“It can be disturbing,” Vincent said from a million miles away.

What were they doing to him?

Keats saw his brother, shackled, screaming, screaming, and now his own head was filled with lunatic visions.

He whimpered. He didn’t care that he whimpered.

He didn’t care that he was crying aloud, howling like a mad thing. Howling. Like his poor, mad brother.

Vincent felt sick inside. This was a dirty trick he was playing. They’d had no preparation. No training. He at least had seen films; he had seen micrographs. He’d been shown what to expect. By that cold bastard Caligula, yes, but shown, anyway. Better than the nightmare Keats and Plath were entering.

These two, these straining, shrieking, sobbing teenagers were taking it all in one awful jolt of disorientation.

He hadn’t just thrown them off the deep end and told them to swim. He’d thrown them into the ocean and told them to outswim the sharks.

He closed his eyes, and the memories came rushing back. The violent nausea. The feeling of being twisted out of reality, like the hand of some malicious god had reached down to rip him out of the fabric of time and space.

And they still had no idea. No idea. No way to understand that this transformation was permanent. No way to really understand that they had just bet their sanity. Their lives.

But Lear needed them. Lear was right. No time for the usual niceties; here you are, kids: welcome to the asylum.

Wait till they see the demodex. Wait until they see their first mite. Wait until they see the blood cells rushing around them like Frisbees.

Wait until they stare out through another man’s eye.

And wait … Vincent froze.

All the while, V1 and V2 had been making their way along Dr. Violet’s optic nerve.

Something. What was it? He’d seen something, something that made the hairs on the back of his head stand up, twitched by tiny muscles, a signal of fear. What did he have to fear?

He backed V1 up.

Sent V2 ahead cautiously.

What had he seen and not seen?

And there it was. Just a few cells torn from the optic nerve when someone disconnected too quickly.

Trap.

FOURTEEN

“They’ve got the new repeater in place, Anthony.”

Bug Man glared at Burnofsky, enjoying watching him sweat. Bloody old fart. He looked like that aging rocker who had just died. The old junkie. Bug Man would hate ever to have to infest Burnofsky, see that wrinkled old parchment skin up close, probably crawling with parasites with all his natural defenses weak. Those bushy eyebrows would be alive with vermin.

“Is it looped in?”

“Damnit, get back in there, Bug, or I’ll do the job for you,” Burnofsky snapped.

“And have you end up wasting two dozen of my branded nanobots? Have Vincent think he took me down?” Bug Man stormed back into the playroom.

He slipped on the gloves and slid back into the seat. Burnofsky watched over his shoulder as he tested the communications. Twenty-one of the twenty-four screens lit up. Most showed other nanobots. Some had views of the brain fold where they were hiding. Down in the meat. Brain mapping was off for the moment.

“Now bugger off, old man, you can watch from the other room.”

“Macro is on its way.”

“The fuck?” Bug Man raged. “I thought you said there was no way!”

Burnofsky shrugged. “I ran your suggestion by the Twins. They agreed with you: they thought it was worth the risk to go macro as well. So I guess if you want credit for the kill, you’d best hurry, because it may be a bullet not a nanobot that does the job.”

Bug Man quickly formed the nanobots into four platoons of six each. Not even the Bug Man could handle twenty-four individual nanobots. The platoons would perform identically, which sometimes ended up with the tiny robots getting in one another’s way, but there were techniques to minimize that. If you had the skills.

He would send them in waves, a platoon at a time. The first group would locate Vincent’s biots. If Vincent spotted them, they’d engage immediately. If not, they’d wait while the remaining forces were moved up. Then, bam! Waves of four, maybe ten or twenty seconds apart. Boom, boom, boom, and down goes Vincent.

Bug Man had a fantasy: he wanted to take one of Vincent’s biots alive and haul it out into the macro.

Keep it alive and play with it for a while. As Vincent went slowly mad.

Plath pushed Renfield’s hands off her shoulders. She wasn’t going to freak out, but she didn’t want to be touched.

The pain in her healing arm helped keep her focused. And maybe Vincent’s soothing tone, but not being touched; and then she slipped to her knees, bent her face forward, and retched again on the floor.

What was that she was seeing? Some nightmarish beast, and another beside it. Standing on tall, clean, pyramidal spider legs on a long field of bumpy, grainy material that made her think of leather.

Vincent’s voice, urgent, no longer soothing, said, “It’s a trap.”

And he was on his feet, grabbing Anya Violet as she turned to run, snatching her trailed arm. She almost got away, wriggling out of her lab coat. But Vincent caught her and yanked her violently toward him and locked her neck between his forearms.

She squirmed but could not get away.

“Is she—” Renfield snapped.

“Nanobot sign,” Vincent said. “No contact yet, but any second now. Contact Caligula. We have a problem.”

Renfield tapped his phone. “You should kill her,” he said, not looking at Vincent, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Snap her neck and retrieve your biots. Let AFGC come and do cleanup. Let Plath and Keats grab their babies—they’re viable by now in their crèches. Then we get out of here.”