BZRK: RELOADED. Майкл Грант

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      “Don’t forget,” he had told her. “Alice in Wonderland. The You Bullshit Bank. Your mother’s birthday.”

      “Whatever,” she had replied, attention focused on thumbing a text message to some friend. The memory, like so many memories of him, came with a twinge of regret that she had not, somehow, cherished him more, him and Stone, both.

      Three more blocks passed in starts and stops and her nerves were getting to her now. Small talk and banter, don’t think about it, any of it, just let it happen.

      “You are a great kisser,” she said suddenly through her knuckles, choosing not to meet his gaze.

      “Am I?”

      “Don’t fish for compliments. A poet would never do that.”

      “You’re worried,” he said. “You’re being nice to me because you think we’re about to be killed.”

      “A little bit, yes,” she admitted. “But also, you’re just a really good kisser. And you know what I like, Keats?”

      “What?”

      “Your chest. I like your chest. It’s very hard.”

      “Okay, really, that’s quite enough,” he scolded. “We’re in a limo, possibly going into danger, and you’re playing the tease.”

      “I like your chest,” she repeated. “Can I ask you a question?”

      “Unh?” he said, not feeling quite in control of this conversation.

      “Are your nipples sensitive?”

      “I sort of hate you right now,” he said, shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully not to grin.

      Teasing was safe. Maybe it was foreplay leading to love, but it didn’t have to be. Keep it all superficial. Make it about bodies and pleasure. The world had it all backward: it wasn’t sex that was dangerous, it was love. She’d lost people she loved. It was love that brought unendurable pain.

      “Death or madness, right?” she said with what she hoped was a brave, devil-may-care attitude. “There’s no reason not to have whatever fun we can. You’re insane for a long time and dead forever.”

      “We’re here,” the driver called back.

      The car pulled to a stop beside a food stand. The driver hopped out and came around to open the passenger door. Keats had already started to open the door and now felt foolish.

      The law firm’s building was on a corner. There was a revolving door and flanking it regular glass doors. Security—McLure men—waited. They wore dark suits and had Bluetooth earpieces. They wore sunglasses even though it was cloudy. They screamed “security.”

      The AmericaStrong thugs were less obvious. They had been nicknamed TFD—Tourists from Denver—for favoring chinos and down parkas, for dressing out of a Land’s End catalog. The McLure men wanted to look like security; the AmericaStrong people did not.

      Four McLure security.

      Six TFDs.

      And all alone, a man in a long, faded black duster over even more faded lilac and leaf-green velvet. A jaunty top hat that matched his blazer.

      Plath watched with eyes that had now seen violence and knew it when it threatened. She gritted her teeth, not so much afraid now as angry. There was a fine line between those two—fear and rage.

      “Sadie, get back in the car,” Keats said.

      But she didn’t. She watched, one hand on the car door, watched with eyes that now saw so much more than they ever had before. Was that what violence and fear did? Did they give you new eyes?

      It all happened without any obvious action. Somehow, in some way that seemed to take place at the subliminal level, the McLure security spotted the TFDs as threats.

      And somehow, those same McLure men recognized the man in the faded velvet, not as an individual, they didn’t know him, no, but they knew what he was.

      And so did the TFDs.

      His name, at least the name he used, was Caligula.

      Plath knew he would have been the one to kill Ophelia. He would also be the one to kill her, if she ever threatened BZRK. She had seen him in action and could entertain no fantasies about surviving if he came for her.

      Invisible lines connected McLure men and Caligula. Invisible, intangible calculations were made. Some scent in the air, maybe, some inaudible whisper in the ears.

      The TFDs walked on by.

      And Plath—Sadie McLure—walked with Keats past the McLure men, all of them smiling, a tense, alert welcome, and accepted the door held open for her.

      “You okay?” Plath asked Keats.

      “Just relieved not to have wet myself,” he said. “That won’t be the end of it. They’ll be waiting when we come back out.”

      But Plath doubted that.

      Keats’s hand closed around hers. She could picture what was happening at the nano level: skin like fallen leaves, fingerprints like the plowed furrows of some arid farm, sweat beads popped by the contact, mingling.

      It was an absurd romantic illusion to imagine that they could avoid death so long as they held on to each other. But Plath, carrying the name of a poet, had a right to a small measure of illusion.

      Dr Anya Violet, who had been dragged unwillingly into violence, into lunacy and horror, sat forgotten in her room, in her narrow, filthy room, and against all odds and logic thought of Vincent.

      Oh, she knew it was all part of the same insanity. She knew that Vincent had been inside her head, that he had wired her. She was a scientist, a trained observer. She knew.

      Once she had found Vincent desirable. That had been honest. That had been real. She remembered meeting him for . . . At least, she believed she remembered. She searched for the memory, ran the pictures back in her head, testing them for tampering. It was hard to tell. Hard to be sure; in fact, impossible to be sure. But she believed that first meeting at least, and that first visceral impression, had been real.

      She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.

      She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured, limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but that was only chronology.

      Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places, where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.

      He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.

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