My brother coughed and slowly picked himself off of the floor. “That was insane,” he said, shaking his head and dusting off his dark gray uniform. I noticed that his hands were shaking, and went over to him immediately.

“Alex?” I said, reaching out tentatively and placing a hand on his shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

He looked up at me, his eyes large. “No,” he said harshly, running a hand over his body. “No, I’m fine. I’m…” He trailed off and looked around the room. “Whoa.”

I looked up and followed his gaze. The walls of the apartment were still glowing with heat from where the weapon’s blade had hit them, and bore the brunt of dozens of long slashes that cut through the dark metal. Pictures and shelves had been ripped apart, and debris now littered the floor. The entire place looked like it had been turned inside out, which was a shame—Mercury had had a nice home. Before.

Mercury! I turned toward the hall, my heart pounding. The door at the end was still there, but had been partially cut through before Alex and I had lured the sentinel out. A quick scan showed me that there was nobody else there; the owner of the mysterious voice must have either slipped out while we were hiding, or been absent from the start. Perhaps they had been talking through a speaker?

I didn’t know, but that could mean reinforcements were close behind. The sentinel was clearly being monitored. It had waited for orders to kill me before trying to—and I hadn’t heard the order come through like I had heard that other voice. Did that mean that there was something inside of its programming, or its head, making it able to fight off the compulsion to kill? Or did it merely need the order before it would act?

What had it said? I thought back, trying to untangle the web of events that were jumbled up in my memory, and remember.

It came to me seconds later: Cover your eyes, Yu-Na.

I licked my lips. Tian had called the sentinel Jang-Mi. Was that its name? It made sense, in the context that Tian had used it, but why would a sentinel have a name, and why would Tian think talking to it would make it see reason? Was she talking to it… or whoever was controlling it?

The questions kept coming, but without Tian there to answer them, there was nothing I could do about it in the moment. They would have to remain unanswered until we could track the sentinel down again.

Speaking of which… I left my brother and climbed the three steps up out of the sunken floor that had partially shielded us, heading for the door. This one was much sturdier than the ones in the Citadel, but still had a line cut through it almost halfway down. Hardened metal hung in rivulets along the side of the gash, and through it, I could see the narrowest slice of a bedroom. I pressed the button on the side, but was unsurprised when it didn’t open.

I placed my mouth near the hole and said, “Mercury? It’s Liana. The sentinel is gone. You can come out now.”

There was a rustling noise, and I peered through the hole, trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Mercury. Dinah Velasquez. A half dozen images of what she must look like danced through my head, and I settled on a middle-aged woman with dark brown hair and eyes and pale skin. Mysterious and probably much taller than me.

A shadow passed over the hole, and a moment later the door began dragging to one side. It stopped halfway, the ridges of once-heated-and-now-cooled metal preventing it from sliding into the narrow sheath in the side.

The gap was still wide enough for a person to squeeze through, and that was what Dinah did, easing out sideways into the hall.

I backed up to give her a little room, and couldn’t help but gape when she came fully into view, several things becoming apparent at once.

Dinah was old. In her mid-sixties to early seventies, easy. Straight white hair with silver streaks hung down her back, cutting a sharp contrast against the dark gray of her suit. Slim wire spectacles sat in front of her eyes but did nothing to disguise the wrinkles, some of which almost connected to the lines around her mouth. Some women, like Astrid, grew softer and rounder when they aged, but not Dinah. She had gone the other direction, her body painfully thin and frail looking, even under her uniform. Her eyes, however, told a different story; they were a dark hunter’s green, sharp, and filled with an intellectual gleam.

The second thing I noticed was that she was short. Much shorter than me—probably by about six inches, putting her at about five feet even. Yet that didn’t seem to bring her any pause as she regarded me, her chin lifting up to give me a judgmental look.

“What took you so long?” she snapped before brushing past me.

That was when I noticed the third thing: a black cane in her right hand, and a pronounced limp in her gait. I looked down at her legs, and realized that one of her feet was deformed. It was pointed inward, toward her other leg, which forced her to step sideways on the appendage.

It clicked. That was why Dinah had insisted she couldn’t leave. Because, well, she couldn’t. If she had tried to run for it with that limb and her advanced years, the sentinel would’ve caught up to her easily in the halls.

Thank Scipio we had gotten to her in time.

I took a moment to enjoy the small measure of relief, and then put it aside. Mer… Dinah had some explaining to do—namely, how the sentinel had found her.

I followed her into the living area, moving up next to her when she stopped to survey the damage. “Did you have to go and piss it off?” she groused after a moment, canting her head up at me.

“Sorry,” I said automatically, immediately contrite under the heavy weight of her gaze. I could only imagine what she had gone through waiting for us, and while it wasn’t my fault that it had taken us time to get up there, I still felt bad. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” she snapped. She lifted and dropped her shoulders in a small, uncomfortable wiggle. “Embarrassed. I hadn’t intended for us to meet this way.”

“How had you intended it?”

“On the day we left the Tower, and not a second before,” she replied quickly. “Hello, Alex.”

“Hey, Dinah,” my brother said from where he was kneeling over some books that had been cut in half by the blast. Then he shifted slightly, his eyes darting up to mine in an expression that read I have no idea what to say to this woman.

“Dinah, how did this happen? How did it find you?”

Her mouth pinched tighter. “I made a mistake,” she admitted begrudgingly after a moment. “I started running the search on your little sentinel without realizing that the powers that be had decided it would be a good idea to give them anti-tampering software that allowed them to track down ‘unauthorized’ individuals trying to locate them.”

My eyes widened at that information, and my stomach churned. “Why would they do something like that? Seems a bit—”

“Overcautious?” Dinah said, twitching an eyebrow. “I don’t know. The rationale didn’t come in the report I read.” She stared at the remains of her door, glowering. “What a mess.”

Her mutter was delivered with anger and exhaustion, and I could sense that the older woman was beginning to come down from the adrenaline that had been surging through her during the event. Soon she was going to get sleepy, her body craving rest to help push the traumatic experience out.

Not to mention, this place was going to be crawling with Inquisition agents at any moment. We would only have a narrow window to talk before Alex and I had to get out of here. Our presence would attract a lot of unwanted attention, and Alex was already being monitored by the head of their department, Sadie Monroe. The last thing we wanted to do was bring her attention onto Dinah.

“Dinah,” I said, catching the older woman’s attention. She blinked and turned her head toward me. “We’re going to have to go soon,” I informed her gently. “Otherwise people will know that we’re working together.”

Her mouth tightened, but she nodded. “Of course.” She looked around the room. “Where’s Tian?”

Now it was my turn for my mouth to go taut. “It still has her.”

“She went with it willingly,” my brother corrected. “She somehow managed to get it to stop. If she hadn’t… I’m pretty sure it would’ve killed us.”

My fist tightened. My brother had a point. Tian clearly had some sort of relationship with the thing. But what and how and why? What had happened to her in the condensation department? How had she managed to befriend it? Why was it keeping her and not letting her go? And who was controlling it in the first place?

Regardless of any of that, though, we needed to find her. And there was only one way to do that.

“Dinah, can you find a way to track this thing without it getting traced back to you?”

She scoffed and shook her head. “Oh no, dearie, I am not tracking that thing again. Do you see my home? It’s too dangerous, Liana.”

“But Tian—”

“Is doing better than we are,” Dinah cut in. “She apparently has a five-hundred-pound block of metal monster protecting her.”

“And keeping her hostage!” I retorted, frustrated. “Plus, that thing is being controlled by someone, possibly the same person who killed Ambrose.” It was a leap, but not much of one in my mind. I found it difficult to believe that there was a third, unknown group, working against both whoever Devon’s allies had been and Lacey’s people as well. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it in my gut.

“Ambrose is dead, and to be honest, he was never really my problem. You and the others are, but I’m beginning to wonder if any of you are worth it. You’re running around doing your precious Tourney and getting caught up in… whatever the hell is going on in the Tower. You uncover problems with Scipio, but then you don’t follow through on them! And we’re no closer to any plan of escape than we were when Roark was alive!”

I swallowed and looked at her, and at the anger in her eyes. She wanted to escape, and to her, I was dragging my feet. She had every right to be angry—but we didn’t have the time for it.

Besides, a lot of that crap had been forced onto me, partially because of her actions. She had been the one who introduced me to Lacey and Strum in the first place, thus getting me in this whole mess to begin with, so I couldn’t feel too bad.

“Dinah, I don’t know what to say to that,” I said. “But it’s a moot point. We’re here now, dealing with this mess, and I need a way to track down this sentinel. Can you help me?”

She sucked in a deep breath and then held her cane out to me, balancing carefully on her twisted limb. I accepted it, and a second later her pad was in her hand, her fingers flying across it as screen after screen of complex coding popped up. She swirled her finger around, making the screens shift to one place or another as she examined them.

“Yes,” she said finally, clicking the pad off and slipping it back into her uniform. She held her hand out for her cane, snapping her fingers impatiently when I didn’t get it to her fast enough, and then settled a part of her weight back onto it with a relieved sigh. “I can write a code that can be uploaded into the relay stations in the Tower, which would prevent it from tracking you, while allowing you to scan for its location. Will that do?”

I nodded. “It will, thank you.” I licked my lips. “Will you be okay here?”

“I’ll be perfectly fine,” she snapped, her eyes narrowing. “I can have some people here to fix the door in a matter of hours, and I’ve got a few Inquisitors in my pocket. Besides, I doubt the sentinel will be back. Whoever is controlling it is too smart for that.”

Controlling it. My mind drifted back to the fight in the kitchen—the speed with which the sentinel had reacted. If it was being controlled by someone, wouldn’t there have been a delay in its response time? The user needed time to receive the images from the sentinel, and then input the instructions, right?

So how had it moved so quickly at the end there? It had received orders, but I supposed that whatever they had done to program it allowed it to have some autonomy—it was the only explanation. It waited for the orders, but once it received them, it decided how to execute them.

And that made it twice as dangerous, as its reaction times were far superior to those of a human’s.

“Dinah, did you see or hear anyone else in your apartment after it broke in?”

Dinah gave me a sideways look, her white brows drawing together. “No,” she said. “Why?”

I bit my lip, thinking. If there had been someone nearby, watching, then that could explain how it had reacted so quickly. There was that voice I had heard in the hall, but there was no sign that anyone else had been here. Unless…

“Alex?” I asked, looking at him and ignoring Dinah’s question for a second. “Did you notice anyone in the hall when you passed it, going into the kitchen?”

He frowned and shook his head. “I looked down it, but there wasn’t anybody there. Why?”

I rubbed my eyes, suddenly very tired. Maybe I was wrong about this. What the hell did I know about a sentinel, or how fast it could move? They had been built long before my time, and all I had were the reports in my history book to guide me.

Still, everything about this entire exchange had been off, in more ways than one, and it wasn’t sitting well with me. We needed answers.

“Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. “I just… I’m trying to figure this out. Dinah, pass the file and instructions for tracking the sentinel over to Quess as soon as possible. Alex, we should get out of here before the Inquisition gets here.”

“Right,” he said. He paused, looking at Dinah. “It’s, um, nice to meet you.”

Dinah gave him a withering smile. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me,” she said primly. “Now that you know who I am, I’m having you transferred into my group.”

I frowned. She could do that?

More importantly, would it be safer for him to be closer to Dinah? Sadie Monroe was already watching him because of me, and if Dinah suddenly pulled him into her… mysterious department…

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Alex asked, and I could tell he was already thinking along the same lines. “Sadie is having me watched, and—”

“You let me worry about Sadie. I alone have the ability to pull rank on her, and now that you’re in my department, you’re under my protection.”

I blinked. She had the ability to—

The words came sputtering out of me; my thoughts and shock eliminated the filter I usually kept between my thoughts and mouth. “You have the ability to override Sadie Monroe?!” I sputtered, incredulous. “How?”

“I run a shadow security department, meant to be a review board to every decision the CEO makes that affects Scipio’s programming. We’re the programming ethics committee, essentially, responsible for making sure each decision made in the name of efficiency isn’t also affecting his other, emotional protocols.”

There was another round of blinking, as I was robbed of all my words for several seconds, trying to wrap my head around what she was saying. “You make sure that Scipio’s feelings don’t get hurt when you’re forced to change his programming?”

Dinah chuckled derisively. “Something like that. Anyway, don’t worry about your brother. I’ll convince Sadie I can keep a better eye on him while giving him a research job. That’ll lead her to believe that he won’t have programming privileges, which will go a long way toward making her relax. I’ll have to give her reports, of course, most of which will be lies, and we might have to feed her a scheduled meeting here and there between the two of you, just so she can have something to listen in on to put her mind at ease. Just have dinner with your family or something, and keep the conversation light and topical.”

Alex and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. “Uhhh…”

“Or go to dinner with each other and talk about things,” she snapped impatiently, slamming her cane into the ground. “What do I have to do, come up with everything? Figure it out for yourselves, and just realize this will be a thing, all right? I’ll keep Sadie off your brother’s back, and give him a little more freedom to work!”

She stopped, glaring at us both, and then sucked in a deep breath. “Now get out of here. The Inquisition is no doubt on their way, and you two aren’t supposed to be here.”

I wanted to stay and question her more about my brother’s safety, but I knew she was right. What was more, if Alex was caught having brought me to this level, Sadie would toss him out long before Dinah could fill out the transfer request form.

We had to go. Now.