BZRK

fall wasn’t immediate; the man took a stagger step to the side and Sugar Lebowski was up like a cat. She drew the belt from her skirt and whipped it around Johntz’s neck from behind, all the while yelling, “Everyone back, everyone back, stay out of it!” to the remaining TFDs.
    But Johntz was too big to go down. He was straining to turn the pistol to point at Sugar, who grunted like an animal as she put all her slim weight into choking.
    Keats levered himself up and hopped, splashing through blood, grabbed the TFD’s gun hand and twisted it to aim the muzzle at the man’s head.
    For several terrible seconds they fought. Sugar slowly choking the strength out of her deputy, Keats twisting as he tried to stay on his feet. Then, a loud explosion.
    Johntz had a quizzical look on three quarters of his face, and a gaping hole for the rest. He dropped instantly.
    The other TFDs had stood by, paralyzed, not knowing who was in charge. Army Pete said, “Damn.” He held his hands up in a “Not me” gesture and backed toward the door.
    Keats held on to the pistol as the man fell.
    Sugar Lebowski had part of Johntz’s brain in her blonde hair. She unwrapped her belt from the dead man’s neck and with shaking fingers threaded it back into her skirt.
    “We need to get our bugs,” Keats said. The gun was still in his hand. It felt good, not bad in his grip. It felt like safety.
    “It will take me ten minutes to get back out of them,” Plath said. “Do I leave them like that?”
    “Like that” meant sweat pouring off the Twins, who were held in the grip of Benjamin’s seizure. No one could live for very long under that strain.
    Plath was asking Keats if she should kill Benjamin Armstrong—and most likely his brother, too, because it was impossible to imagine how one could die and not the other.
    “We’re not them,” Keats said. Then, doubting his own words, said, “Are we?”
    Plath went to stand over the helpless monsters. Monsters? What other word could be used?
    Monsters from birth. Feared and hated by all who saw them.
    Feared and hated now by her, too, and for good reason.
    The skin between the two faces, the place where the flesh had been glued together in the womb, was raw. The force of the seizure had nearly made Benjamin tear his head away from his brother.
    She pulled the pin.

ARTIFACT
    To: Lear
    From: Nijinsky
    Wilkes is alive and back with us.
    Ophelia is alive despite the loss of both legs below the knee.
    Keats and Plath are both well and performed magnificently.
    Vincent is suffering from a deep depression following the loss of one biot. The second biot was badly injured but is recovering. Vincent is being cared for, outcome very uncertain.
    We failed in our main objective.
    We await instructions.



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