No game was anywhere near as good as twitching. He was a twitcher. He needed it. He needed to be down in the meat.

He glared at Jessica, just sitting there, looking beautiful, gazing out of the window at the lights of the city, sighing occasionally, bored but obedient.

It struck him then what he had done. “I hacked my own game,” he said. Jessica was like any game where you knew all the shortcuts, where you had all the hacks. The game lost any value.

He had a portable twitching controller.

He had nanobots of course.

“Come here, Jessica. I just need to poke you in the eye.”

FIFTEEN

African beaches. Or was it Costa Rica they had talked about? Africa, yeah, that was it.

She would get Keats and they would drive away. Stern would meet them. Then, somehow, African beaches. Bodyguards. And a message would be sent to the Armstrong Twins: We are out of this war of yours.

We are civilians now.

Leave us alone.

Nijinksy shone a flashlight down the dark hole beneath the altar.

“It was a bootlegger’s hideout,” Nijinsky said, cutting off her fantasy. He led Plath and Anya down a surprisingly well-built set of concrete steps. After some searching they found a wall switch, and Nijinsky flicked the light on.

It couldn’t quite be called a cave, it was more just an underground pit dug out of the clay soil. Dirt walls, dirt roof held up by a latticework of recently added four-by-four and two-by-four beams.

The floor was covered by interlocking steel mats. A big rock protruded, and the steel flooring went around it. The entire space was large enough that it had to extend beneath several adjacent lots.

There were dusty, dried-out casks, the big ones you might see at a traditional winery, against one wall. Farther on the lighting improved dramatically, and the metal flooring had been covered by a thick blue plastic tarp.

It was in this section, an area that smelled less of mold and must, more of fresh-dug dirt, that the lab equipment was set up.

“A lab in this hole in the ground?” This from Anya, who stepped gingerly onto the tarp and went from one hulking piece of equipment to the next, marking them off a mental checklist, powering each one up, checking read-out panels.

Keats was upstairs with Wilkes and Billy, checking locks on the back door and the small window, barricading with the pews and assorted scrap lumber. All the way down in the sub-basement Plath could hear the dull impact of a hammer driving nails to strengthen defenses.

Burnofsky’s words were still buzzing in her brain.

It was true, wasn’t it? She had been suckered. She’d been tricked into this. She was a rich girl on a revenge high, but led into it by the eternally unseen Lear. Who else had sent Vincent to recruit her?

Who was Lear, exactly? And who the hell did he, she, or it think he, she, or it was to do this to her?

You’ve been hurt so now, by God, it’s your fight. Yours. Oldest game in history: idealists and patriots turned into vengeful killers. Somewhere, Lear is laughing.

“Very well done,” Anya said, giving her verdict on the underground lab.

Nijinsky nodded. “Good. Then we may as well get started. Assuming you’re ready, Dr Violet.”

Anya Violet turned soulful eyes on Plath. “Is she ready?”

Plath blinked and brought herself out of her dark reverie. “Ready for what?”

Nijinsky stood with his back to the lab. He faced her in what was almost certainly a calculatedly frank and honest way. She could have sworn he was striking a pose, and he knew how to do that. But it wasn’t working.

“There’s some new technology,” Nijinsky said.

Anya snorted.

“We have something very special we need you to do.”

“What’s with the royal we, Jin?” she demanded.

“The what?”

“We. Who is we? You and Dr Violet?”

“We,” he said, sounding a little exasperated. “We. BZRK.”

She stared at him, searching his eyes. They were anything but inscrutable, that old cliché. Nijinsky did not hide his feelings well. He knew he was asking something he had no right to ask; he knew he was leading her into danger.

“What is it you have planned for me?” she asked.

“There’s a new version of the biot. Version four. It has a number of improvements,” Nijinsky said, almost as if he was trying to sell her a new car.

She stared at him. “What?”

“We think …I think …No, we think . . .”

“Oh, man,” Plath said.

“With the version four we think you can pull off a deep wire. On Vincent. That maybe you can bring him back.”

Nijinsky and Anya watched her, very different expressions on their faces, waiting. Nijinsky waiting to offer up some compelling argument, but his attention elsewhere all the while, like he was watching a movie in his head. Anya with a sadness that went deep.

“You want me to take on another biot?” Plath asked dully. “Each new biot …I mean, what happens when . . .” She felt a chasm opening up beneath her. They were going to make her just like Vincent. Each new biot was a risk. Each new biot was another opportunity to draw the “insane” card from the deck.

“We …I …think you have the skills, Plath. The empathy. If she were …we’d have asked Ophelia,” Nijinsky said, obviously aware of the lameness of his plea.

“Yeah, but she’s dead.”

Nijinsky nodded. “Yes. She’s dead.”

“Killed by us.”