BZRK

the couch, close to Sadie, and patted the space beside her while smiling at Noah. Noah obeyed and sat.
    Nijinsky looked around, a little desperate for a seating solution, and finally lowered himself with minimal physical contact onto an armless chair. He flicked his blazer expertly so that it draped just the right way. His trouser legs stayed where they should and did not reveal above-sock flesh.
    “We’ve never had two new people at once before, so procedures are a bit ad hoc,” Nijinsky said.
    “But very glad to have you both,” Ophelia said. She had two smiles, one right after the other. The one for Sadie was sisterly. The one for Noah was cordial, and also included the information that she was too old for him, nothing personal, but he was not to flirt with her.
    Noah hadn’t been considering flirting with her. He was in fact desperately trying to avoid looking at the sprinkling of freckles across Sadie’s nose and cheeks, and he was trying not to feel the sadness that throbbed through her tough-girl expression, because, well, there was no because, really. He just wanted to look at her. And he knew he shouldn’t. But he did look at her and then looked away and did this possibly twenty times. And bit his lip, which didn’t help.
    “You’ve both been given some basic information,” Nijinsky said. “You know why you’re here. Your motivations are your own. You just need to know that you’ve already crossed the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious, but you are in.
In
. And there is no out for either of you.”
    He didn’t smile, so it wasn’t a joke. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, signaling that this was serious.
    “You are part of us now. You’ll get orders. And you’ll obey them.” Nijinsky’s eyes slid over Noah to rest quite deliberately on Sadie. Noah used the excuse to steal his own look, and boy, you did not want to be the guy who was on the wrong end of the defiance in Sadie’s eyes. It wasn’t a put-on; it came from all the way down deep. From reptilian brain and spine and fist.
    Noah looked away and rested his own gaze on Nijinsky. Was it racist of him to think that Asian eyes showed less expression? Whether it was or not, Nijinsky was hard to read. And then, just a glint of amusement. Nijinsky liked Sadie. Not
that
way, but he liked her.
    “We all get orders,” Ophelia said.
    “Yes, we do,” Nijinsky agreed.
    “We all understand.”
    “Yes.”
    “The stuff that matters . . .” Ophelia finished the sentence with a shrug.
    “We’ve all lost people,” Nijinsky said.
    Ophelia nodded. No smile. The skin of her face was brittle, stretched, concealing memories. It was hard now to imagine that face ever smiling. And yet she had, hadn’t she?
    “We don’t want to lose any more,” Nijinsky said. “We put our lives on the line. And those who run biots risk their sanity. We do this of our own free will. We do it so that we and the rest of the human race will continue to
have
free will. So that people will be able to choose: right or wrong, good or evil. The other side claims to want universal happiness, and I’ll tell you: they aren’t lying.”
    He let that sink in for a moment, a self-consciously dramatic pause.
    “They would use technology to make the human race into a sort of insect society. To make us all one mind, united. No unhappiness, no stress, no rage or jealousy. But we choose a different world. We choose the right to unhappiness.”
    “We’re fighting for unhappiness?” Noah asked skeptically. “It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way.”
    Nijinsky laughed, delighted. “Oh, it is.” Then, serious again, he said, “We fight for the right to be what we choose, to feel what we choose. Even if what we choose seems crazy to others.”
    “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll fight for revenge,” Sadie said.
    Nijinsky’s eyes glittered. “Oh, yes. That’s fine with me.”
    A look passed between him and Ophelia. Ophelia looked satisfied, almost an “I told you so” look. They were pleased, Nijinsky and Ophelia, pleased with their new recruits.
    “We leave our old names behind, and choose a new name,” Nijinsky went on. “From the start it became a . . . let’s say a custom . . . to choose the name of someone, real or fictional, who had slipped the surly bonds of sanity.” He made a wry smile.
    Ophelia said, “Vincent for Vincent van Gogh, Nijinsky, Hamlet’s Ophelia, Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes, Caligula.” She blinked when she said