BZRK

in between. They were tiny compared to eyelashes.
    The cave felt quite large down at the nano. Earwax was a constant issue, with clumps of it along the “floor” and other bits of it hanging from above. And the entire cave was pockmarked here and there with holes like a sort of tiny, slow-motion geyser. Like the holes in Yellowstone that would burp up a glob of hot mud. Only in this case the hot mud was earwax.
    Up in the macro, Bug Man was installed in a van parked just around the corner on M Street. No repeater necessary, straight signal.
    He moved twenty-four fighter nanobots and four spinnerbots into the ear canal, marched them over the earwax down to the eardrum. An eardrum at the nano was a hell of a thing to see. Kind of like the skin of a bass drum if that bass drum was five stories tall m-sub, and anchored not by a fitted ring but by a tiny bone behind.
    Bug Man waited until the squash game was over because the effect of that squash ball hitting the wall at high speed, that
thwock!
sound, hit the eardrum like a rock drummer smashing it with a stick.
    The whole damned thing, that five-story-tall disk of what looked a bit like bleached, translucent liver, vibrated, and down in the nano that vibration was huge.
    So he waited until John Smith—could that possibly be his real name?—was done smacking hard rubber balls. But next would come a shower, and that was potentially hazardous. He picked a relatively quiet moment and sent his nanobots scurrying beneath the now-moderately vibrating membrane.
    Here at least they were safe.
    But the next bit of the trip would involve climbing up the back side of the eardrum—something best done when the agent was asleep.
    The van would be moved to just outside the Secret Service man’s Fairfax home. And during the night Bug Man would enter his brain and put his spinners to work.
    Somewhere in that man’s brain was a picture of his mentor and friend, agent Francine Petrash, attached to the presidential detail. It would be a tough wire job. Bug Man would have to convince John Smith to touch Agent Petrash’s face. He had some ideas about that. But it would mean an all-night wire job.
    So, for now, Bug Man headed back to the Sofitel for some sleep.
    *
    Roughly three hundred miles away Dr Anya Violet looked at Vincent and said, “I know you’re doing something to me.”
    At that moment Vincent was sitting with his feet up on the windowsill. He was gazing out over a gray, overcast Atlantic. Down on the beach, his two new recruits were walking and talking. Obviously relaxed in each other’s company. Leaving footprints on pristine, damp sand.
    “I’m just watching the waves,” Vincent said.
    “I feel differently about you,” Anya said.
    “Do you?”
    “Goddamnit it, Vincent. I didn’t betray you. I was used. I was set up. They must have guessed you’d come through me. They knew you’d need access to the lab.”
    “That’s right,” Vincent said. He was half listening. Watching Plath and Keats down on the beach. Thinking that Nijinsky had told him only part of a story, that Jin didn’t trust Vincent—or want to burden him—with more.
    Vincent and Wilkes and Ophelia, the three of them, had swarmed over Jin’s brain. There was no sign of nanobot infestation. No wire. They had checked eyes, ears, even nose. They had sent biots crawling across his skin and deep into his brain and found nothing at all.
    Nijinsky was clean.
    But he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his encounter with Sugar Lebowski. He was telling only what he had to tell. Concealing something.
    And all the while, Vincent’s two injured biots were stringing wire deep inside Anya’s brain. It would be some time before they were capable of battle. His two healthy biots were in his own head. Waiting.
    “I know you’re wiring me,” Anya said. The sound of her voice was a stab in the heart because it was her voice, but no longer entirely her own tone or emotion. She was speaking as someone would to a loved one. There was a sense of hurt. Of betrayal. Like you’d feel if someone you cared about was treating you badly.
    Wire. It stretched from her memories of him to memories of everything she cared for, believed in, admired. Loved. Already Vincent was entwined with her mother, with her sister, with her favorite sushi restaurant, with her childhood teacher—who had told her she had a special ability—to her favorite scents.
    She was being hard-wired to trust Vincent.
    And maybe more than