Her own nerves were stretched to breaking point. It had been one thing to feel brave alone with Keats. He brought out the tough girl in her, made her feel strong, like she had when she was with her brother. In fact, now it seemed as if the two were similar, though she’d never made the connection before. Noah and Stone McLure. She had, of course, loved her brother. And though she had tried to resist it, she loved Noah—she was pretty sure of that—though in a very different way.

The optic nerve was a long cable but so thick at this point that she could barely see the curve. The only light came from two illuminating pods that cast the faintest of greenish light—enough to allow her compound insect eyes to see motion, but barely enough to let her humanlike eyes interpret artificially enhanced color.

The optic nerve goes deep into the brain. The brain tissue presses in close all around, but not so close that a biot couldn’t crawl along beneath a weird, sparking sky of brain cells that warped in long, sensuous waves.

Suddenly she saw something she had not seen on previous trips. Her first impression was of maggots.

It looked like a corpse, roadkill, but completely covered in maggots the size of kittens. They seethed over it—white, gelatinous things with neither head nor eyes nor any other recognizable feature.

Lymphocytes. The defenders of Vincent’s body and blood. White blood cells.

It was his biot. His dead biot. The lymphocytes were consuming it, eating it, slowly wedging legs away from body, slowly absorbing its crushed and extruded insides.

“What can you see?” Keats asked, as Sadie drew in her breath.

“His biot,” she said.

“What?” Wilkes asked. She had checked on Vincent, tightened his restraints, then come back, unable to be alone with him.

“His …It’s his biot. The reapers have it.”

That was the term of art in BZRK: reapers. The slow-moving but deadly lymphocytes—they came in different shapes, colors, and sizes—were reminders that bodies have their own defenses. They were here cleaning up the mess, disposing of one of millions of invaders. Mindless. Relentless.

“Why the hell would his dead biot be in here?” Plath demanded.

“I brought it to him after we retrieved it from the president. I carried it out. It seemed the right thing to do,” Nijinsky said. “You give the dead child back to his parent.”

The lymphocytes had dislodged one of the legs. Its pointed claw stuck up in the air, waving slowly back and forth like some desperate flag of surrenderas the cells ate at it like it was a drumstick.

She raced back to the safety of her previous path, sick to her stomach. Her real stomach. Her biot had no stomach.

Don’t fear the reapers,—a song went through her head.

Through the eyes of her old series-three biot Plath saw the approach of her new, sleeker, more capable biot, making its way laboriously, hauling the sac of acid like some foul egg nestled between its hind legs. She felt the twin shudder of recognition as her two biots saw each other and saw the eyes that were so like her own and yet so different.

There is no explaining a biot face. There is no way to paint a fair picture of that awful melding of soulless insect with eyes that look like smeared, crushed-grape versions of human eyes, which somehow convey the image of the face from which they are derived.

The biot 4.0, the new kid, drew up alongside where the older biot was keeping station at the exact location, the very spot they meant to destroy.

The end of a long needle protruded from the brain beneath their feet. The needle was shoved almost all the way down. The biot had one claw gripping it. It looked like a murder scene.

The acid sack, the festering off-white egg filled with a burning yolk, was dragged into position. Plath had been instructed to poke a small hole in it. To let the acid ooze out, and to flow the acid down the needle, down into the sparking brain cells, burning as it went.

“I’m there,” she reported.

“Okay,” Nijinsky said. He had a phone line open to Dr Violet, upstairs with Vincent. “Dr Violet. We’re about to do it. Observe carefully.”

A small tinny voice came through the iPhone’s speaker. “What do you expect? To see him suddenly well? To leap up and cry, ‘Huzzah?’ It won’t be so easy.”

Nijinsky didn’t answer, just pressed his lips tightly, took a deep breath, and said, “Do it, Plath.”

She maneuvered the sac directly against the pin. With one clawed hand she tore a small—it seemed only an inch or so, m-sub—hole. At first the liquid would not come. She used a second leg to press gently on the sac. A droplet formed. It would be invisibly small to anything but a very good microscope up in the world.

The droplet hung, golden in the artificially colored world of her biots’ vision.

Then it dropped.

The destruction was immediate. Between her front legs, just below her sleek insect head, the brain cells burst open like a stopmotion depiction of fruit rotting.

The cells popped. There was no sound, but they popped. Burst, spilled the goo inside, as the acid attacked in detail. She could see mitochondria squirming as though they were tiny insects.

Fumes rose from the melting flesh. She had no ability to smell, and her hearing was not attuned to the hissing sound. She could only see it.

“It just burned a few cells,” she reported.

“Push the pin to one side, see if you can open a tunnel,” Nijinsky advised.

She did, pushing the pin as far as she could, leaning her tiny weight into it. The flesh resisted as though fearing what was to come. A small hole was opened. The problem seemed to be that the acid’s droplets were too large to fit into the narrow tunnel. Her second droplet melted just a few cells, which now congealed, like cooling lava.