Which was only a half lie. Kill the parent, exterminate the line. Zu Zhu to the ancient Chinese, ironically.

But father first. Grigor wanted them to see his head explode. That part was true.

He screwed the gun into Musil’s left ear. Musil heard the noise out on the street with his right, rrrrRRRRRRR...

We have to get them back.

Trust me.

He knew what to do.

It was everything Carmody hated and mistrusted. The windowed video on his visor looked like some kind of computer animation. Like the head-spinning, stomach-turning HIVE simulations. Its depth of field was off. Its imaging was scrubbed of texture. It wasn’t precisely real.

He relied on his ability to see the world as it was. Banked on it. But he was compromising with a machine approximation. Ceding part of himself to something that came close but wasn’t quite. The decision-making part of his brain rebelled. His hand didn’t want to crank the motorcycle’s throttle.

He needed to overcome his own resistance. Trust something outside the range of his immediate and unaided perceptions. The eye of a fucking drone.

Carmody shot through the intersection into the cul-de-sac, coming on with a roar. The houses blurred by, the trees, the grass. Between heartbeats, he imagined windows opening, heads poking out, people wondering about the racket. Then the dead-end sign was just ahead of him. The sun winking off the reflector lenses below it. And sticking up from the yard on his right, the For Sale by Owner sign.

Carmody barked out a voice command and the sim instantaneously expanded to fill the upper half of his visor. He pulled hard on the bars, right, scrambling over the curb and onto the grass. The bungalow was in front of him, the holly bushes outside its wide sunroom window climbing to the lower sash. Its upper sash divided into multiple rows of panes, a drawn white shade behind them.

He could see through the shade. A kind of video game representation of the room with the girls in the chairs to the right. Musil to the left, Grigor Malkira behind him. All of them real and not real.

Carmody twisted the throttle some more, dropped his clutch, felt the air vibrate around him from the surging engine. The bike reared up like a stallion, stayed up going toward the holly bushes.

Gritting his teeth, he plunged into and over them toward the sunroom window.

The sound of the accelerating motorcycle was Musil’s cue. Carmody had started either from the corner or the opposite side of the intersection. The cul-de-sac was three hundred feet long from inlet to dead end. Sixty miles an hour, ninety feet per second.

That had given him three seconds.