BZRK

her father had planned for the unlikely reality that had now occurred: Plath . . . no,
Sadie
. . . alone in the world.
    But of course Vincent had plans for handling that. “Not time to worry about that now,” he had told her. “We have the biggest fight in the war ahead of us. We got lucky the other night, thanks to Caligula and Wilkes, and we know what the other side is up to. We have to deal with that. We have to stop them. Then we’ll have time to deal with your future.”
    “I don’t enjoy being treated like a piece of some big puzzle I’m not allowed to see,” Plath told him. “I’m not the dumb chick who needs to be kept in the dark.”
    “No one thinks you’re the dumb chick,” Vincent had said in his grave, sincere way. “But we compartmentalize information. We set up roadblocks, so that if they take one of us, break one of us, manage to turn one of us, the damage can be limited.”
    “Just tell me this. We’re not all there is, right? It’s not just you and Jin, Ophelia, Wilkes, me, and Keats. It’s not six people, right? Seven if you count Caligula. Because then I’m really just a fool.”
    Vincent nodded, taking the question seriously. “It’s not just us. No. There are people above us. Lear. And there are other cells. In other places. Some will be coming soon to help us with this battle.”
    That had reassured Plath. A little, anyway. And she slept better that night. Okay, she told herself before she fell asleep, we’re not alone in this. I’m not one of seven lunatics. I’m one of maybe hundreds of lunatics.
    She’d wished Keats was with her so she could say that to him and make him laugh. And for a while she’d lain there in her bed picturing him just a thin wall away, wondering what he was doing. What he was thinking. Wondering if when he saw her in his mind’s eye, he saw the bulging aneurysm deep in her brain and felt some mixture of pity and disgust.
    Or whether he thought of her lips, up in the macro, the pink, soft lips, not the nanovision of tea-colored parchment.
    She wondered if he knew the color of her eyes. She knew his. Even after seeing the truth down in the nano she saw his eyes as blue, blue, blue.
    In her entire life Sadie had never thought this much about a boy. In fact, add up all the boys she’d ever thought about and it didn’t equal the time she spent in just one night thinking about Keats.
    When she analyzed this fact, it made little sense. Keats was far from being the most handsome. Sadie had gone out with some extraordinarily attractive boys. And yet, remembering them, flipping through them like an iTunes rack, she wanted none of them here, now. She wanted none of them to knock on her door. Not the way she wanted Keats to knock, right now.
    You’re messed up, she reminded herself. You’ve gone through hell. You lost your father and brother while almost dying yourself. You saw people burning. You were hurt. Your brain was messed with. You were attached to your own little hideous, deadly, creepy insect children.
    You shot a man and watched him bleed.
    And you went where only a handful of people have ever been. You saw things no one needed to see.
    You’ve been down in the meat.
    The boy next door spends part of his day inside your brain, weaving Teflon reeds into a basket to keep you from dying.
    None of this leads to a wise, considered decision. All of this leads to rash and stupid and desperately needy decisions. All of this pain and death and fear leads to your needing to be held, needing to be lifted out of it all. It leads to fantasies of Keats and his hands and his lips and his body.
    Was he thinking the same things about her? Right now, this minute?
    She could imagine the pictures, the fantasies in his head. He was a boy, after all, so yeah, he thought about her. In some very specific ways no doubt. Which was fine, so long as whatever he thought of her, however she looked, whatever he imagined her doing, it had nothing to do with dangerous human-eyed mutant insects down—
    Footsteps. Loud, not concerned with nighttime.
    A loud knock—a banging, really—on her door.
    “Up. Now. Up and dressed.”
    She recognized the voice. Caligula.
    She rolled out of bed, stumbled to her clothing, dressed with shaking hands, and stepped into the hallway. Keats was there before her.
    “What’s happening?”
    He shook his head, mystified. They found Vincent and Wilkes in the common room. Anya Violet sat in a corner, meek, wary, diminished.
    Caligula said,