“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”

She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song? The lunatic is in my head?”

Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.

She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”

“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”

“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that counts as a net plus.”

Nijinsky said nothing.

“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in describing the one he had in me.”

Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding, healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his forehead lightly.

“And so you and I both get to keep a little piece of him.” Anya was tired of sparring. “No. I haven’t noticed anything. If anyone is wiring me I’m not noticing it, and if a …mentally unbalanced …twitcher were doing it, it would be clumsy enough for me to notice. So, I very much doubt that Vincent is even aware of the biot inside me. If he is, it’s as a series of hallucinatory images that probably mean little or nothing to him.”

Nijinsky nodded. “I haven’t seen any activity at all from his biot.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, his knee almost touching hers. In a straight man she would have suspected a flirtation.

“What’s on the pad?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you have surveillance in here. I know you’ve already seen and investigated.”

He shook his head. Then he hung his head down and shook it again. “No, actually. We don’t have the manpower for that, I’m afraid. I mean, yes, we have a camera in here, but aside from making sure you haven’t hanged yourself or tried to dig a hole through the wall . . .”

“It’s what I was working on before you and your charming crew decided to destroy my life,” she said, but the bitterness was false and sounded it. Vincent was not something she could regret.

“Biot?” he asked.

“Biot version four,” she said. “Fourth generation. What you use now is version three. Or threes with various upgrades.”

“Okay,” he said cautiously. “Do you want to tell me?”

“It’s faster. It can jump. It has an improved rack for add-on weaponry. The legs are stronger.”

“Yes?” he asked, not nearly as cool as he wanted to sound.

“And it has a rather interesting penetrating proboscis, hollow of course, with a bladder. Mosquito-derived.”

“So it can suck blood?” He was puzzled.

“It goes the other way. The bladder can be filled with any number of interesting agents—chemical, bacteriological, viral—and injected. No more carrying sacks of germs with you if you want to plant something deadly.”

“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said.

“Ah. Of course. I forgot: you’re the good guys,” she mocked. “Not for you, planting a bit of flesh-eating bacteria in some enemy’s brain.”

“There are limits,” he said.

“Just like you don’t wire people.”

He raised his head and looked at her. “Dr Violet, we will endeavor to remove any alterations made in your brain.”

She swallowed in a suddenly dry throat.

“We do things out of extreme necessity,” he went on, sounding sanctimonious even to himself. “Vincent wired you, as little as he could, just enough to—”

“I’m in love with him,” she said, and now her voice was no longer tight and controlled. “And your solution is to take that away from me? And then what?”

He looked quickly away, as if eye contact had become painful.

Neither spoke. His knee no longer touched hers. She wondered if his biots were now making the slow, laborious climb up the length of her thigh on their way to her brain. No, not likely: he could have simply planted them on her face, no need for subterfuge.

“What else?” he asked.

“The visuals are better. It will make wiring easier and more accurate. The downside? You feel pain when it feels pain. And God himself only knows what effect it has if you lose one.”

Nijinsky controlled his breathing, not wanting to signal his excitement. “Can you make them?” he asked.

“Version four? Of course I can make them, they’ve been successfully tested,” she said. “Get me to the lab and I can grow one in a few hours.”

Nijinsky nodded. Not an easy proposition. The McLure labs had been the scene of a bloody battle. A massacre. But Lear had been busy, and a backup existed.

“What if it wasn’t your lab?” Nijinsky asked. “What if it was a place with all the same equipment, the same samples or most of them, essentially the same data files, even better computers, and so on?”

That surprised her. “You have another lab in New York?”

“Not in New York,” he said, and offered no further explanation. She ran down a list of equipment. To each item Nijinsky said, “Yes.”

“Well, aren’t you clever little conspirators?” she asked sarcastically. “Yes, if everything is as you say, yes, I can do it. But why should I?”