BZRK

heart hammered in terror. He tried to twist away but powerful hands imprisoned his skull.
    “No, no, don’t do it, miss,” Keats begged.
    “Then tell me where to find the McLure,” Charles grated.
    The knife would slice through flesh. It would cut his nose and hesitate at the cartilage but it would cut and cut away and his nose would fall to the floor, a useless piece of dead flesh and he would forever—
    “Now!” Charles roared. “Tell me now!”
    “I don’t know where—”
    “Cut off his nose! Cut him! Do it!”
    “I—” Sugar said.
    “Cut off his nose or you’ll lose your own!”
    “He’s a kid!” Sugar begged.
    “I don’t know where she is!” Keats pleaded.
    “Don’t hit me, Granddad!” Benjamin cried.
    “Shut your mouth, brother! Cut him now!”
    But even as Charles bellowed, his body was jerked away. The Twins stumbled back, and through eyes filled with tears, Keats saw Benjamin flailing madly, swatting at something no one but he could see.
    “Brother!” Charles cried.
    It was a lunatic dance, two halves of the joined body struggling, staggering, slipping in the blood.
    The Twins stumbled back into the desk, which scooted away so that they fell hard on their behind, and Keats felt the impact through his biots and the blade slid away from his Keats’s nose and Benjamin, in a child’s voice, kept saying, “Communists!”
    Then Charles roared in frustration. He swatted at his brother’s head but couldn’t reach. He swatted with arms too short to reach across the width of his own body and shouted, “Control yourself! Control yourself!” as he lost the last of his own control and now flailed, tried to pull himself up and ended in knocking the whole desk over.
    Pens and phone and dog treats and a soft-drink bottle all slid to the floor. The touch-screen desk lay on its side, still displaying the battle inside the president.
    Charles got his hand on the drink bottle, holding it awkwardly by the fat end, and jabbed it now, hit his brother’s face with it, and blood gushed suddenly from Benjamin’s mouth even as he kept yelling, “Communists! Communists!”
    “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
    Charles bashed his brother’s mouth. A tooth bent inward and gushed blood. The lips were jagged and red.
    “He’s going to hurt Benjamin,” Sugar said. “We have to stop it.”
    She moved fast, whipped out plastic ties, the same as the ones that held Keats, grabbed Charles’s hammering hand and using her full weight, pushed it down.
    “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