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Do something!

A needle bit my skin. The injection.

I ripped free of my body.

It happened in a blinding moment of pain and confusion. The delver I’d become, the delver that was part of my soul,ejected.Not just Chet, but me too—as both of us were intertwined. We launched free exactly like a pilot from a falling ship.

I watched as the doctor dosed my body, which went limp. I was scuddingoutside of myself.

Hell. I was a ghost.

“What have we done?” I asked, and noticed—with a chill—that my body on the floor mouthed the words, its eyes open and staring sightlessly.

I don’t know,Chet said, vibrating from within my soul where we’d mixed.I…

I looked down. I…we…had a kind of shape. I was a glowing golden-white form, with another beside me—overlapping me. Chet, the delver, like my double.

The warping of the air, the random uses of my powers…Was this where it had been leading? Had my soul been trying to escape all this time? I managed, with effort, to control some of my panic.

Even without Chet, I had a soul like a delver’s—that was what cytonics were. People who had been mutated over time by radiation coming from the nowhere. We were people who had…whatever quality it was that let an AI exist without circuitry. I wasn’tdead. Like M-Bot and the delvers, I could merely exist outside of a physical housing.

Kind of. Icouldstill feel my body as I lay there. I could hear, as if with my own ears. I wasn’t completely detached from my body, just partially.

Brade eyed my crumpled form on the ground, her hand on the pouch at her side, watching the doctor pull the syringe from my neck. She seemed afraid, legitimately. And why not? That syringe could remove a cytonic’s abilities; she was right to be wary of it.

“Done,” the doctor said, sounding relieved. “She’ll be without her powers for another two spans.”

“Finally,” Brade said. “Come on.”

Two guards grabbed me under the arms, and again I could feel it. When I turned my cytonic body to look at Chet at my side, my physical form twitched in that direction. I wasn’t certain I could move it more than that. I followed—hovering, rather than walking—as they relocated to a room across the hall. A holographic battle map sprang up in the center of the room, displaying the large platform of Evensong, the much smaller observation platform we were on, and that sea of mines I’d seen earlier.

I leaned forward and noticed that I could make out something about those mines. Each had a number above it, along with the readings of…vitals?

Not mines,I realized.It’s a huge web of inhibitor stations. Each with a slug, to keep this region protected from unauthorized hyperjumps.

Indeed, Detritus—marked in holographic blue and hovering even larger than Evensong—had appeared far beyond the edge of this field of inhibitors. It was too distant to blast the stations directly. We’d learned that slugs working together had a multiplicative effect on their powers—so this number of them could cast an enormous bubble, large even on a planetary scale. There would be no chance for Detritus to blow up the inhibitors from the perimeter, at least not without sending in missiles that could easily be shot down in transit.

That was basically all I could pick out of the situation—save for the blips that I guessed were those space worms. Nearby, the guards pulled my body over to the wall and handcuffed me in place to a railing.

“Good, great,” Brade said. “Watch her. Even in chains, she’ll try to escape.”

“She seems really limp,” one of the guards said. “And her eyes are unfocused. Did that drug do something worse to her than usual?”

“She’s faking,” Brade said. “Trying to get us to think she’s insensate. Keep a gun on her.”

“Should we stun her?” the guard asked.

Brade regarded me. Personally, I didn’t mind either way. I doubted it would do anything to my soul.

“Keep close watch,” Brade said. “But no stunning. I might need her able to talk; she’s a bargaining chip in more ways than one.”

As a soul, I glanced again at Chet. He quivered with concern for my friends, and for us. Scud. What…what had we just done? Was there any way to get back into my body? I tried using my powers, and while my mind expanded, I couldn’t hyperjump anything. So I couldn’t say if I was in a better or worse situation than before.

This is bad,Chet thought at me.Isn’t it?He was looking at the battlefield, and the viewscreen.

Too early to tell,I thought, though that latent fear lurked inside of me. The worry that this was the end, the final confrontation. Either we defeated Brade’s forces now, seizing her slugs here and permanently hamstringing her ability to rule…

Or we fell.