If anyone thought my quip was funny, they didn’t show it. Alex crossed his arms over his chest and leaned a hip against the conference table while Maddox sucked in a deep breath, her fists clenched. Even Leo looked tense, and I realized that they didn’t believe what I’d said any more than I did.

After all, Scipio had just given Sadie permission to look into the other virtual assistants to determine whether there was a problem. When she found none, she might suspect that it was something other than a glitch. But I was pretty confident I had a way around it. I just had to convince Lacey and Strum to let us upload the virus into their terminals as well, so that there appeared to be a defect in the assistants. I’d have to admit to Lacey what I’d done, but if I brought her information on who had killed her nephew, then she would probably be okay covering for me.

But the others weren’t there yet. They were still focused on the fact that this hadn’t ended like we expected it to and were still adapting. “Guys, I know Sadie launching an investigation into the virtual assistants seems like a big hurdle, and normally it would be, but you forget that we have Lacey and Strum on our side. We can use that, replicate the same problem at one of their places, and then Sadie and the council will be convinced it’s a problem in the code, create some sort of update to ‘fix’ it, and move on. We’re just going to need to have something for Lacey—namely the people who attacked Ambrose. We have Sadie’s files, and the answers have to be there. We just need to go through them and—”

Leo cleared his throat, and I broke off to look at him, surprised to see his face reflecting a deep nervousness. “Actually, I rushed the download,” he said carefully. “So, we have all of Sadie’s files. Over a million terabytes of data. And there are encryptions on a lot of the files. It’s going to take some time.”

I absorbed this information as more of a speed bump than a wall. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll net Lacey, explain what we did, and ask her to cover for us. If she understands that it could lead to finding the entire legacy group, she will help us. But I’ll worry about that. Is there anything you guys can do to sift through the data faster? You, Quess, and…” I cast a quick glance at my brother and decided to at least try to extend an olive branch, “Alex?”

Leo was already nodding. “Quess is working on it now. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to continue focusing on Rose and Jasper.”

“Has there been any change?” I asked, instantly concerned. “Are they still offline?”

His brown eyes grew dark with worry. “Yes and no. Jang-Mi woke up.”

It was funny how three little words could arouse so much fear. Jang-Mi was all that was left of the core memory that had made Rose what she was, but the wall between the two had been destroyed by the legacies as a way of controlling Rose. The remnant personality had taken over most of Rose’s code and was unstable to the nth degree.

“What happened?” I asked, fearing that Jang-Mi had somehow gotten to Jasper in spite of the firewall separating them. Or was taking over Cornelius’s systems and about to turn them on each other.

“She woke up confused and angry,” he said, his mouth flat. “I attempted to calm her down, but it was like she forgot that Yu-Na was dead and started looking for her again. She grew more and more desperate when she couldn’t find her. When she started to attack herself, I put her in the self-diagnostic protocol to try to get Rose back, but I think the fight was too much for her. She’s not responding.”

A half-dozen questions sat on the tip of my tongue, all of them centered around three major points: Why wasn’t she back? Had sending her to Sadie’s computer sapped the last of her strength? Was her personality finished, and if so, what did that mean? She was Scipio’s heart; if she died, then what hope did the rest of the Tower have? How could we ever fix Scipio without her? But as I looked at Leo’s worried brown eyes, I realized that if he knew, he would’ve told us already.

So instead, I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder, trying to comfort him. His hand came up to cover mine, and even though we were exhausted, sweaty, and had just performed the crime of the millennium, a spark jolted through me as his fingers stroked over mine.

For several moments, everyone and everything in the room dropped away, and I had a powerful urge to just sit in his lap and hold him. I knew I shouldn’t—he was an AI in the body of the man I had been falling for before he was injured—but that didn’t stop my heart from wanting it.

Then my brother cleared his throat loudly, jerking me out of the moment. I looked down to find him watching us both, his face an angry mask. “You still haven’t told us what you’re going to do with that legacy in the other room,” he said. “And that’s our biggest problem right now, not broken fragments and Sadie’s information. Sadie and the others will have noticed that he’s missing by now. We need to get rid of him.”

Maddox gave him a sideways look, her mouth already moving before mine. “Your sister has already told you that this discussion is over and done with. We’re not killing him.”

“And you agree with that?” he railed, looking at Leo, Maddox, and Quess. “You really are backing that move? These guys broke into Ambrose’s room and beat him without getting caught on the sensors! That’s what they do! So what makes you think that this situation is going to be any different? Any minute now they are going to figure out a way to track him, find him here, and then we’re all in trouble.”

Once again there were some good points in there, helping his case, but it still didn’t change the fact that we were talking about killing an unarmed man. Did his words fill me with fear? Absolutely. Thanks to what he’d said, I now couldn’t seem to get rid of the image of Baldy creeping into Maddox and Quess’s room and killing them while they slept. Of Leo with a knife in his chest, or Tian with her throat cut. I knew Baldy was capable of it, and more than dangerous.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a use, too. I just needed to figure out what it was. Alex wasn’t interested in hearing that, however, so I did the next best thing. “Maddox is right, Alex. Bring this up again, and I’m going to carry through on my promise and make you leave. Don’t make me do it.”

His eyes widened, his anger melting some to reveal a surprised pain. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

I nodded, meeting his gaze head on. “I am,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, but I have to be. You’re starting to scare me, Alex. This isn’t like you at all. You’re patient and calm. Mom’s death changed you.”

There was a moment, a fraction of one, really, where the wounded confusion was stronger than the rage, and I felt certain that I had reached him. But when he looked up at me, the shutters in his eyes had dropped down again, hiding the vulnerability behind plates of anger that hardened his face.

“It’s on your head if he kills you all,” he said, seething. “I’ll be with Quess, handling Sadie’s files. Quess?”

My brother didn’t even wait for the taller man to respond. He just snapped a turn on one heel, faster than I could blink, and was striding out of the room with a determined set to his shoulders.

Quess stared after him, rubbing the back of his neck. “He does realize that I work for you, right?”

“With me,” I corrected absentmindedly. “And… just go with him. Please.” The last part I said in the breath of a sigh, grateful that I had at least gotten him to shift his focus somewhat. We would need all the help we could get with Sadie’s data, and if there was one thing my brother was good at, it was figuring out computer stuff. Between him and Quess (and possibly Leo), they would crack it.

“Fun,” Quess said wryly, tucking his pad into his pocket and starting after Alex. “If he gives me any lip, do I get to yell at him?”

“Nope,” I told him, shaking my head. It wouldn’t do Quess any good, anyway. Alex wasn’t going to take kindly to anyone putting him down. “Let me know, and I’ll handle it.”

If you have never been the focus of a three-way look of disbelief before, then you have been missing out on something special. The looks Leo, Maddox, and Quess had on their faces ranged from polite to cynical, and I squirmed under their scrutiny.

“I can,” I told them insistently, feeling the need to defend myself.

“I’m not so sure. Your brother needs some help, Liana,” Maddox replied. “He’s going off the rails.”

Even though she was right, there wasn’t much I could do officially, and she should know that. “Yes, but you and I both know that grief services in the Medica are crap,” I replied. “Besides, imagine how he feels. He’s isolated in IT, and even though Dinah is trying to keep him shielded from Sadie, he knows she’s watching. Then I went and ignored him after my mother’s funeral, when all he wanted was to be included. He found out I almost died, and even then, I asked him to stay away from all of this. He’s angry, yes, but part of that is my fault. I just… We’ve got to let him cool off, and then I will talk to him, okay? Until then, just give him a little bit of space.”

That did nothing to assuage the doubt in her eyes, but she nodded anyway. “He’s your brother,” she said by way of letting it go, and I accepted it.

Looking over at Leo, I saw him reading one of the files from Lionel Scipio’s office—the ones I had been trying to make sense of earlier. “Any clues in there to help us? With Jasper or Rose?”

He pursed his lips and sighed. “Not yet, but there’s a lot to go through. The psychology profiles help somewhat, but they don’t really matter if I can’t figure out what Lionel did to create the barrier around the core memory. I’m hoping the answers are here, somewhere, but…” He trailed off, and finally looked up at me over the top of the file, his eyes bleeding with unspoken fears.

“The answers are in there,” I told him. “They have to be. Have you managed to make any contact with Jasper? Or seen anything from him?”

Leo shook his head, his face grim. “His program is locked up in a tight shell to protect his coding, to the point where he won’t accept even the friendliest of pings. I’m guessing it’s a defensive measure he’s been taking against Sadie, and we’re collateral damage. I’m not entirely sure what to do about it. Maybe he’ll come out of it eventually to check things out, but right now, he’s not even listening.”

I considered the problem. “Can you let him hear my voice? If he recognizes that it’s me, maybe he’ll know it’s safe.”

The look on Leo’s face told me he didn’t think it would work, but he turned to the computer and started to type something. After a few seconds, he gave me a nod. “Go ahead.”

“Jasper?” I called. It was tempting to yell, because working with noncorporeal AIs always felt like I was trying to shout a message across a chasm. But in reality, they could hear me no matter how loudly I spoke, thanks to the microphones in the rooms. “Jasper, it’s me, Liana Castell. You helped me out a few times in the Medica, remember? You saved my life, actually.”

I looked at the wall of screens that hung from the ceiling, hoping for some sign of acknowledgment, but nothing changed. “We rescued you from Sadie’s quarters,” I added. “You’re safe. And I actually have someone I think you’d like to meet. We call him Leo, but at one point he was the original basis for Scipio. We also have Rose, and we’re working on finding the other fragments. We want to help you all go home.”

Silence. Disappointed, I looked at Leo and nodded that he should shut it off. “I was hoping it would work,” I muttered. Maybe it had been wrong of me, but I had been wanting to find Jasper for so long that I had built it up in my head that it would go smoother than this. It wasn’t just because we needed him. That was true in many ways, but I had always pictured his rescue ending with him being exactly as he had been.

But his reticence to even accept communications from us told me that he had probably suffered greatly at Sadie’s hand. My heart ached for him, and I wished there were some way of communicating with him.

“I’m going to get him back to us somehow,” Leo said softly. “I’m going to get them both back, as they were. It just might take more time than we wanted.”

“I know you will,” I told him. If anyone could, it was Leo.

And if we couldn’t spring into action right away with our AI fragments, we had to do something else. Give Leo time to work while focusing on our other objective: finding the legacies. We had to wait for Quess and Alex to break into Sadie’s files to really know what we were dealing with, but we did have other leads. Dylan Chase was helping me track down the undoc side of the legacies we were after, and since Tian had also secured Liam, we had different avenues of moving forward.

But it would be difficult. We were going to have to make sure we got everyone, or it wouldn’t matter at all.

Leo smiled kindly at me, his features growing soft as his misery slowly dissolved. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice was intimate and… inviting. I found myself wanting to go to him, but I somehow managed to fight it off. Then he started speaking again. “Actually, there’s something else in the files you should be aware of.”

“Oh?” I asked, curiosity returning. I had thought Leo’s report had been the end of it, but if he was bringing something else up, then chances were I’d interrupted to go off on a tangent before he could finish. “What is it?”

“It’s about the nets Lionel designed. The legacy ones. As you already know, they were designed to capture memories, but along with that, they recorded muscle memories, to help later generations of workers remember how to repair something even if they didn’t have an exact understanding of how it worked.”

That explained what had happened in Sadie’s apartment, with the net hijacking my body. I’d been in control, but I’d also felt out of control, as if a ghost from the past was prodding at my autonomic systems from the outside. It was weird, but also followed what I knew about Lionel, who had made the nets to try to make life easier inside the Tower. Unfortunately, the legacies had twisted that design in their quest to subvert Scipio, leading to the Tower itself distrusting the tech. So now, the legacy nets were only in the hands of those who had ignored the law and kept theirs.

“What’s more,” Leo continued, leaning back in the chair, “an early report from Samantha Reed, the founder of the Medica, revealed that AIs implanted in the nets could repair most types of neurological diseases, including the onset of Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and bipolar disorder, and also cure most types of cancer. She proposed that copies of the AIs be inserted into each net, for that reason. It was overruled by a vote.”

“But we knew that,” I replied. “You said the net had special healing properties. That’s why you went into Grey’s head.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “But that’s not the point. The point is that after the suggestion was shut down, Ezekial Pine ran an experiment, using his neural clone, Karl. In the process, he realized that an AI can also extract information from a criminal. With complete accuracy.” He looked up from the file and grimaced. “I wasn’t going to bring it up in front of your brother, but it means we have a way of getting all the information we need out of Baldy, without having to ask.”