BZRK

a wall with a long, horizontal cave beneath it.
    It had to be a shoe. Or a table leg. No, a shoe.
    “We have Army Pete in the building,” Sugar said, desperately. “He’s downstairs. We need to get him up here to place his nanobots and then—”
    “He’s a third-rate hack!” Benjamin snarled.
    “Our best guys are—”
    “Get him!” Charles said.
    “You, you, and you: get Army Pete. Drag his ass up here and make sure he’s loaded up,” Sugar said, relieved to be snapping orders again.
    “The army was filled with communists in those days!” Benjamin ranted.
    The biots were in the open-sided cave formed by the shoe. Had to be that. Had to be a shoe, didn’t it?
    The ceiling above K1 and K2 was creepy in its normality. It looked like a vast quilt—plastic fibers woven together as if by a million tiny seamstresses. It had the look of basketwork, almost uniform, weird in its unnatural uniformity.
    And suddenly that ceiling was coming down fast. Keats made his biots leap and twist. Biot legs clutched strands of neoprene and scampered upside down toward light at the end of the toe.
    The shoe flattened as the Twins walked. It seemed as if the biots must be crushed, but there was a pattern in the sole and Keats sent his creatures diving into a long, straight channel, then forward again.
    He couldn’t help but stare as Charles and Benjamin walked. Left. Right. Drag a nearly limp middle leg. Left. Right. Drag.
    The center leg had some movement, but it was as if it was numb. It moved in a jerky sequence all its own, out of synch and thus hauled along, scraping toe across the floor.
    They were coming to Keats.
    The left foot stepped in Keats’s blood. Corpuscles surged up and around the biots, finding them even in the depths of the channel. The biots powered on through their creator’s own blood, red Frisbees clinging to spiky feet and clustering on biot bellies.
    “Make him sit up,” Charles ordered. “Remove the gag.”
    Instantly, rough hands grabbed Keats and hauled him almost to his feet before slamming him on his butt.
    The feet were immobile. The biots rushed over and through blood to the end of the channel and turned the corner onto the toe, and Benjamin said, “I don’t feel right, brother.”
    Keats stared up into the faces of the Twins.
    He knew better than to be horrified by mere deformity. He’d had a teacher once with paddle arms no more than twelve inches long, a birth defect, and so he knew not to stare, and he certainly knew better than to shudder and pull back and lose for a moment his ability to take a breath.
    But this was something out of a nightmare. This was no mere deformity. This was Satan playing with DNA.
    Charles’s eye glared pure hatred at him. Benjamin’s eye was filling with tears. And the third eye, soulless, dead, devoid of spark, wandered before at last focusing on him. He saw the brown iris contract.
    “You’ll tell me now where the girl is,” Charles said in a low voice.
    Keats should have said something pithy and defiant. He didn’t. His mouth wasn’t working.
    “You’re a handsome one, aren’t you?” Charles asked. “My brother and I have not had that particular advantage in life. Tell me, boy: What’s it like to have that face? What’s it like to have women look at you and admire you?”
    “Speak up!” Sugar said. Her voice betrayed her own fear. And someone, Keats didn’t see who, buried a toe in his kidney and made him cry out in pain.
    “Do you have a knife, Ms Lebowski?” Charles asked.
    “A knife? I . . . No, sir.”
    “I do,” a male voice said. There came the snicker-snack sound of a Swiss Army knife opening.
    “Promote this one; I like a man who is prepared,” Charles said to Sugar. “Give the knife to Ms Lebowski. Ms Lebowski, what part of a man’s face attracts you?”
    “I . . . the . . . the eyes,” Sugar stammered.
    Biots were on top of the shoe now. Too far. They would never climb that towering body in time to do any good.
    “No, we can’t take his eyes, Ms Lebowski. How would he be able to appreciate what had happened to his face if we took his eyes?” The faces, the eyes, scanned the surface of Keats’s face and focused at last on his nose.
    “Will the girls think he’s pretty with his nose cut off, Ms Lebowski?”
    “Jesus . . . I,” she said.
    “Let him feel the blade,” Charles said, his voice guttural now.
    Sugar pressed the blade against the side of Keats’s nose. He could see it. He could feel it. His