ABEL CANNOT EVALUATE ENOUGH VARIABLES TO DETER-mine how probable, or improbable, this circumstance might be. However, it is not impossible.

“Identify yourself!” shouts the same voice he’s heard before.

From the place where he huddles behind a chunk of wreckage, he checks the timbre and inflections against his memory banks, rechecks them, and nods. “My name is Abel,” he calls. “And yours is Riko Watanabe.”

Footsteps come closer—just one person, small of build. A few people mutter, “What are you doing?” and “Come back!” but she doesn’t stop until she sticks her head through the door. Despite the tan fatigues and goggles she wears, he identifies her easily. It is indeed Riko.

She has the same short haircut she did before, the same wary expression. This is hardly a joyous reunion. But she lowers her blaster rifle, which in the current situation counts as a good sign.

“This is Abel,” she calls to her fellow Remedy fighters. “The mech I told you about, who broke me out of prison.” After another moment’s hesitation she adds, “He’s a friend.”

Abel is not sure he would’ve described her as a friend; he is even less sure whether he’s willing to apply that term to anyone who freely takes part in terrorist activities.

Under the circumstances, however, he must take what allies he can find.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “How in the worlds did you find us?”

“I was following Burton Mansfield, who is holding Noemi captive,” Abel replies. “I believe they are both on board.” Impossible to tell whether they survived the crash—but he refuses to speculate further. Not until he has more data. He won’t give up on Noemi one moment before he has to.

Riko nods slowly. “Mansfield’s on the manifest, yeah, but Noemi? How did he manage to take her hostage? Hadn’t she gone back to Genesis?”

“It’s what humans would refer to as ‘a long story.’” Abel risks getting to his feet. The Remedy members closest to them tense and clutch their weapons tighter, but nobody aims at him. They appear to have trust in Riko’s judgment. So he adds, “All I ask is for a chance to look for her.”

“Fair enough,” Riko says. “In return, we could use a little help.”

“Whatever I can do.”

Whether Abel likes it or not, for now, he’s on Remedy’s side.

The extravagance of this ship struck Abel as wasteful, even cruel, as soon as he saw its golden exterior. However, he had failed to account for the danger presented by that gaudiness until he encountered the interior, and had to follow Riko and her party across endless rooms and hallways littered with the remnants of chandeliers, champagne flutes, and stained glass.

“Think of how many people could’ve been fed for the cost of that thing,” says Riko as she nudges one of the larger crystal prisms aside with her booted foot. “Four dozen? A hundred? And how many chandeliers are there on this ship?”

“I haven’t seen enough of the layout to come up with an informed estimate.” Abel remains within half a meter of Riko, partly because she is his guide, but also because the other members of Remedy are far less sure of him than she is. They’ve hung back approximately three and a half meters, following at a careful distance, muttering among themselves. He doesn’t object. On a crashed ship, on an isolated world, it would be tactically unwise to needlessly antagonize terrorists.

Riko Watanabe is such a terrorist. He has known that since her connection to the Orchid Festival bombing. Yet this information refuses to fully process when she gives him a small, uncertain smile; the expression makes it clear how young she really is, no more than twenty-one or -two.

“We’ve got to introduce you to Captain Fouda,” she says. “Explain to him exactly what you can do. With your abilities, you might be able to help us get some of this ship back in operating order. I mean, I know it’s never going to fly again, but at least we could get it running as some kind of shelter.”

Given the extremity of the crash, Abel doubts this. “While landing, I observed a large structure some kilometers distant. The most rational conclusion is that this was the shelter built to house the first settlers here. Your group should send a team there to investigate. It would undoubtedly provide better long-term shelter than the wreckage of this ship.”

“Of course they had homes waiting for them already. These bastards would never come here to settle the land through hard work like any other colonists.” Riko clutches the blaster rifle she holds a little closer. Abel’s very glad not to be standing in its crosshairs. “The Columbian Corporation’s fancy-pants passengers are too good to dig ditches, or winter in ready-huts. No, they have to be surrounded by luxury at all times, taking a luxury ship to keep them comfortable until everything’s set up to their satisfaction. It’s ridiculous!” She nods toward an ornate mural on one wall, an upside-down portrait of the falcon god Horus.

Her irascible mood seems likely to cause complications. Abel keeps his tone even. “You’re entirely correct that the use of resources for this ship was wasteful. But the Osiris has been destroyed. We should move on.”

Riko stops midstep. The orange emergency lighting catches the spikes in her short black hair and the thoughtful expression on her face. “I know you’re right, but it’s hard,” she finally says. “I’ve been fighting this kind of evil since I turned ten. Moving on—that’s never been an option before now. It’s always been about tearing something down. Never about building something up.”

“New worlds offer new possibilities.” Abel continues making his way through the Osiris corridors, and as he’d anticipated, Riko stays with him.

By this point on his visit to a new vessel, he’s usually mentally constructed a rudimentary layout of his surroundings. Form follows function, and the fundamental structures within any station or ship usually conform to basic templates. The Osiris, however, is different. Its corridors wind and bend in illogical ways, more like the tangled streets of an ancient city than anything designed. Even though maps of the ship are posted at every stairwell and lift, they won’t illuminate without main power, which means they’re as useless as the nonfunctioning lifts and the stairs that seem to dangle from the ceilings. They walk through a spa with saunas and hot tubs hanging down uselessly, a ballroom with ridged acoustic tile that would’ve caught sound from beneath efficiently but is tricky to walk on, and finally a banquet hall with long opalescent tables dangling from the ceiling.

This extravagance seems likely to set Riko off on another tirade against waste. Abel decides the best means of distracting her would be to obtain more information for his own purposes. “Since you were ten?”

Riko, still gazing at the shimmering tables above, doesn’t quite catch it. “What?”

“You said you’d been fighting since you were ten. I wouldn’t have thought Remedy accepted recruits that young.”

“Oh. They don’t. That was a—turn of phrase, I guess.”

Abel considers what he knows of the human subconscious. “Even turns of phrase mean something.”

Taking another couple of steps, her boots crunching against broken glass from the tables, Riko shakes her head. “I was ten the first time I saw a food riot on Kismet. You wouldn’t think people would be starving a couple miles from a beach party, would you? But we were. You could hear people laughing while you lay in your bed hungry.”

“Kismet hides that fact very well.” Even Abel, who is hardly naïve about humanity’s unkindness to its own, hadn’t realized hunger would be one of that planet’s problems.

“There’s plenty of fish in the ocean, and humans can eat most of them, but you have to serve the resort guests first.” She stares into an unseen distance, focused only on the past. “Tons of edible fruit grows, both on Kismet-native trees and the ones we imported—the palms with their coconuts, or the bananas, or the pineapples—but the resort guests love those. They eat it all. Every alcohol distiller in the galaxy ships to Kismet, plus we were able to ferment the local bellfruit into a wine so sweet you could hardly believe it. And the guests drank all the wine. Every glass. Nearly every drop. You could spend every day harvesting food, every night serving it to the guests, and then at the end of it go to bed ravenous.”

“That sounds difficult.” Hunger is one human experience Abel can’t share. He doesn’t think he’s missed much.

“We have it pretty good on Kismet, at least better than the Vagabonds or laborers on Stronghold. But compared to the people who visited our world to eat and drink the best we had, and who lay around on our beaches all day while we slaved to make them comfortable? We were desperate, and we knew it.” Riko leans against the wall, and suddenly the blaster rifle looks too large for her slim arms and tiny frame. She could be a little girl playing soldier, if Abel didn’t remember the sight of dead bodies after the Orchid Festival bombings. “Sometimes the anger boiled over. We’d have riots. Strikes. Lootings. Then the mechs would sweep in and arrest or kill however many people it took to restore order. I saw friends of mine die. Can you imagine what that feels like?”

Abel thinks of Noemi lying on her biobed, nearly delirious with fever, Cobweb tracing white lines on her skin. “Yes,” he says to Riko. “I can. Let’s move on.”

She furrows her brow, clearly aware she’s troubled him in some way. However, she says nothing, for which he’s grateful. Maybe tact has more utility than he’d realized.

Once they’ve secured this door, Riko pushes open another in a corner to reveal something far less dramatic: a bathroom, or what was once a bathroom before it turned upside down. As he looks at the ceiling, he says, “Relieving wastes may prove to be… a challenge.”

Coming up behind him to take a peek, Riko groans. “Shit.”

“I wouldn’t.”

A faint creaking farther down the corridor compels Abel to focus his hearing on that area. Two more creaks and he’s certain. He straightens and gestures at Riko, who takes another moment to realize what he’s already determined: Someone is walking toward them.

The other Remedy members are far behind. This person is approaching from ahead.

It could be another Remedy patrol, Abel surmises from Riko’s reaction, which is wary but not panicked. He follows her lead, keeping hold of his weapon but not yet aiming it.

The footsteps enter human aural range, and Riko’s dark eyes widen. However, the proximity of this unknown intruder is less disquieting to Abel than the arrhythmic steps; this person isn’t walking through the corridor as much as stumbling through it. A sound-wave analysis indicates that this individual is barefoot and extremely small, possibly even a child.

Not an attacker, then. More likely a passenger injured and dazed from the crash. But even a small adult, if injured, dazed, and afraid, might fire if startled. Abel remains on alert.

A figure appears in the doorway, silhouetted by the dull orange emergency light. The individual is male-presenting, approximately one hundred fifteen centimeters in height, with childish body proportions, pale skin, and long hair, unclothed. Abel’s analysis stops short when he recognizes the scent in the air. The smell is one he remembers vividly from the first moments of his life—the oddly sweet odor of mech generation fluid.

When the figure takes another step forward, emerging from shadow, Abel sees a small boy holding what appears to be a severed mech hand, as if it were a plaything. Mansfield has indeed begun making child mechs. The boy mech’s features are ill-formed, incomplete. This one wasn’t finished yet. How can he be awake?

“I’m lost,” the mech says. In his voice Abel hears emotions he’s never heard from another mech, even himself—terror, misery, and confusion. “I don’t know where we are.”

“We’re on a ship called the Osiris.” Abel keeps his tone even and calm. He’s aware of Riko gaping at the two of them, but she says nothing. “Can you tell me your model designation?”

“I don’t know what that is.” The mech curls into one corner and flops down, just like the exhausted child he appears to be. He hugs the severed hand to his chest.

“Your name,” Abel says gently. “What is your name?”

“I’m Simon Michael Shearer,” the mech announces automatically, as though called upon in school. His fear and disorientation remain strong. “Why are there things in my head? There are thoughts in there I didn’t think.”

Shearer. Gillian’s surname is now Shearer. She lost a child some months ago. The information filters through Abel’s mind, combines with his knowledge of Mansfield’s obsession with immortality and his and Gillian’s hopes for organic mechs, and delivers a conclusion that radically changes the situation: This can only be Gillian’s son, Mansfield’s grandson. Simon, not Burton Mansfield, is the first individual to have his consciousness resurrected in a mech body.

Abel is looking at the only other mech in the entire galaxy who possesses a soul. Every other day of his existence, Abel has been totally unique—and he knows better than most that to be unique is, in some sense, to be alone.

He’s not alone any longer.

Empathy floods his emotional capacities, and he holds out one hand. “It’s all right,” he says gently. “You’ve changed, Simon. It takes a while to get used to changes. But I can help you.”

Simon trembles, afraid even to hope. “Can you get all the weird thoughts out of my head?”

That must be how his childish mind interprets data input. How different is a human brain from a mech one? What feelings are the same, and which have changed? Abel longs to know the answer to these questions, but Simon is not yet in any condition to answer. “I can’t remove them,” Abel says, “but I can help you understand them. Focus them.”

“But I want them gone!” Simon shoves himself up to his feet. He’s on the verge of tears. Abel takes another step toward him, only for Simon to skitter backward, stumbling on his chubby, childish legs. “Make them stop!”

“I would if I could.” Abel can do nothing for this child but exist alongside him. At least Simon will never endure what Abel endured; he will never be alone.

“You said you could help!” Simon shouts, and he lifts the hand up, as if to throw it at Abel. It wouldn’t be much of a projectile, but it’s the only weapon the little boy has.

“Watch it!” Riko gets between Simon and Abel, even though protection seems unnecessary. “Just calm down, and—”

Simon shoves Riko, hard. Harder than any human child could. She flies across the room, hitting the wall solidly before slumping down semiconscious.

At the sight of what he’s done, Simon makes an anguished cry that seems to pierce Abel through. The child doesn’t understand his own body or his own mind. He is in a world literally and figuratively upside down.

Before Abel can stop him, Simon runs out again, escaping deep into the wilds of this crashed ship.

To pursue or not to pursue? Abel must remain here. Riko’s the only member of Remedy who is loyal to him at this point; if he goes running through the Osiris without her, other members are likely to fire on him. He badly wants to help Simon, but he can’t do that by being destroyed or disabled.

Abel will set things right with Simon, but that has to wait.

Instead he goes to Riko’s side, where a brief examination reveals she isn’t injured beyond being winded and stunned. But as he checks her over, part of his brain plays another thought on infinite loop: I am not alone. I am no longer alone.

Captain Rushdi Fouda of the Remedy fighters has only an honorary title. Within 3.2 minutes of meeting the man, Abel has determined that Fouda’s never been in military service. He enjoys the idea of command more than the reality—and surely whatever preconceived idea Fouda had of leadership looked nothing like this: control over only isolated pockets of a crashed ship on an unfamiliar world. The Osiris might as well be a city under siege, with certain streets and neighborhoods barely held, others destroyed, others hostile.

Nor is Fouda eager to welcome a mech into his ranks.

“It’s like I told you, Abel’s no ordinary mech,” Riko insists. She puts one hand to her forehead for a moment, wincing.

Although Abel determined she suffered no traumatic brain injury from Simon’s attack, she’s nonetheless had a headache for roughly the past eight minutes. It occurs to him to wonder about the toxicity zone he flew through on the way to the Osiris; exposure to such elements would certainly harm humans in short order, and a headache could be the first symptom. However, given that everyone else seems fine, Abel surmises that the dangerous zone is far enough away, and that the air filtration aboard the Osiris must still be functioning as adequate protection against any effects at distant proximity.

Riko continues, “Abel rescued me and Ephraim Dunaway from prison.”

“Dunaway,” Fouda sneers. He is a wiry man, sinews showing through leathery skin. Faint lines tracing a pale pattern along his face and neck. “One of the moderates. Your good friend.”

“We tried to find common ground, yeah.” Riko’s cheeks flush with anger. “The point is, Abel got us both out.”

“He’s a mech.” Fouda gestures at Abel the way he might indicate some mess that needs cleaning up. “In the end, that means Burton Mansfield controls him.”

“He does not,” Abel says. This point is one he must make himself. “Mansfield has tried very hard to recapture me, and has failed. I came here to investigate him, and to search for my friend Noemi Vidal, who may have been brought here as his prisoner.”

Riko interjects, “Noemi’s the Genesis fighter I told you all about! We can’t pass up the chance to have an ally from Genesis.”

Would Noemi be so quick to join up with Remedy, especially after this? Fortunately this is not a question Abel has to answer. To Fouda he says, “All I ask is a chance to look for her, perhaps also to search for whatever data Burton Mansfield may have cached on board.” And to check on Mansfield—though that’s something he prefers not to admit even to himself.

Fouda huffs. “You came here with demands, then! Well, we have demands of our own first.”

“That’s reasonable.” Abel stands in military at-ease position, calculating that this will influence Fouda to believe him obedient. He will obey if it doesn’t conflict with his core programming; he can readily assist in restoring power, for instance. Getting the information he needs—finding Noemi—is worth some labor. However, it is not worth slaughtering innocents.

But Fouda says, “We’ll start small. See if we can trust you.” When Abel inclines his head—again, like a subordinate—Fouda calms even more. “The passengers are pretending to be soldiers. They’ve set up force fields, blocking us from some areas of the ship. That’s how they hide from us. We don’t intend to let them hide any longer. A mech like you—you’d be effective against them, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.” Given sufficient firepower, Abel could outfight large numbers of humans, but elects not to mention this. Fouda should not have that information before he decides whether to give Abel a weapon.

“Fine.” Fouda nods at him. “Let me show you what we’re up against.”

He leads Abel down a side corridor, toward what must have been a separate operations room. Their entire path is lined with mech bodies.

Dozens of them. Possibly hundreds. Some have literally been smashed to pieces—an arm here, a torso there—making an exact count difficult. Abel prefers not to try. Mechs bleed as humans do, and the scent of the air has that metallic tang to it. Some blood spatters the walls and has puddled on the concave ceilings-turned-floors. Internal coolant fluid pools there, too, milky-white streaks amid the red; it doesn’t mix with blood.

“We couldn’t leave them for Mansfield to turn against us,” Fouda says. He’s not apologizing for this; he’s proud of it. “The Charlies and Queens went down hard. The rest? Easy.”

“I should imagine so. They weren’t combat models.” A Nan lies at Abel’s feet, her scorched face staring up blankly at him. Nans nurse children and the elderly.

“What, do you feel bad for your fellow machines?” Fouda mocks him.

“No.” He doesn’t. Abel knows better than any human the vast gap between regular mech minds and his own capacity. They don’t have selves; the bodies on the floor weren’t alive in the way he is. “But I find it interesting to evaluate how humans treat those who present no threat to them.”

Fouda isn’t pleased enough with this answer to continue the conversation.

Only one display in the ops room still functions, but it reveals the layout of the Osiris in thin green glowing lines. Abel realizes they haven’t inverted the layout to reflect the ship’s upside-down state and quickly punches in the commands to do so.

Fouda seems irritated he didn’t think to handle that himself. But he only points to a few areas glowing orange. “Here, near their mech chambers and the baggage hold—that’s where they’re holed up. Closed-off areas with force fields.”

“Standard force fields?” Every ship has them amply distributed throughout, in case of hull breaches. When Fouda nods, Abel says, “Those are easy to activate, but just as easy to deactivate. It can’t be accomplished remotely, but a small, targeted strike team would be able to handle it—provided you have someone with sufficient knowledge of field mechanics.”

“We do now,” Fouda says. “We have you.”

Abel’s in no position to argue.

One of the consoles overhead blinks, and the Remedy fighter monitoring it (from a repair ladder) says, “We’ve got another mech patrol incoming.”

Fouda scowls. “More? How many of them can there be?”

“Quite possibly thousands, extrapolating from the size of the vessel,” Abel says. Nobody thanks him for this information.

The Remedy crew member continues, “I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like—like the mech patrol is working to clear a major corridor that would connect the passenger territory to the bridge—Corridor Theta Seven. That would give them a clear path to attack us.”

“Except that it goes straight through the theater,” Riko says, and a few people laugh. Abel’s unsure why, but at this point asking seems more risky than useful.

Fouda’s begun to grin. “Then let’s put on a show, shall we? We’ll take out their mechs, and any passengers foolish enough to be with them. And this time, we’re going to fight fire with fire.” He turns to Abel and says, “To kill a mech, we send a mech.”

Again Abel considers protesting and decides against it. He doesn’t want to protest.

Even though he disagrees with Remedy, he’s ready to take up arms against the passengers—because the passengers are the ones holding Noemi captive. Mansfield has her even now. If he believes Abel will be unable to find Haven, which would be a rational assumption, Burton Mansfield has no more need to keep Noemi alive. She’s in mortal danger, and the only things standing between her and Abel are a set of force fields and a mech patrol.

Neither will remain standing long.

Fouda says, “Do we have your oath that you’ll help us, mech?”

Abel looks up evenly at him. “Yes. You have me.”