There was a long moment of silence, and I glanced nervously at Dylan and then back to the terminal, wondering whether Tony was even hooked up to a microphone and speakers. It seemed a bit cruel if he wasn’t, considering he had the ability to hear and respond to the world around him, but maybe it was part of how Lacey had kept him hidden.

A burst of static from over the door caught me unexpectedly, and I half leapt out of my skin. The room filled with the giggle of a high-pitched voice, modulated to sound like a young boy of nine or ten. “He-he-he-he-he! You said butts!” he exclaimed happily, still chortling gleefully. “I told Lacey that would be good, but she just—”

The voice cut off and the screen clicked on, revealing a young boy’s face composed of red coding. The image looked around the room, but I heard the whir of cameras going all around me, telling me that the face was just mimicking the movement to tell me what he was doing.

He was giving us a onceover and growing more and more suspicious by the second.

“Where’s Lacey?” he demanded, and there was a thread of fear in his voice.

I looked down at my watch, and saw that there were still two minutes on the estimate Lacey had given us. Some time for an explanation, but not much. “Lacey was shot at the council meeting, and she’s several levels up, in surgery. Can you access the cameras in the room? It’s on level 45, south side of the Tower.”

“No,” he reported. “I can’t. Cogstown still has power, but cameras are down, taken out by a virus undoubtedly left by the spy who was working in the server room.”

I felt a wave of frustration at his response, not only because it kept him from verifying our story, but also because Sadie and Sage had really covered their bases. I might have forced Sage to speed up his plan, but he had already managed to achieve quite a bit within the various departments—and it all sabotaged our chances of resisting him. It was devastating. Without the cameras, the Cogs wouldn’t be able to see if any sentinels managed to find a way in. Just one sentinel could tear a bloody path through Cogstown before anyone realized it was there, and by the time a large enough force was alerted and mobilized, the sentinel would’ve killed dozens of people.

I swallowed my anger back and looked at Tony, ever cognizant of the time. “Look, I swear, Lacey gave me the password and told me where to find you. The transceiver that you built was taken by Sage, and they are going to plug it in at any minute and initiate the download. How do we stop it?”

He blinked at me and then looked at Dylan and Rose. “Why do you have a sentinel with you?” he asked, blatantly ignoring my question.

Rose moved, stepping around Dylan and closer to Tony. “Hello, Little Brother,” she said softly, and I could feel the warmth and reverence in her voice. “Oh, I’ve missed you. I’m so happy to see that you’re safe and undamaged. I worried—”

“Holy hell in a handbasket,” Tony exclaimed, his face growing smaller on the screen, as if he had taken a step back. “Rose? Wha… Ho…” He stopped for several seconds, and then his face grew larger. “Are you okay?”

Rose’s eyes “blinked,” and then she cocked her head. “Not good. But I’m more afraid for our brothers. Scipio is in trouble. Jasper and I have seen him, and it’s like there are hooks in his code that run deep, controlling some of his key functions like he’s some sort of puppet. Jasper was trying to study it and relay the information to me, but he has been taken by our enemies, and I was forced to copy myself to stay with Liana and find you. They have everyone, except for you, and it seems that Alice and Kurt are working with a man who has plotted our downfall since the beginning. Why would they have done this, Little Brother?”

“There, there,” Tony said soothingly. “Don’t be afraid, Rosie. I’m thinking. What were Jasper’s concerns?”

“Scipio’s longevity. He thinks our brother is being tortured beyond just losing our voices in the harmony. Isolation is torture, but he is a full AI, and should have been able to cope without our input. But he’s not. Jasper told me that his code was fragmented and corrupted beyond what should be possible in such a short time. What is happening to Scipio, and what can we do, Tony? Will we lose him?”

I frowned at Rose. In spite of the bounty of information she was delivering, I was more than a little miffed that this was the first time I was hearing about Jasper communicating anything to her. She could’ve spoken up between the Council Room and here, but she hadn’t. Not that it changed anything. But it would’ve been nice to hear sooner. It was hard not to say something, but ultimately, I was curious to see how this exchange between Tony and Rose would play out. Tony had enhanced Scipio’s creativity, giving him a boost in his problem-solving skills, and it stood to reason that Tony might have some insight to offer.

Provided it didn’t take any longer than the timeframe we were working with, of course.

“Oh boy, that’s not good,” Tony replied. His gaze drifted off on the screen, seemingly staring at some fixed point on the wall. “We’ve got to get our friends out first, and that includes Kurt and Alice. What’s going on with them?”

“Kurt has been keeping Ezekial Pine alive for over two hundred years,” Rose replied sadly. “He’s been using the alpha-series net to house our brother. I’m not sure what happened with Alice, but she has copied herself willingly multiple times.”

“Oh man, not a hive mentality.” Tony groaned theatrically. “I love Alice to death, but sometimes she can be a real butt-muncher. Ugh.” A hand appeared on the screen, wiping over the young boy’s face in a way that made him seem years older than he appeared. “We have to initiate a reset, not only of Scipio, but of the fragments. It won’t restore the broken parts, but it will erase the last three hundred years of history, which should delete whatever crap they’ve done to Scipio.”

I puzzled over his words for a second, letting them sink in. I hadn’t even known it was possible to reset Scipio or the fragments. I was under the impression that if they were shut off, they were deleted, and to me, resetting them was the same as shutting them off.

But if Tony was suggesting it… did that mean there was a way to fix all of this and restore the fragments to Scipio? Excitement thrummed through me as I leaned forward, focused on the face in the terminal.

“Wait,” I said as he opened up his mouth to say more. “You’re saying there’s a way to fix Scipio and the other fragments?”

The young boy nodded and smiled. “Of course there is! But all six programs have to be taken to the integration chamber at the base of the Core, and uploaded at the same time. Once we’re inside, there’s also a chance that Alice or Kurt could destroy us before we can initiate the reset, though, so whoever uploads us will have to move quickly.”

I blinked at him, disconcerted by the dark words he was delivering in such a cheerful tone. “Are you serious? The other programs could destroy you?”

Tony nodded, but continued to smile. “Yeah. I mean, it depends on how deep Pine’s influence runs, but if Kurt’s helping him stay alive, and Alice is willingly copying herself on his behalf, I’d say they’re pretty loyal. So they’ll likely try to destroy us before we even get the chance to reset them, and there’s not much we can do about that. Don’t worry, though; I’m sure Lionel will give us a better plan before too long. He’s probably just trying to find us.”

Once again, I was thrown for a loop. What did he mean, Lionel would give us a better plan? Did he mean Scipio? He had to, because Lionel was dead, and had been for almost three hundred years. “What do you mean, Lionel?”

“Lionel Scipio, of course,” Rose said, her tone slightly patronizing. “He promised us he would always take care of us.”

“But he’s dead,” Dylan said flatly. “Died a long time ago. He can’t do anything to help us.”

“Ha ha! That’s what you think,” Tony taunted. He paused, and there was a flicker in the coding of his programming. “Oh, um… So somebody just initialized the transceiver.”

“What?” I exclaimed, and looked down at my watch to see that we still had thirty seconds left on our clock. Damn Sage and his villainous ability to overachieve at the worst possible moment. And damn me for getting distracted with learning there was a way we could save Scipio.

“What do we do?” I asked, taking a step toward the terminal. “We don’t have a hard drive to download you into.”

“No, but you have your net,” Rose exclaimed excitedly. “The alpha series was designed to house AIs.”

I frowned and reached into my pocket to pull out the small white square. “I don’t think that’s wise,” I said. “Remember, Sage said he could spy on me through it.”

“I can help with that,” Tony said confidently. “He won’t be able to eavesdrop as long as I’m in it, so no worries there. But you do have a problem: you don’t have the proper download platform to make that kind of transfer. We need a wireless data transfer node.”

I frowned, and realized he was right. When I had downloaded Leo into my net so long ago, it had been through a specialized scanner on his terminal, which had transmitted his code wirelessly. When we transferred him into the Medica, we’d used a similar device. I quickly pulled the tech’s bag off my shoulder and opened it up, hoping to find something that we could use. Inside, there was a cornucopia of items that I could mostly only categorize as gadgets and gizmos, along with crystals, rolls of wiring, several data chips, some sort of motherboard… The list went on. I scanned the haul for something resembling what I had seen in the past, but eventually grew impatient and spilled the contents out on the desk the terminal was sitting on.

A few items fell on the floor, and I quickly squatted down to pick them up and returned them to the pile. “What about any of this?” I asked, worried about what was happening with Tony. If Sage was in the process of downloading him, we wouldn’t have very long to circumvent what he was doing. We needed to get him out of there. “Does any of this work?”

I looked at Rose, expecting an answer from her, and to her credit, she leaned over the desk to inspect the items, carefully picking up a few objects and examining them. But it was Tony who answered my question.

“You have the most important components. We just have to make a few modifications. Go ahead and grab that microprocessor, the IDF scanner, the bundle of gold wire .02, the redirection matrix, the…”

The list continued to grow, the names of items becoming more and more complicated as he went on, and I gave Rose a helpless look, begging for assistance. She shifted her massive weight from one leg to the other and then shook her head, managing to appear equally baffled. In desperation, I turned to Dylan, whose frozen mask of confusion and intimidation seemed somehow more grandiose than mine. Tony blithely missed it all, and finally, after several seconds of him droning on, I had to cut him off.

“Tony, two things: One, I have no idea what any of that stuff is. Two, how can we do this before your download goes through? What is even going on with that?”

“Oh, sorry!” he exclaimed, instantly contrite. “I shut it down. Lacey gave me an off switch on my end to make sure I had a choice in the matter in case something like this happened, and I chose to terminate the connection. But that doesn’t mean I’m safe. It won’t take Scipio long to track where the transceiver sent its signal, using the Core’s sensors. I’m guessing we have about five minutes before they try to force a connection and drag me out.”

I looked at Dylan, and her eyes confirmed the truth of what I was thinking: there was no way we could construct what Tony needed—in that time—without help.

“I’ll go get Lidecher,” she said, and I nodded, glad she was in the same headspace as me. I hoped the tech wouldn’t be upset about us calling for more help, but even if he was, he could get over it. We needed him.

“Thanks,” I told her as she headed for the door. Then I turned back to Tony. “Start showing me pictures of the components you need. Rose and I will start separating them so we can get this done.”

“Oh, fun! A game! Okay, hmm…” Tony gave me another contemplative look, and the next thing I knew, the code that was being used to make up his face suddenly shifted into an image. I stared at it for a second, confused yet a third time by the AI’s unconcerned nature, in spite of the threat to his code, and then shook my head, deciding not to question it. There wasn’t time, and frankly, if he wanted to turn this into a game, I was okay with it—as long as we got the task done in time.

Please let us get the task done in time, I begged silently, hoping that someone somewhere was listening… and on my side.