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SEVEN

Inside Sadie McLure’s head was a bubble. Sort of like a water balloon. Only it was the size of a grape and filled with blood.

It was thirty-three millimeters long, about an inch and a quarter. It was a brain aneurysm. Quite a large one. A place where an artery wall weakened and blood pressure formed the water balloon of death.

Because if it ever popped, blood would go gushing uncontrolled into the surrounding brain tissue. And Sadie would almost certainly die. And if not die, then lose parts of her brain, perhaps be left a vegetable.

There was an operation that could be done in some cases. But not in this case. Because the balloon inside Sadie’s head was buried down deep.

She had seen the CT scans, and the MRI scans, and even the fabulously detailed, nearly artistic digital subtraction angiography. That had involved shooting dye through an artery in her groin.

Ah, good times. Good times.

If she had stayed in the hospital, they’d have done a CT looking for bleeding. Then they’d have done an MRI to get a closer look at the aneurysm.

That’s when they would have noticed something unusual. A certain thickening of the tissue around the aneurysm.

So they’d have done the digital subtraction thing and then, yep, then they’d have had a pretty good picture of something that would make their hair stand up.

They’d have seen what looked like a pair of tiny little creatures, no bigger than dust mites, busily weaving and reweaving tiny strands of Teflon fiber to form a layer over the bulging, straining, grape-size water balloon.

They’d have seen Grey McLure’s biots, busy at the job of keeping his daughter alive.

Sadie could see them now as Dr Chattopadhyay—Dr Chat to her patient—swiveled the screen to show her.

“There are the biots in the first image.” She tapped the keyboard to change pictures. “And here they are half an hour later.”

“They haven’t moved.”

“Yes, they are immobile. Presumably dead.” Dr Chat was in her fifties, heavy, dark-skinned, skeptical of eye and immaculate in her lab coat over sari. “You know of course that I and my whole family mourn for your father and brother.”

Sadie nodded. She didn’t intend to be curt or dismissive. She just couldn’t hear any more condolences. She was suffocating in condolences and concern.

Over the last twenty-four hours she had absorbed the deaths. Absorbed, not coped with, accepted, gotten over, or properly mourned. Just absorbed. And somehow seeing those tiny dead biots was one step too far.

What her father had created was a revolution in medicine. It had taken him years. He had thrown more than a billion dollars into it, which had required him to buy back his own company from stockholders just so he could spend that kind of money without having to explain himself.

He had worked himself half to death, he and Sadie’s mother. Then, the cancer, and he was even more desperate to finish the work, to send his tiny minions in to kill cancer cells and save his wife.

The pressure he had endured.

But the biot project was too late for Sadie and Stone’s mother, Grey’s wife.

For three months after Birgid McLure’s death Grey was virtually invisible. He lived at work. And then . . . the miracle.

The biot. A biological creature, not a machine. A thing made of a grab bag of DNA bits and pieces. Spider, cobra, jellyfish. But above all, for the control mechanism that allowed a single mind to see through the eyes of a biot and run with a biot’s legs and cut with a biot’s blades, for that, human DNA.

The biot was not a robot. It was a limb. It was linked directly to the mind of its creator. It was a part of its creator.

Grey McLure’s biots had been injected as close to the aneurysm as was safe. They had set up a supply chain that ran through her ear canal to shuttle in the tiny Teflon fibers. And then they began to weave, a sort of macro-actual tiny, but micro-subjective huge, basket around the aneurysm.

“You’re lucky the overpressure from the explosion didn’t cause a rupture,” Dr Chat said. “There’s some bleeding, but it seems to have stopped. Lucky.”

Sadie wanted to say something mean and sarcastic about her luck—luck that had left her an orphan—but stopped herself.

“Did it do anything at all to the aneurysm?”

“It seems mostly unchanged. But as you know, the weave needs constant tending to remain strong. And in any case it was only sixty percent done. So I have to prescribe the blood pressure medications to lower your BP.”

“I had an allergic reaction,” Sadie said.

“There are other medications we can try. There’s a whole range of—”

“Whatever,” Sadie snapped. “I can read Google as well as you. I know that I already have excellent blood pressure, and that these meds won’t have much effect, and they’re really only there to make me feel like I’m doing something. I don’t need a placebo, Doctor.”

Dr Chat sighed and looked at her from under disapproving eyebrows. “You have a responsibility now, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“This company employs almost a thousand people in six countries.”

“Seven,” Sadie said. “Dad opened a lab in Singapore. That’s where he and Stone were headed.”

Dr Chat sighed. “Is there anyone we can call to come be with you? Friends? Your grandmother?”

Sadie shot her a defiant look. “Not really, no. Not the kind of friends I want to see right now.”

So the doctor left, and Sadie was alone. It was a luxurious room. The bed might be hospital style, but there was a forty-two-inch plasma screen on the wall, sleek Jasper Morrison chairs, a pad, lovely orchids in crystal vases, soft lighting, a view through a floor-to-ceiling window of the McLure Industries main New Jersey campus. And through a side door was a marble bathroom that could have graced a suite at a Ritz-Carlton.

If you had to be sick, this was the place in which to do it.

Sadie felt her gaze drawn to the image of the tiny dead biots. The last little bits of her father.

She wondered why she didn’t cry more. She had cried, but in sniffles and single sobs. She had cried so long, so much for her mother. Maybe she was cried out. Maybe she had just accepted the fact that life was pain and loss.

Or maybe she was numb, waiting with calm acceptance for her own death. The last of the McLure family.

Sadie rolled out of bed. Not exactly an easy thing to do. A painful thing to do. Her arm was one long, dull ache punctuated by waves of stabbing, stabbing, stabbing that caught her breath in her throat.

The cast had been replaced with a lighter version that could hang from a shoulder strap.

The rest of her body was just one big bruise. She moved like an old woman as she made her way to the toilet. She peed a little blood, but less than last time.

She hesitated at the shower. She wanted very badly to take a shower. But it would be easier to keep her cast dry in a bath. Nurses had given her a sponge bath, but really that wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

Wincing and moving with arthritic slowness, she turned on the water. There was of course a selection of Bulgari bath oils and beads. She spread the green-tea-scented salts in the water.

Getting out of the hospital gown—it was a very nice hospital gown, but still something for an invalid—took a while. Finally she stepped into the water. Then slipped and fell in all at once.

Unbelievable pain as her broken arm hit the side of the tub. The shock of hot, hot water on every square inch of her battered flesh.

But then, slowly, the heat seeped down into her muscles, found the bruises and began to leach the clotted blood from them, soothed the twitchy nerve endings, and lulled her mind to a state that wasn’t quite sleep but was close to it.

She heard a door open, but it seemed to come from far away. The voice, however, came from right next to the tub.

“Sorry to intrude.”

Sadie’s eyes widened to see a youngish man, maybe in his early twenties, but with a very serious mouth and emotionless brown eyes.

“What the hell?” Sadie cried. She jerked too suddenly, and her arm bounced and sent shrieking pain up from elbow to shoulder. “Damn it! Get out of here!”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. We need to have a conversation.”

“A what? I don’t know you. Get out before security gets here and I have them beat the crap out of you.”

The serious mouth very nearly twitched. As though it was thinking about a sort of smile, but not really planning to go through with it.

For Sadie’s part, she refused to give in to an instinct to cover herself. That would have signaled vulnerability. And she might be naked, neck-deep in water, and half crippled, but she was nowhere close to seeing herself as vulnerable.

“My name is Vincent.”

“Well, good for you. Now fuck off.”

“I’m a . . . a friend . . . of your father’s.”

“So now you sneak in to get a good look at me naked?”

Vincent drew back fractionally. He blinked. “Yes, you’re not wearing anything.” Like it was the first he’d noticed. And the concerned furrowing of his brow and the way he’d kind of jerked back almost made Sadie believe it was the truth.

“What is it you want?” Sadie demanded.

“Your father and brother did not die in an accident. They were murdered. You were targeted as well. They have not given up. You will either be killed or enslaved.”

Sadie stared at him. For a good long minute. She was realizing how little the word murdered surprised her. No one had said it to her. No one had suggested it within her hearing. But in the day and a half since the crash no one had said anything like “engine failure,” or “bird strike,” or even “pilot error.”

“There’s a robe,” she said, and jerked her chin to where a thick, heavy terry-cloth robe hung. Vincent fetched it, held it open, and then turned his face away.

She climbed slowly, painfully, to her feet. Murder. Yes, that did not seem at all crazy. Her mother had taught her to listen to what wasn’t said. The holes in conversation were often the most interesting parts.

Of course, if she was in danger, maybe this guy was the one bringing it.

Vincent kept his eyes averted until she had dragged the robe slowly, slowly and carefully over her broken arm and tied it with her good hand.

Then, with a sudden fluid motion, Vincent had a pen in his hand and pressed it against her heart, just beneath the breastbone.

Sadie froze. “What are you doing? Autographing me?”

Vincent shook his head. “Making a point.” He drew the pen back, aimed it safely away, and squeezed it. A glittering blade shot up. “Making the point that if I were here to kill you, you’d be long dead by now.”

Sadie breathed. More calmly than she had any right to do.

“Let me guess: you’re here to save my life. How exactly are you going to do that?”

“For a start, like this.” He touched her face and held the contact for a several seconds. There was nothing erotic in it.

“So,” Sadie said flatly.

Vincent nodded. “Like I said, I knew your father.”