Even now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers—P1, P2, P3—were in the vial she kept on a chain around her neck for safekeeping, but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual field. And if they ever began to go dark . . . Then would come the madness she defied by taking the name Plath.
Down in the meat.
Once you had gone down in the meat, the images could not simply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination, so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as they would look at m-sub.
She would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples; and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he ejaculated.
It was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never seemed to distract him—
Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.
“Sorry,” Plath said and snapped back to reality. “I was considering. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”
“Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew where we were they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning; there were opportunities for infestation.”
“Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two members of BZRK are, you try to wire them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word BZRK, pronounced with vowels intact: “Berserk.”
Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more gravy and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky and rising from below to crush and—
I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.
Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be able to be with another human being without always picturing that other, stranger reality.
“Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested. “Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreacting.”
“Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running things.”
Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You, Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You, Plath .”
She could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.
But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.
She wondered if she should tell him now.
But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.
Driven.
Manipulated.
Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.
Nutella
Beans
Bread
Pasta (own brand, nothing fancy)
Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)
Cheerios
2 oranges
3 onions (the white kind)
Three onions. The white kind.
This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To school!
“You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That’s most likely why you were let go.”
Let go.
Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings.
He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.
He walked down the cereals aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping trolley. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.
Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.
He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.
A pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him like he was invisible.
He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.
Top of the world, that’s where he’d been. But all that was gone now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs of wealth or future prospects. Why would they look at him?
He rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that, entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of meat to one side, heading to onions.
He felt rather than saw that something had changed.
Instinct. Some sense that was not quite sight, sound, smell or touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to look he knew he was being followed. His speed was being matched.
He walked slower, stopped, pretended to admire the lamb; but the presence did not pass him by.
He moved suddenly toward the grocery department, walking too fast, and he felt his pursuer keep pace.
Well.
Well. Ah. So. So was it cops or killers?
His heart was heavy in his chest. His feet dragged a bit, just the toes scraping on the tile. Shit, he’d just started to think maybe he was out of it, that maybe the Armstrongs would let him go. He’d given them a lot of good work, after all.
If not some hit man for the Armstrongs, was it police? Or even MI5?
He stopped in front of a bin of oranges and rested his hand on one, just feeling it. He liked oranges. Was this the last one he would see for a long while? Or the last one ever?
He turned, resigned, not seeing the point really in continuing to pretend. And there was his pursuer.
Now surely that was not a cop or MI5.
The man was well-dressed, almost like a banker. Far too posh-looking to be a cop. He was a black man, tall, thin, with glasses, and when he met Anthony’s eyes he smiled. Like an old friend. At first Bug Man felt himself relaxing, but no, no, that was a bad idea. A smile meant nothing.
“You want something?” Bug Man