BZRK

trust.
    But she was still doubtful. Suspicious, because she was a very smart woman, and very self-aware, and he liked that in her. And soon he would wire all of that suspicion away.
    “I do what I do because I have no choice,” Vincent whispered.
    I am not Scipio. I do not slaughter women and children and boast of it before the Roman Senate.
    I will save your life, Anya,
he thought.
You don’t understand: Lear will send the Carthage message unless I make you one of us.
    I will save your life, Anya, by destroying your will.
    “I want you to make love to me,” Anya said. Her voice cracked with need.
    “This isn’t the night for—”
    She rose, came to him, knelt, took his legs down from the sill, and touched him.
    Vincent pushed her away, gently but decisively. “No, Anya. I’ll do what I have to do to save your life. But I won’t let you lower yourself.”
    Vincent knew about Bug Man and Jessica, the beauty he had turned into a living slave. He was not Bug Man.
    Anya’s eyes flashed furiously. “You make me need you and then give me nothing? That’s your act of charity, Vincent? Wire me to be hungry and then let me starve?”
    “I have to live with myself,” he said. He stood up and she followed him as he rose, still very close, so close they touched and where they didn’t touch they wanted to.
    “You want me,” she said. “You may not take any pleasure from it, but you want me: your body betrays you. And whether or not it’s real, Vincent, whether it’s my true desires or something you’ve done to me, in the end there’s no difference.”
    “There is to me,” he said.
    He pushed past her, his throat tight, blood pounding through him.
    I am not Scipio. And I am not Bug Man.
    So many things I’m not
, he thought bitterly.
And so few things I am
.
    *
    Later Keats and Plath cooked pasta. It wasn’t an old family recipe, just some sauce from a jar. Plath used the massive pot her mother had once used to boil crabs, right here, right absolutely here in this very kitchen in a very different world.
    And they had a dinner, all of them, Vincent and Anya, Nijinsky, Ophelia, Wilkes, Keats and Plath. They drank a nice Barolo. They passed around the freshly grated Parmesan. And it was normal if by normal you meant a horrible parody of normality.
    Nijinsky had somehow found enough clothing of Plath’s father to look quite modelish again. And Wilkes kept her sudden digressions into hostility under control. And Anya looked at Vincent with loving eyes while he ate mechanically. And Ophelia somehow found her repertoire of smiles that made them all feel better.
    And still it was the most desperately sad meal Plath had ever had.
    It was Keats who broke the code of silence and asked Vincent, “When does it start?”
    “Tomorrow,” Vincent said. “Our British cousins are in the city. They’ll be taking—defending—their prime minister. We have our president. And . . .” He paused, glanced at Anya as though not sure whether he could speak freely in her presence. Something reassured him, and in accepting reassurance, Plath thought something inside Vincent twisted and writhed a little bit, too, and he said, “And we have a little surprise for the Armstrong Twins.”
    Every fork except Wilkes’s stopped moving.
    “I won’t lie: they hit us pretty hard. We believe now that AFGC have targeted our president, Keats’s prime minister, the Chinese president, the Japanese and Indian prime ministers. Five targets. But the Armstrong Twins hit our Chinese and Indian cells very hard. So we’re probably going to have to give them up. And that’s very bad.”
    “The Japanese cell is very tight, and they don’t seem to have been hit. So we’ll leave the Japanese PM to them. Same with our British cousins.”
    “God save the king, eh?” Wilkes said to Keats.
    “Or at least the prime minister. Even if he is a Tory,” Keats answered.
    “Nijinsky and I are the first team on President Morales. Wilkes and Ophelia run counterforce for that,” Vincent went on.
    “What’s counterforce?” Plath asked.
    “There are three ways to stop a twitcher,” Ophelia explained. “You can beat him down in the nano. You can incapacitate him in the macro: in other words, kill him. Or you can wire him. Wilkes and I will be looking for the twitchers. They’ll use multiple locations near the UN Building to avoid having to use signal repeaters.”
    “Their repeaters are junk,” Nijinsky interjected.
    “We have word from