BZRK

tense. He did.
    “Wish we were there?” he asked.
    She let go of a small, abrupt laugh. “God, yes. Or anywhere.”
    “Euro Disney?”
    The suggestion was so perfectly absurd she started giggling. And that brought a smile, a real one, to his lips, and his blue eyes lit up even brighter than before.
    “Really, any of the major theme parks,” she said through laughter. “I’d go see the giant ball of twine in Kansas.”
    “Is that real?” he asked.
    Suddenly serious she said, “Dude, I no longer feel qualified to say what’s real and what isn’t.”
    He looked down. “Dude. Well, my America visit is complete. I’ve been called ‘dude’.”
    She took up the bantering tone. “How have you liked America so far?”
    “Oh, it’s about what I expected,” he said.
    That unleashed an almost hysterical burst of laughter from both of them.
    “You suppose they’re watching us?” Keats asked, looking up at the ceiling.
    “I hope so. That way they’ll be able to see this.” She held up the middle finger on both her hands and stuck them in the air.
    “So,” he said, faltering a little, “would you go out with me sometime?”
    “That depends. What did you have in mind?”
    “We get something to eat. See a movie.”
    “I shot that man.” The words were out before she knew they were coming. A sob escaped behind them. And quiet tears.
    “Yes.”
    Neither had anything to say for a long time after that. Both sat in the dark, perched awkwardly on the edge of chair and bed.
    Finally Plath yawned. “If I asked you to stay with me tonight . . . I mean, if I said I wanted you to lie next to me and sleep. Could it be just that? Could it just be that we—’ Her voice broke and she couldn’t speak.
    “You mean could we just be here together because we’re both scared to death? And hurt? And don’t have anyone else?”
    She nodded. “Yes. That.”
    She lay back on her narrow bed. He came and lay down beside her. Only their shoulders and thighs touched. For a while they lay staring up at peeling paint. And then, finally, sleep took them both away to terrifying dreams but also to a degree of oblivion.
    *
    In Brooklyn, a similar scene.
    Though Jessica did her programmed best, the Bug Man just lay in his bed staring at the ceiling.
    He had beaten Vincent. That much he owned. No matter how Burnofsky sneered. No matter how much the Twins may have raged—at least in Bug Man’s imagination, because they didn’t call.
    He had beaten Vincent.
    He had.
    Would have finished him off, too, except for stuff that happened in the macro. Which was not Bug Man’s fault.
    The reports that came in from the lone survivor of the McLure building massacre mentioned a Taser. That’s what had kept Bug Man from finishing Vincent.
    Macro stuff. Up
there
. Not down in the meat. Down in the meat Bug Man had taken Vincent down.
    Damn right.
    Whatever Burnofsky had to say.
    Within a millimeter of dragging a still-living biot off the field. God, that would have made Burnofsky depressed to the point of suicide. And the Twins? They would have kissed his butt with their nasty freak mouths.
    He could have messed with a captured biot until Vincent admitted that Bug Man ruled the nano.
    Ruler of the nano.
    So cool.
    That would have been . . .
    He heard sounds coming from outside his room. His mother getting up to go to work. His aunt would sleep another hour.
    Bug Man rolled out of bed and pulled on his clothes.
    “What’s the matter, baby?” Jessica asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “Come on, sweetheart, I can—”
    “Shut up,” he snapped. Then in a gentler voice, “Look, just leave me alone, okay? Just . . .” He left her and went to the kitchen.
    Bug Man’s mother was a mother-looking woman. She was overweight; she didn’t dress fancy; her hair was done once a week at a salon run by another black woman from Britain, although she was from somewhere to the north, Newcastle or whatever.
    His mother was watching the coffee brew. Just standing there.
    “Hey, Mum,” Bug Man said.
    She looked at him with a critical eye. “You got in late last night.”
    The small TV on the counter was tuned to a cable-news channel. The sound was off. The picture was some jittery new bit of video from the stadium. It showed the plane hitting the stands. Still. Even now.
    “Yeah. There was a . . . you know, screw-up. A thing that happened.”
    “You didn’t get fired, did you?”
    “No, no, nothing like that.” He reached past her to snag a mug and