CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN:

Some Fresh Bullshit

Dreamer-bots swarmed my tongue, climbed between my teeth. I choked and tried to cough them out, but I didn’t dare to crush them, for fear I would swallow jagged metal or toxic substances. Dreamer-bots stabbed needle-sharp feet between my eyelids. I scratched at my face but there were too many of them; they crawled between my fingers. The ones that ended up on my hands dug their feet into the soft skin beneath my nails.

A force much stronger than me wrenched my hands away from my face and I shouted out in wordless denial, still struggling to claw the bots off me. What would happen if they got into my throat, my eyes, my skull?

Something cool and dry pressed against my face, flattening the bots gently against my skin. An unknown weight pinned me down. I was going to die here, choking on nanotech, robots crawling through my gut—

I gasped, and realized that my mouth was empty. The last one clawed over my lip as it retreated and I closed my jaw so that nothing could claw its way back in. My ears itched, but then the itching ceased.

The pressure over my face released, and I took in two desperate breaths through my nose before I dared to open my eyes.

Indigo sat on his heels beside me, hand extended before him. In the dim glow of his collar-light, his hand was misshapen, distorted. I reached out blindly for the flashlight and shone it on him.

The Dreamer-bots coated his hand like bees on their keeper, swarming, humming. Indigo stared with unnerving intensity at his living glove, his hand held stiffly out.

Then he hissed through his teeth and shook his hand. A few Dreamer-bots shook free and hummed lazily through the air to land on his skin again. In the bright beam of my flashlight I caught a glimpse of red between the swarming creatures.

My heart thudded unevenly in my chest. I set the flashlight down and tugged off my jacket. “Cover your hand with this,” I said, and Indigo stuck his hand out in front of him, on the ground, and I covered it with my jacket. I kneeled on the sides of the jacket to seal it, while underneath, the bots buzzed angrily. With both hands I pressed down on the fabric on either side of Indigo’s wrist.

“Okay,” I said.

He pulled his hand out through the tunnel of fabric I’d created, scraping Dreamer-bots off against the fabric. My jacket buzzed furiously and moved beneath me, lumpy and living. I swallowed my nausea.

A few bots escaped free with Indigo’s hand before I could close the opening under the jacket. He caught them and crushed them, one-handed, expression grim. There were a hundred small cuts on his hands, each beading a tiny drop of red.

My jacket fought me. “Okay,” I said, mostly to myself, trying to hold the struggling jacket shut, “I didn’t have a part two to the plan.”