“Good,” Tony said, his eyes squinting at Lidecher as if he were able to peer through the nervous man to see what he was doing. “Now place the alternating current nodule into the wire and affix it to the transceiver. Use a .02 millijoule charge when closing the circuit. Anything higher will fry the scanning element.”

“Okay,” Lidecher said, quickly following Tony’s instructions. I glanced at my watch and tried not to cringe when I saw that four minutes were already gone. “Okay,” he repeated again. “The scanning element is starting to glow. What do I do now?”

“Stand back and let the lady put the net on the scanner,” Tony replied, and I practically leapt forward, holding the net between two fingers.

“Here,” I said, slapping a hand on Lidecher’s shoulder to keep him in place so I could simply lean over him. My eyes scanned the electrical components, which seemed to fill every bit of free space on the desk, and quickly found the glowing green screen that was about the size of my hand. I dropped the net on it and then looked at the terminal. “Can you sense it?” I asked, knowing I was being impatient.

“Yes,” he replied. “Downloading now.”

A second later, his face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a progress bar. I watched as it slowly began to fill, tracking upward, and then took a quick look at my watch. Only thirty seconds left.

“C’mon,” I whispered, trying not to bounce back and forth on my toes. Getting Tony out and slowing Sage down was step one of a plan that was only loosely coming together in my head, but I didn’t want to have come this far only to fail at the first stage.

The bar continued to move up as the numbers on my watch shrank down, and my heartrate doubled as I realized he wasn’t going to make it. The bar was at 62 percent with only fifteen seconds remaining, then 78 percent at ten, 84 percent at five…

The clock hit zero with only 91 percent of the download completed, and I had a heartbeat to pray that Tony had been off in his predictions—that Scipio wasn’t able to move that quickly—before all the lights on the server lit up at once. There was a high-pitched hum, and then the entire room exploded in a shower of sparks.

“Duck!” I shouted belatedly. Then, ignoring my own advice, I turned toward the scanner. An electrical surge was building, white-blue, crackling fingers of lightning beginning to form between the servers, following the cable lines between them. I saw them traveling down the line toward the net at lightning speed, and reached out and snatched it on impulse.

The arc of electricity caught me in the wrist, and every muscle in my body seized up as an unknown number of volts shot through me. The air caught in my lungs, and I was powerless for several seconds, frozen in a blast of fiery hot pain that ran under my skin.

Then it stopped, and I was flying backward.

I felt oddly disconnected as I fell through the air, even though I knew I was flying at a speed that would undoubtedly fracture several of my bones as soon as I hit the wall, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It seemed as inevitable as gravity that I was going to hit.

Unconsciousness began to loom up, the darkness filling the edges of my sight as I continued to tumble through the air, and I felt myself start to give in, not wanting to remain awake for the inevitable thud.

But hands grabbed me before I fully succumbed, catching and cradling me. The sensation was a jolting juxtaposition when compared to the smooth glide through the air, and it snapped me back to a position of wakefulness.

Only then did I realize I needed to breathe. My lungs were burning from being locked in place by the electrical surge, my body’s desire for oxygen a pressing need. I opened my mouth to take a breath, but for some reason, my chest wouldn’t move. I blinked and looked around, then reared back when I saw a metallic face loom into view.

But the purple eyes told me it was Rose, and I placed a hand on my chest, tapping on it.

She nodded and looked up and away from me. I followed the direction of her gaze and saw Dylan hobbling toward me. Her mouth was moving, and as I cocked my head at her, I realized she was talking. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I didn’t care. My body was screaming for oxygen, but my lungs were refusing to help, and for several terrifying heartbeats, I felt certain that they were irreparably burned by the electricity, and that I was going to die. I was floundering, trying to make my ears work, to understand what she was saying, when something cold pressed against my neck.

There was a sting of something being injected. I felt my lungs begin to move and tried to fill them with as much air as I could get, the feeling conjuring up images of the air scraping over sandpaper. I grew lightheaded at the first gasp, and by the second, the blackness was rising back up and claiming me.

I fought it.

Even as it dragged me down, making my limbs heavy and useless, I fought against the sensation, struggling to open my eyes.

The first time I pried them open, the sharp brightness of the real world sent me reeling, my head threatening to split in half with the pain. I sank back into oblivion automatically, the agony so severe that I was certain I would die if I did it again.

I started to let myself drift deeper, but a voice whispered for me to fight it—that if I didn’t, I would die—and I believed it. I clawed my way back to reality, this time preparing myself for the pain, and cracked open a single eyelid. Slowness did nothing to mitigate the throbbing ache, but I fought through it, opening my eye further.

A dark shape hovered at the edge of my periphery, the blob difficult to make out. I tried to tilt my head toward it, and felt the muscles of my neck shifting just under my skin in a most discomforting way, like they had somehow been separated into strands and I could feel every one. As my head began to tilt, a wall of dizziness crashed over me, and the darkness came back to seize me.

This time I floated, the pain and confusion of my last two attempts making it more difficult to mount a third. I was beyond tired, and I hovered at the edge of unconsciousness, the pull of it dragging me down while I kept hauling myself up enough, just enough to avoid giving in entirely.

As the struggle raged on, I found myself wondering what I was holding on for. Something had happened to me—was happening to me—and I clearly needed rest. Maybe it would be okay to just let go, and slowly sink back in.

NO! a voice insisted, an almost petulant lilt to it. Keep fighting. Don’t give in.

I felt something reaching out for me, a line of connection that promised that if I tried, just one more time, I’d be rewarded. It wouldn’t be that bad.

Grey’s face filled my mind—a memory of us standing on the catwalk by the hydro-turbines, the moment that had hung between us, coupled with the recollection of Leo, his lips pressing against mine in a hot, hungry kiss that was all him, even if he had been inside of Grey’s body at the time.

The reminder of the two men in my life, the love I felt for them, gave me the fire for one last try, and this time, I just went for it.

My eyelids snapped open, and I resisted the urge to shut them immediately against the harsh light, and squinted instead. It took a few seconds for the glare to lessen, my pupils slowly contracting to filter out the excess light. My head ached fiercely, but even as I thought about it, there was a significant decrease in the pain, making it somewhat easier to breathe.

How’s that? a voice asked in my mind, and I tensed.

Tony? I asked, instantly confused. What—

You took a few thousand volts, and your heart almost stopped. Luckily, Dylan had enough first-aid training to inject you with adrenaline, and something that she said will help with the damage to your nerves.

A synaptic neural gel, I told him, knowing exactly what Dylan had done. It was smart, too. Her quick thinking had likely spared me any long-term nerve damage. Where are we?

Even as I asked, my vision finally began to focus, the dark and light colors sharpening, gaining shape and definition. I realized I was sitting down in a hall, my back pressed against the wall, just outside of a door. We were no longer in the server farm. The halls were lit differently, and were significantly warmer. But beyond still being in Cogstown, I had no idea where we were.

Level 25, Tony replied. Dylan took charge after you passed out, and at Rose’s insistence, put me inside you, in case there was any brain damage. There was not, by the way, and I managed to get the rest of my program into the net before Scipio crashed the server, so there’s that. I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of piloting your body up here. It was super fun, by the way; you’re kind of really flexible, huh?

If Tony had been any older, or had any sort of a lecherous tone in his voice, I would’ve been creeped out. But he wasn’t, and I could sense the compliment. Even still, that did nothing to detract from his revelation that he’d been “piloting” my body while I was unconscious. I’m not sure I’m—

There wasn’t any time, he interjected impatiently. Scipio fried the servers controlling the doors, to try to get me to escape through the transceiver. I set up a dummy program to continue opening the doors for the Cogs after I left, but it’s gone. That means that whatever doors were open are going to stay open until the Cogs close them manually. If they don’t get them closed in time, then Alice is going to get in, and everybody’s up poop creek without a paddle. We had to keep moving.

I bristled under his words. He was right, of course. I just didn’t like the idea that he had taken control of me. Still, I could tell he hadn’t done it maliciously; his thoughts were like an open book to me, and I could feel the innocence of his actions. Which was odd, considering he was over two hundred and fifty years old.

I understand, I told him, deciding to let it go. Now, why are we on level 25? That’s right above Water Treatment. It’s the wrong direction.

Your blood sugar is dangerously low, and your electrolytes are depleted. Dylan asked Lynch to find you some food and water, and this was apparently the closest place. I wanted to work on waking you up, so I stayed out here while they went inside to grab some grub. But, now that you’re up, you should probably get in there. They seem to be at an impasse regarding what to do next. Or rather, how to do it.

His words filled me with a sense of foreboding, but I ignored it and slowly climbed to my feet. Every movement was filled with some sort of twinge, sometimes painful, but other times electric, like amps of energy had somehow managed to hide themselves just under my skin. I ignored that, too, and eventually made it to my feet.

I was exhausted by the effort, but Tony had mentioned one important detail that seemed to override everything else weighing on my mind.

Food and water.