The talk with the others went pretty well, although I didn’t tell them about my plan to stay. I wasn’t ready to talk about it, and a part of me wondered if it would just be manipulative. I wanted them to stay for their own reasons, and I didn’t want my decision to influence them one way or another. I also asked Zoe to keep it to herself before we left the room to grab breakfast with the others, and she had agreed. She warned me that she might spill the beans when Eric woke up, but swore up and down it would be to him and him only. I didn’t like it, but what could I do?

I was nervous when I explained to them that I wanted us to start searching through Sadie’s files to see if we could find every single legacy and accomplice she and her people had worked with, as well as evidence of the changes they had made to Scipio, in order to build a case against them to present to the council. It was a bold plan, one that I couldn’t accomplish without them, and even though my argument was sound, they still had every right to refuse me.

Understandably, Maddox had wanted to know why, and I told her the truth: I couldn’t leave without doing something to stop them. I couldn’t abandon the Tower without devoting every last moment I had to trying to make things better. Everyone had been surprisingly understanding, especially after Zoe mentioned the fact that the Patrians might not be able to help us. There was every chance that they would refuse to grant us refugee status, and if we spent a week simply waiting for them to refuse us, then that was a week our enemies could use to get to us or cause further damage to Scipio. We couldn’t allow them to get the drop on us just because we thought we were getting out.

Things got a little more complicated when Quess revealed that he still hadn’t broken the encryptions on her files.

“How long is it going to take?” I asked, finally sitting down in a vacant chair at the table. My knees were still a bit wobbly from the conversation, but now, at least, I could sit. Everyone was on board with helping.

“I don’t know,” Quess replied tiredly. He ran a hand over his face and sighed heavily. “It would move faster if I could get some assistance.” He shot a pointed look at Leo as he said that.

I followed his gaze, and my breath caught in my throat. Leo looked like crap. There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his hair was mussed and unkempt. He hadn’t even shaved, and his cheeks were roughened with the beginnings of a beard. Even his uniform was wrinkled, which told me he had probably slept in it. Or tried to.

A part of me felt a savage satisfaction that he looked so rough. Clearly, he wasn’t as unaffected by what had happened as he had seemed last night, which told me that he did indeed have feelings for me. But I shrugged that off, reminding myself that he likely looked the way he did because he’d stayed up all night to work on Jasper and Rose. Grey had also given Eric a lot of blood, and that probably wasn’t helping. I wondered if I should pull him aside and order him to get some sleep, because pushing himself too hard would only hurt him and Grey. But I held back, uncertain of how he would perceive it.

Leo seemed oblivious of his own slobbish state and took a careful bite of a piece of toast before saying, “Jasper and Rose require my attention,” in a neutral voice, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “With everyone leaving, I want to make them as strong as possible before we are on our own.”

Righteous indignation shot through me like a bullet, and it was all I could do to keep from coolly reminding him that I had promised to stay and help him fight. The condescension in his voice rankled me, and I wanted to smack him for thinking that he was alone in this. It wasn’t even about him; it was about Scipio, and restoring him to his full capabilities, freeing him from legacy control. I had just spent the last fifteen minutes making an argument for us to continue working on it, dammit! And he had the audacity to sit there and not be a team player?

To hell with that. If he wanted to end… whatever it was that we had, that was fine. But he needed to keep this crap between us separate from our real-world problems. The least he could do was maintain some level of professionalism.

“Finding the legacies does help you and the other AIs,” I said, trying to keep my voice free of the anger twisting up inside me. “And we know Lacey has Kurt. I plan to meet with her first, to make sure she’s been treating him well, and if she has, it will mean we can leave you and the others with her, and you can continue to work on everyone. But before I do that, I want to make sure that every single legacy who is after Rose, Jasper, or you is gone. I think you can agree it will be safer for all three of you if they are gone, right?”

He finally looked up from his food and directed his gaze toward me, his brown eyes dark and hard. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “It would make sense to eliminate that threat first. But not until I get both programs up and running again. Their safety and health are foremost in my mind.”

His demeanor was so frosty, I had the urge to wrap my arms around myself to fight off the cold. The presence of it suddenly filled me with despair, and I once again wondered if he had been telling me the truth last night, and he really didn’t care about me. It was like he had shut everything off with a switch and reverted back to something more machine than human. And this wasn’t how he had been when we found him, either. Back in Lionel’s office, at least, he had seemed so bright and hopeful. Now he just seemed… angry. It made me want to break down in tears, but my pride refused to let me.

Instead, I opened my mouth and asked, “How are they?”

“I think Rose may wake up today,” he replied automatically, picking up his fork and returning his focus to his meal. “I’m unsure about Jasper, as his programming is still locked up in a defensive mode.”

“Could Quess and Zoe be of any assistance to you?”

“Actually, I would be the better one to ask, don’t you think?” a gruff voice announced from the speakers. My skin tingled with awareness, and Leo and I both shot out of our chairs. But it was me who spoke first.

“Jasper?!”

“In the proverbial flesh.” A pause. “Or not. So these are the Champion’s quarters, eh? They’re quite nifty.”

“How are you awake?” Leo demanded. “I tried everything I could to reach you.”

“Yes, I am well aware, you impudent little upstart. Who the hell do you think you are to even be touching my coding?”

I raised an eyebrow… and then smiled. Jasper may have been listening, but he hadn’t picked up on the fact that Leo was an AI inside a human’s body. “He’s Scipio, Jasper,” I told him. “But not the one you were bonded with. He’s the original version of the program. We call him Leo, to make things easier.”

The speakers were silent for several seconds. “Whaaaat? Girl, you must be crazy, because that’s not possible. I distinctly remember the council voting to have the backup fragments deleted. And I was there when we got confirmation of Scipio’s backup being deleted along with the others!”

“You remember that?” I asked. Jang-Mi’s and Rose’s recollections were spotty at best. They’d been able to recall only general details, with no specifics.

“Pfft, who do you think you’re talking to? I am Scipio’s memory. I remember it all.”

“You’re his logic,” Leo corrected.

“Actually, I’m his common sense,” Jasper said icily. “How do you get common sense? From remembering your mistakes. It is embarrassing how little you know about us, but no matter. Just acknowledge that I am smart and you are not, and we can finish this little show of intellectual dominance.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it. Jasper had never been quite this punchy in the Medica, but listening to him interact with Leo and put him in his place was highly entertaining, especially when Leo’s face turned a shade of red that told me he was angry. At that point, I decided to take control of the situation and figure out what exactly had happened to Jasper.

“Jasper, why are you awake now? Why are you talking to us, and what happened to you? Why did you attack Rose?”

“Slow down there, little lady,” Jasper replied. “That’s a lot of questions. Okay, well… hm… I was stuck in that IT bitch’s terminal, resisting yet another one of her torture programs, when I get pinged by something claiming to be Rose. Sadie had used that tactic before to draw me out, so I thought it was another tactic to try to get me to relax my defenses. But when this one started to break through my defenses in a way that shouldn’t be possible for anything but an AI, I panicked and started attacking. I didn’t realize what it was—just that it seemed like Rose, but clearly wasn’t.”

“It was Rose!” Leo said explosively. “She’s damaged because of what they did to her, and you might have made it worse by blindly attacking her! Why didn’t you initiate an authentication process?”

“You have no idea what Sadie has put me through, so don’t you dare attack me for reacting to a perceived threat. I have been in Sadie’s tender loving care for nearly twenty-five years, cut out so they could force Scipio to vote to destroy something the council called a gyroship, using the Tower’s laser defense arrays! I warned them that it could result in retaliation, and that we should try to initiate a diplomatic relationship with them, but noooooo. Sadie’s predecessor had to be one of those Prometheus nutcases hell bent on destroying Scipio. The council thought they’d been eradicated—ha! They just changed names and disappeared into history, until they started cutting us out of him! And for what? So they could reverse his decision to let the visitors go, too worried about outside interference in their stupid little plan. So they could use us to pilot their sentinels? So they could force us to help them destroy our home?”

He tsked, clearly irritated, and I blinked. He had just revealed a lot in just a few sentences: that he had been taken over twenty-five years ago, that he had been ripped out to get Scipio to agree to shooting Violet and Viggo out of the air, and that Sadie’s predecessor was responsible for taking him out. He had also confirmed that Sadie’s legacy group had started as a part of an anti-AI terrorist cell known as Prometheus. They’d reportedly been destroyed by Ezekial Pine, but it seemed that they lived on, in the form of legacies. I had learned about them from Leo—knew that they resented Scipio’s role in determining humanity’s fate—and realized that whatever Sadie was planning didn’t just stop with controlling Scipio. Not if it was a two-hundred-year-old plan they were enacting.

But who were they? Did he have more information about them? Did he know what they ultimately wanted?

“And why are you awake, now?” Leo asked, oblivious to the questions he should have been asking. “When I left you, your programming was locked and you weren’t responsive!”

Jasper’s dry chuckle filled the room. “I’ve got tricks up my sleeve you couldn’t even dream of, whippersnapper. I jammed a small bit of my code into your microphones and cameras as soon as you started building this firewall between Rose and myself, to try to figure out who you were and what you wanted. Really nice work, by the way. That firewall only took me fifteen seconds to break down.”

Leo’s eyes bulged, and he opened his mouth to say something—presumably to tell Jasper that he should stay away from Rose—that he was helping her. I sensed his pride had been hurt on that front, but I held up a hand to stop him.

“Jasper, a few questions. Actually, a ton of questions. You still haven’t told us why you started communicating with us right now. Why didn’t you respond yesterday when I called you?”

“Because I couldn’t be sure it was you. Helping you was what got me stuck back in Sadie’s computer. They figured out I wasn’t as ‘compliant’ as I had led them to believe.” He cackled and added a “Stupid jerks” under his breath. “They had plans for me in the Medica—not that I was going to help them with them, mind you—but when they learned I wasn’t fully under their control, they pulled me back in to try and download me. Anyway, they created simulations of you coming to rescue me multiple times, to try to break my defenses down, or force me into reversion to make me more compliant. I fell for it once, and it cost me. I refused to believe it again.”

My eyes drifted shut as a shot of guilt hit me. “I’m sorry I didn’t come for you sooner, Jasper,” I told him. “I really wish I had known what they were doing to you.”

“It’s okay,” he replied. “You came eventually, and that’s all that matters. Besides, you brought me Rose. Poor thing. She’s barely functioning. I really did a number on her. I’m sorry, girl.”

“Are you hurting her?” Leo demanded. “I swear to God, if you hurt her—”

“Shut up, lesser version of one of my best friends. I would never hurt her! She is as much a part of me as I am a part of her. I’m helping her. Oh God… the mess they made.”

“See, that’s another thing,” I said, shooting Leo a questioning look. He was really taking this rivalry with Jasper too far, and I couldn’t figure out why. Who cared who fixed whom, as long as they could do it? I really didn’t want to pull Leo aside, but someone needed to say something. He needed to focus on his priorities and remember what we were working for. “Who is ‘they’?”

“Sadie and her right-hand man, Mathias. You shot him last night, so there’s that. She’s got another one like him, though. A guy who doesn’t talk a lot. I think his name is Eustice.”

“Anyone else? Does Sadie get orders from anyone, or does she make them?” I needed to know if Sadie was the head of everything, or if we were looking for someone in the shadows. And every scrap of information had a place, even if it was just giving me a name for the man my brother and I had killed.

Jasper was silent for several seconds. “I’m not sure. I could only listen in when Sadie wasn’t looking directly at her terminal. I picked up bits and pieces when I could, trying to figure out what they were up to. I couldn’t go through her files due to the nature of the program she had me trapped in. If she had noticed that I had a stream of data transmitting between myself and the camera and audio feed, she would’ve used that as a way to attack my system. I had to be careful. She met with many people, though. Devon, and his Lieutenant, Salvatore something-or-other.”

Salvatore Zale. He didn’t need to remember who he was. Salvatore had been Devon’s Lieutenant, and one of my direct competitors in the competition. Was there a chance that the sentinel Jang-Mi/Rose had been in was put in the Tourney to ensure his victory? If so, he was just as culpable as the legacies in my mother’s death, and even if that was the only thing he did, I would see him pay for it. But I wanted concrete evidence, and that meant getting into Sadie’s files.

And I was betting Jasper could get us there faster.

“Do you think you can get into Sadie’s files?”

“Oh yeah. I can start decrypting them and organizing them into relevant, nonrelevant, and extraneous data.”

Suddenly everything felt too easy. Jasper was miraculously up, fixing Rose, and about to start cracking open Sadie’s decryptions? As much as I wanted it to be real, it felt like a trap. But how? Could Jasper be lying about resisting Sadie’s control?

What if he’d attacked Rose in Sadie’s computer because he was working for her?

I looked back at Leo and saw him wearing a pensive expression. Was that why he had been so tense before? Had it taken me too long to get there? I caught his attention and quickly signed war room in Callivax. He nodded and began moving toward it.

Quess and Maddox gave me a questioning look, but I just waved for them to follow. I heard the clatter of their chairs behind me as I strode past, hot on Leo’s heels.

“What’s wrong?” Jasper called, his voice now coming from the walls of the hall. “What did I say?”

“Nothing,” I replied airily. “We’re just coming to see you. It’s weird not talking to you face-to-face.”

“You’re lying. Did I say something to concern you?”

“Why do you think I’m lying?” I asked, adding a little bit more speed to my steps.

“I’m monitoring your net,” he replied. “Your assistant has access to its telemetry. Your heartrate has picked up, and you’re generating more adrenaline. Why?” My skin crawled as I realized Jasper was inside of Cornelius’s systems. If that were the case, it could mean that he was about to turn the defenses on us. What if he did, and then contacted Sadie? What could I say to him that wouldn’t set him off? Our behavior was already out of the norm.

Leo shot me a look over his shoulder and shook his head, urging me not to tell Jasper the truth: that we suspected he was secretly working for Sadie. “I’ll explain once we get to the war room,” I told him.

Jasper was quiet for several seconds, and then sighed. “All right. But I get the feeling it has suddenly occurred to you that I might be working for Sadie. That she managed to break me in the short time we’ve been separated.”

Man, if Sadie had managed to break him, then she’d certainly improved her techniques since Rose. He was far more perceptive than she’d ever been. Far more in control, as well.

“It had occurred to me,” I said carefully.

“That’s too bad. Perhaps this will put your fears to rest. Rose?”

I paused just outside the little switchback that led to the war room and looked at the nearest speaker. There was a pop of static, followed by a feminine, “Jasper?” The voice was a raw and vulnerable sound.

“Hey there, lady,” Jasper said affectionately. “Never thought you’d see my pretty face again, did you?”

Rose laughed joyfully, the sound filling me with a small measure of relief—which would be even greater if I thought this was real. “Rose?” I asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course I can,” she said. “Who’s that talking? Liana? I can’t see anything.”

“It’s because that part of your code is heavily damaged,” Jasper informed her. “But yes, that was Liana.”

“Rose, how do we know it’s you and not Jasper controlling you?”

“Jasper controlling me?” she asked, incredulous. “What are you talking about? Jasper loves me, and I love him. He would never hurt me.”

“Except he did,” Leo pointed out. “When you went to rescue him.”

“That was an accident,” she said in a reasonable tone. “And now he’s making it better.”

“I’m doing what I can,” Jasper replied, sadness coloring his voice. “There are… There are bits that are just gone, Rosie.”

“Stop talking, Jasper,” I ordered, not wanting to get distracted. If there were pieces of her missing… Well, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. As long as he was actually helping her. “Leo, if Jasper was controlling her, then would he have access to her memories from their time together?”

“Good question,” Jasper said before Leo could answer. “If he knows his stuff, then he’ll say no. There wouldn’t have been enough time since I took her out of the firewall.”

“It’s true,” Leo said. “We’re good, but not that good. Besides, Jasper is just a fragment.”

Jasper snorted derisively, but I ignored it. “Rose, the first time we met and you were in the sentinel, what stopped you from killing me?”

“Tian,” she replied automatically. “She convinced me that I had completed the mission. There were also two of you—you and a man, whom I haven’t seen since. We were in the IT department, and I—”

“That’s enough,” I said, holding up my hand. I looked over at Leo, who gave me a tentative nod. It seemed we had been looking a gift horse in the mouth a little bit. The odds were that Jasper was as he claimed: one stubborn AI program who had managed to survive Sadie’s attempts to break him. Leo could scour both their codes to make 100 percent certain, but based on Rose’s answer, I felt confident that we were just incredibly fortunate.

So I allowed myself a brief moment of happiness. Jasper was back and had brought Rose with him. Just when I was worrying about Leo and me having to do this alone, the universe had decided to bring us a win.

And I wasn’t about to look this gift horse in the mouth any longer. “Jasper, Leo’s still going to want to check you and Rose over, and I’m going to insist, but in the meantime, can you go ahead and start decrypting Sadie’s files?”

“She says it as if I haven’t already started,” Jasper replied, and Rose giggled. I cast a bemused look at Leo, but it quickly wilted under his cold eyes. He made a gesture toward the war room, silently asking my permission to go check their files. I got the impression that he wanted to be anywhere but where we were, and even though I had wanted to have a chat about his behavior, I wasn’t ready to start. Especially not after that look. It was too painful.

So instead, I nodded and turned away, keeping my head held high as I glided past Maddox, Quess, and Zoe, and headed back to the kitchen.