“You wreck this thing and your future will be very much in doubt, Imelda,” she told herself.

Then, finally, she fired up the engines.

It was noisy but not deafening in the cockpit. She felt the surge of suppressed power as the twin jets throbbed. The sleigh rose on a cushion of air.

She keyed the remote, and the hangar doors slid open. Beyond the doors was whiteness, white on white as far as the eye could see.

She punched her destination into the GPS, released the cable tie-downs, and slid toward the gap at walking speed then running speed and was just hitting fifty knots by the time she blew out of the building, keyed the doors over her shoulder, and rocketed out onto the ice.

Oh, yes.

She smiled and held it at fifty knots until she had played with the controls for a while and come grudgingly to trust the forward-scanning radar.

The ice here was rippled but with no rises over eighteen inches. The sleigh’s jets adjusted automatically to push more air into the cushion as she reached obstacles.

Very soon fifty began to feel slow. Boring. Despite the fact that the ice was flying by beneath her. In her rearview mirror she saw a vortex of ice crystals, a shimmery white contrail.

“Well, in for fity, in for a hundred, right?”

She punched it, and the sleigh took off like a rocket.

“Oh, yes,” Suarez said. “Ah-hah-hah!”

TWENTY

Plath was still asleep when they struck.

One from Keats, two from Wilkes, two from Billy. Five busy biots raced up through her eye and into her brain.

They had planned. Wilkes and Keats would focus on ripping up wire in the places where Keats had found it. Billy would go hunting for the intruder and call for help if he found something.

“It’s mostly all up in here,” Keats said. “Hippocampus and some Broca’s area.” Amazing how quickly one could learn something as esoteric as brain architecture when life and death were involved.

The three of them were downstairs in the darkened living room. Hopefully Plath would not awaken and come down to find out why Keats was not in her bed. If she did, they would know it: arteries would start pumping faster as she woke and began to stir.

“Go ahead, Billy. But if you find something, don’t fight it. Call us for help.”

Billy had a Coke by his side. He was dressed in a Washington Nationals jersey many sizes too large and slumped down to look cool, with the result that he looked even younger than he was—a small, round head and solemn face in a pile of rumpled clothing. None of them had anything to do with their hands.

“There’s the first wire I found,” Keats said to Wilkes. Down in the meat he was pointing it out to her nearest biot.

“It’s encrusted,” Wilkes said. It’s been there for some days at least. Maybe longer. Meaning maybe we pull the wire, but the neurons have already made it redundant.”

The wire was crisp and clean, only a few molecules in circumference. But neurons had grown over and around it in places, like kudzu, vines twining sensuously around the metal of the wire.

“Maybe,” Keats admitted. “But I won’t have that in her brain.”

That made Wilkes smile. A genuine smile, not her usual cynical leer. “Pulling it up, sir. Aye, aye, Captain. Pulling it up.”

Keats saw her two biots going at it, working well together to pull up the encrusted wire. The pins were sunk deep and completely overgrown. It took two biots straining to draw them slowly out of the brain like fence posts being pulled up. They came free but were still tangled in strands of neurons.

Wilkes had to tear the strands away, breaking actual brain connections in the process. To biot “ears” they made a sound like someone squirting water through their teeth and tearing denim.

No way to know whether these were just redundant cells tracking the wire or whether they had some legitimate purpose. Was she ripping away some cherished childhood memory? Probably not, probably these connections were just reinforcing the wire, but the human brain was astoundingly complex. BZRK had very sophisticated brain mapping, but still it was largely a crapshoot.

Gee, sorry about that, Plath, I just wiped out your memory of nursery school.

Keats was doing the same around the corner. There the wire was fresher, less overgrown. His biot stood at right angles to hers in the almost gravity-free liquid environment.

In the macro Billy said, “Can I ask a question?”

“Of course,” Keats replied.

“Why are we doing this?”

“Because someone has messed with Plath’s head, that’s why.” Keats obviously thought that was the end of it. But Billy pressed. “But isn’t everyone’s head messed with? I mean, stuff you see, or how you were raised. Stuff people did to you.”

There was something, maybe several somethings, behind that tremulous stuff people did to you.

But this was not the time to examine Billy’s demons. “That’s all natural, this is …” He was at a loss for words. “It’s wrong, that’s all.”

Billy fell silent after that. But Keats could see that he wasn’t convinced by Keats’s halfhearted effort to justify what they were doing. Keats went on about his business, tearing out wire, pulling pins. So did Wilkes, but now she took up the same line of questioning.

“Yeah, blue eyes, but we aren’t doing this with her okay anymore than whoever laid the wire down, right?” In the meat they were at right angles, here they sat facing.

“She’s not able to—”