You’re safe.”
The rage was cooling, but the memory of that sudden explosion
filled Jessica with a different warmth. She was sweating and shivering
all at once. “Who are you?”
And out came the badge. “Agent DeShawn Franklin, Secret Service.”
She was nonplussed. “Secret Service. Then …You know? About
Anthony?”
“Is that your boyfriend in there?”
“He’s not …He’s my …I . . .”
“Take a breath. It’s okay. You’re safe. What is it you think I know?”
He made a wry but wary grin. “Look, if you’re holding drugs, that’s
not my thing to worry about. Secret Service, not DEA.”
“You take care of the president.”
“That’s one of the things we do, ma’am. Jessica. You want to tell
me something, I can see that.”
“Anthony,” she began, then glanced over her shoulder as if expecting him to be behind her. He was nowhere to be seen. “Anthony, I
think he did something to me. And I think he’s doing it to the president, too.”
“Plath,” Keats said.
“Sadie. Sadie and Noah. Let’s try that.”
“Sadie.”
They had found a place: the stunted bell tower. The stairs leading up were narrow and rickety, and they’d had to bow their heads
and press steadying hands against the wall as they climbed up. But
at the top there was still a bell, an actual, old-fashioned bell maybe a
foot across at the base. It had not been rung in a very longtime , and
spiders had taken it over as an arachnid condo.
The space around the bell was cramped but swept relatively clean
by breezes blowing through the low, open windows. They could at
least stand upright, and a series of tiny horizontal ventilation slats
gave them a sort of film noir view of the world outside.
It was cold. They could each see the other’s breath. A small slice
of the brilliantly lit Capitol Dome was visible, but it looked cold, too.
“You know what I wish?” Noah asked. “I wished I smoked cigarettes.
It would be lovely to stand up here and sort of contemplatively smoke
a cigarette.”
“Of course I imagine a cancerous lung must be a hell of a thing to
see down in the nano.”
“All things considered I’m not so worried about cancer.”
“ No?”
“Normal people are worried about cancer.”
“And that’s not us?”
She forced a short laugh, wanting to acknowledge the weak
attempt at humor. “Do you think either of us ever was? Normal?”
“I was,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me about normal.”
“What me? Well, Miss McLure . . .”
“Ms,” she corrected.
“Really? All right then, Ms McLure. Here’s my normal. Up early.
It’s cold in the flat because the radiator in my room doesn’t work very
well, and if I want to be warm then my mum’s room has to be the
Sahara.”
“Can’t you get it fixed?”
“Well, yes, normally I’d ring for the butler—”
“Don’t start,” she snapped.
“Why are you so touchy about being rich?”
“Because I want to be loved for myself.” She said it lightly, a tossoff, as a joke.
“I didn’t think you wanted to be loved at all,” he said.
“Ah. Well, there’s a difference between wanting to be in love and
wanting to be loved.” She shivered. “I’m freezing.”
“Shall we go down?”
She shot him a look from beneath lowered eyelids. “How do you
not recognize a cue to offer me some warmth?”
He put his arm around her.
“Still cold,” she said.
He took her in his arms. She put her arms around his waist and
pressed against him, the side of her face flattened against his chest.
She breathed deeply. She felt her breasts flattening against his abdomen.
He was breathing in her hair.
“So it’s cold in your room,” she prompted.
“Sorry?”
“You were telling me about normal.”
“Was I? Sorry, I was busy thinking about football. Desperately
thinking about football. Remembering all the details of a particular
match . . .”
“Mmm,” she said. “You like sports?”
“Yes. I find sport to be an excellent distraction.”
“From?”
But she had lost interest in banter, really, and he didn’t bother to
answer. Instead he ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her
close for a kiss.
Her heart wasn’t in it. She was distracted.
“What?” he asked.
“Keats …Noah …Those beaches we were talking about. What if
it was possible? I mean, what if I had a way to—”
A scream.
Keats and Plath froze. “That’s not Vincent,” she said.
“Billy!”
They bolted for the stairs.
Billy saw the palm of his own hand as an unworldly terrain, gently rolling hills crossed by an irrational crosshatch of ditches, some
shallow enough that his nanobots could step over them easily, others deep enough to hide a nanobot from view.
He experimented by closing his hand slowly. The land curved
up around his nanobots. It lifted him at the same time as it began
to shut out the strong light. Fingers …They looked so huge! Like
someone had made sausages the size of Metro trains. They were even
segmented like a train, each section of finger like a car. They came
together as they closed, blocking light, creating deep canyons in the
sky. The surface was again covered in slashes, left right, diagonal, in
every direction. It looked like some arcane script, like writing in a
language he could never hope to understand.
He opened his hand slowly. The massive scarred fingers swept
back and away, like watching one of those time-lapse things of a
flower opening its petals, bud becoming blossom.
Light flooded over his troops, his nanobots.
His tiny army.
But enough of palms and fingers, he wanted to see more. He
wanted to see what the older BZRKers had always talked of in awed
tones. He wanted to go down in the meat. He wanted to confront the
beasties. He wanted battle.
He wanted game.
He glanced at Burnofsky. The man looked at him with an expression that reminded Billy of rats he had seen in the alleys behind his
foster home. Knowing. Wary but not fearful. Contemptuous.
Billy sent his nanobots speeding across his palm—leaping, cavorting, even lowering the center wheel for a bit, though this proved to be
not a practical idea on this terrain. He cartwheeled a couple of the
nanobots in the process of learning this fact.
The nanobots raced madly, legs motoring along like blue-tinged
cavalry. He picked the middle finger to climb. And it was a climb now:
when they slipped the nanobots fell backward, like Jack and Jill falling
back down the hill. But gravity hadn’t too much meaning for nanobots.
A slip, a fall, meant little, which gave him a reckless courage.
He laughed.
“Fun, eh?” Burnofsky said. “Hurry and get off your hand. Get
somewhere more interesting.”
Billy shot him a suspicious look. Burnofsky prodded him. “Don’t
be scared, little boy,” he crooned. “You’ll be part of history. A first.
And I’ve got a ringside seat.”
“What are you talking about?”
Burnofsky made a lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter. Game on,
Billy the Kid.”
The nanobots reached the end of Billy’s finger.
He raised that finger toward his face.
In the up-is-down and none-of-it-matters world of the nano,
the fingertip seemed to plunge down toward the face. Like a massive
rocket aiming for impact, and Billy was riding that rocket.
Yee-hah.
Billy went around the circumference of his finger. He crossed
from plowed farmland to an eerie moonscape, like the dried-out salt
flats of Death Valley, hard-baked shale plates, not nearly as smooth
down at the nano level as fingernails were up in the macro. Down
here what was up there was like roof shingles.
But ahead, oh, there was the stuff, there was the world-wide wall
of meat, the cheek, and above it a globe like the moon sunk into a
pulpy earth. The eyeball. His eyeball.
The nanobots leapt from the crusty ground of the fingernail
onto an endless curved plain of fallen leaves, and then slowed.
“Three minutes,” Burnofsky said. “It will begin now.”
The nanobots deployed curved hooklike blades from the ends of
their rear legs. The front legs continued to power forward and the rear
legs sank into the dried outer layer of epidermis, those fallen leaves of
dead flesh, and began to plow them up.
When they had plowed a furrow—and there was no pain in harvesting dead skin cells—they stopped.
They turned.
Billy punched the virtual controls. He frowned, and Burnofsky
saw that frown.
“I wish I could see what you’re seeing, Billy.”
The nanobots revealed then a feature that was unexpected. A jaw,
toothless, but curving like the Joker’s slashed mouth, opened at the
bottom of the nanobot.
The ripped and torn skin cells were sucked into the unhinged jaws.
Within seconds the nanobots began defecating a pinkish paste.
What happened next was a blur Billy couldn’t even see. The nanobots ’ legs moved like a spider on speed. Or like a sculptor, wasn’t that
what they called guys who carved statues? A shape began to emerge
from the pink goo.
Other things—tiny needles, busy sculpting cilia, jets of flame, on
and off in an instant. A faint haze almost that was the MightyMites
crawling across the nanobots like fleas on a dog, a scarcely visible blur
of activity.
He was seeing programmed activity, he knew that much. He was
seeing something that he was not controlling.
He looked for a Stop button. He searched the controls, punching
this and that, trying to distract the nanobots, trying to make them do
this or that. Or anything.
But his controls were no longer controlling. A prompt appeared,
demanding a code.
“What’s happening?” Billy asked.
“Watch,” Burnofsky said with an almost sensuous whisper.
“The controls aren’t working.
“No, they won’t now unless you punch in the code. Thirty-two
characters, alphanumeric,” Burnofsky said. “If you just start guessing, you should be able to hit the right sequence within, oh, probably
a year—”
“Give it to me!”
It was now clear to Billy what was happening. New nanobots was
being built from the pink goo.
As he watched the new monsters rose. They were crude, postapocalyptic versions of the original nanobots, less sharp-edged,
rougher, simpler.
And then, they began to dig.
It was then that Billy screamed.
She rolled onto her side, swung her legs off the bed, and stood
up. She still smelled of urine. She had not had the strength to shower
before.
Would they come for her again?
Please, no. Please. No.
The ship was pitching and rolling far worse than before. Somewhere outside, in the world beyond this terrible gleaming sphere, a
major storm must be raging. She felt sick to her stomach and ran,
wobbly, to the tiny bathroom. But by the time she made it there the
nausea had lessened. She closed the door with barely room to sit down
on the toilet.
She had to lace her fingers together to keep them from shaking, but even then they trembled, and the trembling went all the way
through her.
She sat and there was the door directly before her and there was
something on the door.
A piece of toilet paper, just a single square held there with a tiny
piece of tape.
Someone had written on it in pen.
It said: Be strong. You are not alone.
“Yes, I want a goddamned cigarette.”
“But, Madam President, you don’t smoke.”
That was from her chief of staff, Ginny Gastrell. Gastrell was
painfully thin, with a sort of concave chest, knobby elbows, and hands
that could almost have belonged to a man. She was often described by
detractors as looking like the weak horse in the third race at Belmont.
“I did smoke, though. I gave it up. Now I want it back,” Helen
Falkenhym Morales said. She was in the Oval Office, staring through
the bulletproof glass at the south lawn. “I gave it up and I want it back.
I want a cigarette. Surely someone in this place still smokes.”