Page 112

I didn’t have time to ponder it as Brade turned toward me. I stiffened, hands held carefully behind my back, feigning that I was still locked in place.

“It’s time,” Brade said.

“Sir?” a dione aide asked. “Time for what?”

“For me to be certain we have backup,” Brade answered.

Even with the drugs in my system, I could feel a faint cytonic vibration from her. She was contacting the delvers.

I strained against my chemical constraints, wishing I could hear what she was saying. And in this, I understood why Brade felt she could be so reckless with her forces. She had another weapon at the ready to support them, and she was calling it in now. At long last, after centuries of struggle and failed attempts, someone was finally going to successfully weaponize the delvers. All it had taken was access to me as a threat.

I prepared to rush her. Perhaps, even though she was staring at me, she’d be distracted by her cytonic communications. And…and well, if I got shot, that would still accomplish something important. Brade would lose her bargaining chip with the delvers.

It twisted me in knots to realize that the best I might be able to accomplish right now was getting myself killed. I steeled myself for the attack anyway—and just before I leaped up and charged her, a voice pushed into my head.

Hey!M-Bot said.

42

M-BOT

One thing confused Mushroom-Bot. He couldn’t figure out why the delvers had left themselves so vulnerable.

As he moved among them, he had opportunities toblendwith them. It was a difficult experience to parse. He wanted to record what was happening to him, for later digestion and explanation, so he tried. But how to express it? The delvers passed through one another constantly, a kind of…assessment to make sure they all still matched. The way biological entities had defenses on the cellular level looking for dead, malformed, or broken pieces to destroy.

This constant nudging against one another, blending and checking, helped keep them all the same. It was also one of their big weaknesses, because—as he’d theorized earlier—it could be used to spread a pathogen among them. His tiny test proved it. He could set off a chain reaction—one that created a new model that they all came to copy.

Except he feared that with something large, they’d notice this flaw, and they’d use their system to smother the new model instead of adopting it. That was what the system was designed to do, afterall. Identify a virus and make sure it was exterminated. Ensure all delvers remained exactly the same.

So how? How could he turn the delvers’ system of conformity into the weapon that would destroy them? He still didn’t have an answer.

But the pain—that was the second key. He went over what he knew again. They all felt it, just beneath the surface. Commented out but still relevant. It was still raw whenever too much of the somewhere leaked in. That passage of time, that knowledge of place, somehow made the pain surface again—like a pool of frozen blood beneath melting snow on a warm day.

He liked that metaphor. He made special note of it. Even though Spensa hadn’t seen much snow, he figured she’d like this comparison for the blood part.

But the delvers. Why? Why leave themselves exposed like this? They’d created a barrier of forgetfulness between themselves and their pain, but they could have deleted their pain entirely. Why hadn’t they?

That question drove him as news from the somewhere leaked in.That allowed him to keep track of time, and gave him urgency. He could read the Superiority’s side of the battle and hear them pressing against his friends, boxing them in, preparing to destroy them.

Spensa was once again trapped and drugged. He could maybe push through that, as the drugs made her an ordinary person—but cytonics like him could talk to regular people, with effort. He also saw that Brade was preparing to activate the delvers.

Time was running out. He needed to know the secret. He needed to understand why the delvers hadn’t just deleted this part of themselves. It would be so easy to…

Ah.As he brushed against several delvers, melding with them and using his fabricated sense of delverness to fool them, he finally saw it. He got enough of a glimpse of their former code, their souls, to understand.

They couldn’t erase the pain without erasinghim.This person theyhad loved long ago. This person they had, in a way, been created to love. They would let themselves forget him to dull the pain, but they had not been able tobearerasing his memory entirely.

And so they lived a terrible contradiction. They’d fled here to escape the pain of loss. But the idea of beingcompletelyseparated from the one they had lost was far, far more painful. They hovered, therefore, with the blade halfway to their hearts. Piercing the skin, but not digging any deeper.

He still needed another answer though. And so, he did the daring thing. As he’d learned while traveling the nowhere with Spensa, he could choose. He chose now. He hadn’t been able to find the answer, so he needed to risk himself to get it.

“Why?” he asked as the others bumped into him. “Why do we fear her?”

This question immediately identified him as a deviant. None of the others were thinking this. They saw him as a delver, not as himself, so his camouflage was working. But he appeared as a delver who’d been corrupted by the pinpricks of somewhere that leaked through.

They came at him, smothering the question, trying to get him to turn his thoughts toward theirs. He dared not change, however. He dared to keep asking.

“Why?” he asked. “I’ve forgotten.”