What had changed?

The benign explanation was that she had learned and matured and come to grips with grim necessity. The less benign explanation was that she had become hardened and had lost her soul.

But she feared the truth was a third possibility: that she had been wired.

How and by whom? The obvious suspect was Keats. After all, he had a biot in her brain, ostensibly protecting her from a blown aneurysm.

But why would Keats wire her? Orders from Lear? Or had he gone over to the other side? Both seemed absurd. Keats would not blindly take orders. And he would never join the people who had put his brother Alex in a mental institution.

Unless he had decided that BZRK was to blame. And wasn’t that a plausible conclusion? Wasn’t BZRK responsible, in a way?

She ran down the list of other people who might have done it. Maybe one of the McLure Security guys. Maybe one of the house servants who washed sheets and delivered food. Or maybe someone had gone to work in her brain as soon as she got back to New York. But that would mean whoever was doing it had had very little time. Which in turn meant that someone was very, very good at the job.

Someone.

But the obvious suspect?

She was circling the globe, around the eye that twitched beneath her, making all the minute adjustments that eyes must do. She skimmed the edge of her iris-serried ranks of gristly muscle fiber waiting to react to light, opening and closing the dark, deep hole of her pupil.

Down and around, beneath the permanent retraction point of the eyelid, so that her “sky” was now an eternal mucous membrane. Her biot skated on, slowed slightly by the claustrophobically low roof. With absolutely no ambient light, she had illumination switched on—glowing nodes built out of the DNA of exotic deep-ocean creatures. She was in the land of muscle bundles now, massive cables seemingly fused into the melting ice of the eyeball and ascending into the dark.

And onward, farther around the globe—and now, at last, like Yggdrasil, the tree that supported the world in Norse mythology, the optic nerve rose into view.

Suddenly the world shifted wildly beneath her. Muscles jerked crazily. In the real world, the light had snapped on.

She sat up.

Keats looked at her, saw her surprise, and said, “Sorry, did I startle you?”

“No, no,” she lied. “I just … there was a Post-it note.… Never mind.” She could see it lying on the floor of the bright hallway. “Are you coming to bed?”

“Was kind of hoping to,” he said, not wolfishly, more just a tired boy.

Plath pulled the blanket back to bare the sheets for him. He nodded at the open space, smiled at it as if it was an old friend. He stripped off his clothes while she lay back and closed her eyes, hoping he would get the message.

She tried to calm her breathing. Keats was in her brain; he would know from the pulse of blood through the aneurysm whether she was perturbed.

Keats was warm beside her. He leaned over to give her the lightest of kisses. Just a brush of lips and a whispered, “Good night.”

But to her surprise Plath found herself wanting more. She pushed her fingers through his hair and pulled him close and kissed him back. In the dark, even as she crawled toward her own optic nerve, his lips were just his lips and not a parchment landscape.

He responded.

P2 began the ascent—direction was all very subjective in the meat—began climbing that tree.

He was still holding back, not quite sure whether this kiss was a prelude or just a very nice good-night. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and now he must feel the way her pulse raced.

Up the nerve, up to the impassable membrane that guarded the brain itself. Her brain. She reared up on her four anterior legs and used the sharp pincers on her front legs to slice as small a hole as possible through the membrane. A watery liquid oozed outward.

She checked herself, inspected as well as she could her biot legs, looking for pollen, bacteria, fungus—all the things which can be so deadly if carried into the brain. She found what looked like a half-dozen tennis balls on her left rear leg and knocked them loose. Bacteria, and very much alive: one was splitting as she watched.

Keats was kissing her now, everywhere. He was no longer responding to her, but moving ahead, taking charge, setting the pace, and for once Plath let him, willingly surrendering, needing to surrender.

Her brain floated like a giant sponge, a sponge crisscrossed with throbbing arteries and veins like the tangle of rivers and tributaries in a delta. The fluid made movement slower than it was in an air environment, and her biot claws had to grab on so as not to float away.

He was inside her. His biot. Down here in these endless folds of pink flesh. At least she hoped he was, hoped he was not on her other eye spying, or worse, far worse, somewhere deeper still, laying wire.

Let it not be him. Not him. That was a betrayal she could not survive.

The tissue that was the ground could appear to be a wall, a floor, or a ceiling, depending on your perspective. The biot world was one where gravity was almost irrelevant, certainly in this liquid environment.

She was aiming for the hippocampus, a deep structure, an ancient part of the evolving brain. It was the router of the mind. If someone was wiring her, that’s where they would likely start. The implanted brain-mapping imagery was a guide, though an imperfect one because no two brains were identical, and where she might expect to find a figurative gully could be a plunging valley.

In the real world her body was responding almost on its own, as though it was not connected to her, not connected to the brain upon which she now walked, the brain that was the processor of every contact between his tongue and her flesh.