BZRK

anyone would find of Sugar Lebowski. Her mouth tasted like vomit. Her heart was hammering away so loud she almost couldn’t hear Jindal.
    “Are they all dead?” Jindal asked. He sounded like a little kid asking his mommy.
    “They’re fucking charcoal,” Sugar said harshly.
    There was a camera mounted openly on the wall of the AFGC control room. Of course she knew the Twins had other cameras as well. Up there, a hundred feet above her, they would be watching. She could feel it.
    It was clear to Sugar at that moment that she would be very lucky to live out the day. Letting Nijinsky escape would have been enough to infuriate the Twins. Yes, she’d been attacked, taken by surprise, and yes, Dietrich should share some of the blame, but they weren’t understanding, forgiving people, those two. But that paled to insignificance compared to this.
    Was she so valuable to the company, to Charles and Benjamin, that they would have to keep her alive? Would she ever make it home to see her daughter?
    Sugar turned to face the camera. “That’s just two twitchers,” she said. “We still have Bug Man, Burnofsky, One-Up, and Dietrich. One-Up is running late but she’s reliable. When she gets to the location with Dietrich, we can repurpose either Kim’s or Alfredo’s nanobots to him at the hotel location. If you choose, we can also shift One-Up from her current target.”
    There was of course no answer.
    Her insides twisted. She glanced at the link to the hotel location. It showed Dietrich already suiting up as the spare twitcher. She peered past him. The camera angle wasn’t good. One-Up’s chair was on the other side of a bed that had been pushed out of the way, and light was coming in through the window that blinded the camera a little.
    But peering hard she could see that the far chair was still empty. She’d just reassured Twofer that One-Up was reliable. She was a prima donna, but she always showed up. But this was no time for her bullshit.
    “Where the hell is One-Up?” Sugar yelled, losing her cool a bit as she considered her own likely demise.
    He jumped. Others in the room jumped as well. They were all staring at her with accusing eyes. She was the one who had ordered the bomb.
    “She . . .” Jindal began. “You know she always has to have a Starbucks. She went out and . . .” He shrugged and looked around helplessly. “It’s a thing with her. It’s a superstition. You know that! Half these twitchers have OCD. They’re all nuts.”
    Sugar’s phone rang. It made her jump. It had to be them. It had to be the Twins.
    Sick with dread she looked at the number. It was not a recognized number. She pushed the answer button and held it to her ear.
    “Who is this?” she asked.
    “It’s me, it’s me, I’ve been trying to get through!”
    One-Up.
    “Slow down,” Sugar said with all the authority she could manage. “Explain yourself.”
    Sugar listened. And she glanced at the camera and imagined those two freak faces, imagined those three awful eyes boring into her.
    She would never survive this day. Sugar saw her house. Her daughter. Her husband, whom she didn’t like very much, but he was good cover.
    The Twins were going to have her killed. By one of her own men. She glanced quickly at the angry faces around her.
One of you
, she thought.
One of you.
    She wished she could cry. But if there was any way out of this, it was by dealing with this new threat.
    There was an opportunity here, a desperate opportunity.
    She turned away from the monitor to her deputy, a beefy but smart former cop named Paul Johntz.
    “Paul. We’ve been penetrated. There are at least two BZRK twitchers. They’ll have to stay within range of the building to run biots. Get every piece of muscle we have and follow me.”
    *
    “I’m tapping optics,” Plath said. She’d been shown how to do it. But only once. She sank the probe. It was a rigid little spear on the end of a piece of nanowire. She had to use her mantis arm to do it, and it was awkward. Like throwing a harpoon with a lobster claw.
    The probe sank and . . . And nothing.
    She reeled it back in. Stabbed it deeper into the nerve. And suddenly, “Ahh!” she said.
    “Shh,” Keats said. “People.”
    There was movement near the Dumpster. Plath fell silent. A new visual had opened up. So strange. Like a window inside a window. Like picture in picture on a TV, except that this picture was black-and-white and grainy, as if the pixels were all an inch on a