IF NOEMI WERE GOING TO DESCRIBE CRAY IN ONE WORD, it would be claustrophobic.

The spacedock and surrounding shopping center had an airy feel—an accomplishment of lighting and design Noemi hadn’t appreciated when she was there. By now, though, she’s spent hours either in an underground river or here in the Razers’ hideout. She doesn’t like all this stone surrounding her, looming overhead.

A memory flickers back into brightness: her and Esther, running through one of the meadows surrounding Goshen, the town where the Gatsons live. The high grasses had danced in the strong breeze, swishing and swirling around them like green ribbons. Above stretched a vast blue dome of cloudless sky, marked only by white birds flying toward the cool mountains of the east.

What Noemi would give for one more day with Esther, beneath that infinite sky.

But Cray’s not all bad. When she can forget the weight of the rock looming over her, the Razers’ hideout feels pleasantly cozy. Personal decorations that can’t be handmade are considered wasteful on Genesis, so Noemi’s never been able to string colored lights along her ceiling. She’s never collected brilliantly colored flags to hang from archways. Although the Gatsons had a hammock in the backyard, she never imagined putting one in her own room.

She glances at the hammock, where Abel lies asleep. (I should regenerate, he’d said, smiling and settling into the hammock with hardly a wobble. Then he had closed his eyes and gone to sleep that instant.) Noemi finds it hard to look at him for long.

It unnerved her when she saw him peel back his own flesh to reveal metal within. All the mechs she’s killed in combat, and yet only now it bothers her to see them bleed.

Mechs are just machines. Flesh and blood may have been coaxed into surviving around that structure, but deep within they are only things. At least, they’re supposed to be.

But Abel—Abel seems different. Noemi isn’t asking herself whether he’s a machine or a man; she has begun to believe that he’s both. But to what extent? Is the human side of him only a trick, a shadow of Burton Mansfield himself, placed there as testament to both his genius and his ego? Or is there more?

Whatever he is, he was designed for a purpose—something important, something great. Something neither she nor Abel knows.

Noemi takes a deep breath and lets that question go. She’ll wrestle with that later.

On Genesis they were taught that Cray was a planet of cold, cerebral people who valued analysis above emotion. Maybe it had been, thirty years ago. Now, it’s home to Virginia and her friends, who are… many strange things, but hardly cold.

“Did you pull up any Mansfield papers in the last ten years?” Virginia says through a bite of the sticky bun she’s munching on. She’s sitting cross-legged on a brightly colored cushion, talking to her friends via several live screens.

Ludwig—the blond guy, who seems to be handling his part of the conversation while lying down in bed—shakes his head no. “It’s like he vanished. Like he disintegrated. I don’t know what happened to Burton Mansfield, but the galaxy’s greatest cyberneticist wouldn’t just stop researching for no reason.”

“Or maybe it’s just because the man’s in his eighties.” That’s Fon, the athletic girl with five piercings in each ear. “He’s not old enough to have taken ReGen when he was young. That means he’s pretty fragile by now.”

“They would’ve given him some!” protests Kalonzo, the youngest of them. “Somebody like Mansfield—they want him to live a double life-span. Triple!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Virginia says. “The plant they extracted it from went extinct, and they never synthesized a substitute, so how exactly do you think Mansfield’s supposed to have taken ReGen when he was born a decade after they stopped selling it?”

This ignites a debate between the four of them, three of whom firmly believe ReGen remained available through back channels for years after it supposedly ran out. They each have elaborate, arcane theories to explain exactly what those channels were, who controlled them, how long the supply lasted, and whether some people might still be taking a drug that slows the aging process so dramatically some people lived to be two hundred.

Noemi studied ReGen in history class. On Earth, they spent their lives fearing death, denying its inevitability. They even found a way to expand their life-spans. And yet they were so shortsighted that they used up the plant that provided the necessary drug. Once it had gone extinct, their chance for relative immortality went with it.

What kind of world could be brilliant enough to invent the Gates, the mag engines, even a mech as advanced as Abel, and still be dumb enough to do that?

Noemi sighs. She’s beginning to understand the colony worlds a little—the Vagabonds—the kinds of choices off-worlders have now. But she doesn’t think she’ll ever make sense of Earth.

“Listen, guys, let’s wrap up,” Fon says via her connection. “I’ve got Hernandez first thing tomorrow, and you know how he gets if you drag ass in his lectures.”

Both Kalonzo and Ludwig groan. Virginia says, “Don’t remind me. Okay, I’ll be hanging out here in cybernetics central until the rest of you show up tomorrow. Got it?”

“I’ll do some midnight riding if I get the chance,” Ludwig says—whatever that means. Noemi’s still piecing together their slang. “If so, I’ll let you guys know.”

“If you pull this off, you’re forever captain!” Kalonzo says, which makes them all laugh. More slang? As they sign off, Noemi steals another glance at Abel.

He lies in the hammock, his hands folded atop his chest. Humans rarely look that tidy while they doze; he’s even more stiff now than he was back in the pod on Wayland Station. But he’s not so stiff that he’d tip off anyone who didn’t know what he really is. Mansfield must have included programs to protect Abel while he sleeps.

But he’s not sleeping, Noemi reminds herself. Even if he calls it that. He’s just in regenerative mode. Even if his energy stores ran low, he couldn’t actually feel tired.

Could he?

Virginia slaps off her link to the others, licks the last of the sticky-sweet from her thumb, then kicks back in her chair. In her loose, casual pants and her cheerful yellow tee, she looks like an overgrown kid. Or maybe an artist. Not one of the supposed icy geniuses of Cray.

When Virginia sees Noemi watching her, she brightens. “What, you can’t sleep? I would’ve thought you’d collapse, after that dunking you took in the river.”

“Me too,” Noemi admits. “But I guess I need more time to—wind down, or something.”

“Well, come on. We’ll find something fun to listen to, or watch. Too bad you’re wanted, or we could do some orbital flips in my flash new ride.” Virginia waves her over. “We won’t wake up Abel, will we?”

“I think he can choose how long to be asleep.” That’s Noemi’s theory, anyway. When Abel’s next awake, or at least admitting he’s awake, she’ll ask to make sure.

For now, she wants to talk with Virginia, to get to know her. The conversations she had with Harriet and Zayan hadn’t lasted nearly long enough for Noemi to satisfy even a fraction of her curiosity about people on other worlds.

They go to the computer terminal on the far side of the room from Abel, just in case. As Virginia activates the screen, Noemi catches a glimpse of the wallpaper image and recognizes the man’s face. “Wait. That’s—”

“Han Zhi. The smokiest guy in the galaxy.” Virginia gives her a conspiratorial smile. “Gotta admit, usually girls are more my type, but some guys do it for me. And Han Zhi? He can do anything for me he feels like doing.”

“He’s pretty amazing,” Noemi admits. On Genesis they try not to judge others by appearances, but nobody’s immune to a face like that. Of course not everyone in the galaxy can find him the hottest guy alive—but Virginia, at least, agrees. “Is he okay after the Orchid Festival?”

“Did you not hear? He’s totally fine. His next holo won’t even be delayed.”

Noemi didn’t care that much about this one particular celebrity. “But, the bombing—weren’t people killed?”

“A dozen or so. Mostly workers.” Virginia says this so… flippantly. As if workers weren’t even people.

Is that what happens when you have mechs to do all the work for you? Noemi wonders. Do you begin to believe that work makes you less than human?

She must have had a strange expression on her face, because Virginia sits up straight then, taken aback. “Wait,” she says, and there’s an unfamiliar note in her voice—more serious than before. Harder. “You guys didn’t have anything to do with the bombing, did you? Is that what you’re on the run from?”

“No! We would never, ever do something like that. Ever.”

Virginia holds up her hands, as if in surrender. “Okay, okay. Might’ve jumped to some conclusions there. Like, Galactolympic-long-jump jumped. You were just ‘persons of interest,’ and if you’d been mixed up in that—yeah, we’re talking red alert, every security mech on the planet swarming in this direction. Besides, Abel’s a mech, so I don’t think he even could plant a bomb—”

That must be true. It’s odd to think that Abel literally cannot be as cruel as some humans.

“And you’re, what, sixteen? Seventeen? Hardly enough time to get mixed up with Remedy.”

“Remedy. I heard about them on Kismet’s moon.” Noemi draws closer, thinking of Riko Watanabe and the shadowy figures she encountered in their last minutes on Wayland Station. “Who are they?”

“Anti-Earth lunatics,” Virginia scoffs. “They’re not all terrorists, which is part of the problem. Remedy doesn’t have any one leader, so some cells are pretty low-key protest groups. Illegal, but no big deal if you ask me. That’s where a lot of the doctors come in—”

“Doctors?” Noemi thinks of the medical personnel who performed the Cobweb screenings. She’d thought they might be pretending to be doctors to get access to Wayland Station. Apparently not.

Virginia shrugs. “I don’t know why, exactly, but it was groups of doctors who formed Remedy in the first place. The first few messages from the group were almost reasonable. I mean, conspiracy theorist voodoo, all ‘the truth must come out,’ blah blah blah—but they weren’t violent. But once Remedy spread beyond that first group, to other kinds of people, the violence began.” She looks at Noemi again and laughs. “And if you don’t even know where the evil terrorists came from, you’re obviously not one.”

“Obviously,” she repeats.

Evil terrorists. Those words hang heavy in her mind, clouds that won’t disperse. The bombing horrified Noemi, and yet she hasn’t forgotten the unwilling thrill that shivered through her when she saw those words of defiance shining above Kismet: OUR WORLDS BELONG TO US. She can’t understand the action, but the emotion behind the bombing is one she’d give her own life for.

And what about Riko Watanabe? Noemi keeps remembering the last moment they spoke—with soot from the bomb still smeared on Riko’s face, a blaster in her hand. She saw both a homicidal zealot and a potential ally. Can those things be separated? Should they be?

“Okay,” Virginia’s saying. “So, we’re both Han Zhi fans, so we should watch one of his vids, right? My favorite’s all cued up.”

It hits Noemi then that Virginia’s not as frivolous as she pretends to be. She’s just talking about what’s simplest and easiest, only for the chance to talk. While she obviously feels close to her fellow Razers, they’re not enough. She needs more.

Esther told Noemi something once, years ago, when Noemi had been irritated by a neighbor who went on and on about her garden, the words bubbling out of her constantly, each sentence hardly connected to the last. Don’t you understand? Esther had said later, so gently Noemi felt ashamed. People only talk like that when they’re lonely.

Virginia may pretend not to think much about her family back home, but there’s a huge hole in the center of her, the empty place where they ought to be.

“Sure.” Noemi smiles, hoping she looks half as kind as Esther did that day. “Let’s watch the vid.”

As the first three-dimensional image begins to take shape around them, though, the colors stop while still a blur. A small message in golden text floats at eye level: MIDNIGHT RIDING ACCOMPLISHED!

“Ludwig,” Virginia whispers in amazement. “You righteous, glorious firework, you.”

“What?” Noemi says. “What did he do?”

“Something very flash.” Beaming at Noemi, Virginia pauses the holo-image and hurries to the door, running on tiptoe so Abel can sleep. But Noemi sees Abel open his eyes partway. He’s not awake, exactly, but on alert. Ready to respond to any change in their situation.

She should feel unnerved by that. On some levels, she does. But Noemi can’t deny that she feels comforted, too.

The door slides open to reveal Ludwig, still wearing the same odd, outdated clothes he had on earlier that day. He grins as he passes something heavy to Virginia, an orange backpack straining at the straps—

The thermomagnetic device. Realization sweeps over Noemi in a dizzying rush. We’ve got it. We’ve got it!

She dashes for the door, ready to embrace them both, but Ludwig quickly raises one finger to his lips. “Sentries,” he whispers. “Can’t let them see you. Okay, first thing in the morning, we’ll do the next level of cybernetics tests, all right?”

“Better believe it.” Virginia grins at him. “And you are captain for all time.”

“That’s me.” Ludwig gives Noemi an oddly shy little wave before walking away. The door slides shut as he goes.

“Let me see.” Noemi unzips the backpack and peers inside. It’s cylindrical in shape, about the same length and width as her arm from elbow to wrist. The twinkly string lights overhead reflect dully on its brushed-copper surface. Its size and appearance don’t hint at its power, but its weight does. She knew it would be heavy, but is caught off guard by the heft of it, staggering back a step before she regains her balance.

“Helps channel power from the core processor—as in, planetary core.” Virginia beams down at the thermomagnetic device the way most people smile at puppies. “But it’s a backup to a backup for a system that’s not even online this time of year. Nobody’s going to miss it.”

“Thank you,” Noemi whispers. “You’ll never know how much this means.”

Virginia leans forward, her red-streaked ponytail slipping over her shoulder. “Any chance you’re going to tell me what it’s for?”

Noemi zips the backpack again. She feels as if she has to shield it from sight, even here when there’s no one else to see. “Nothing that’s going to hurt anyone.”

As she speaks, she glances at Abel, still asleep in his hammock, and wonders if that’s true.

Time is space is time: Humanity learned that from Einstein. You can’t be sure the time spent on one world will match the time you spent on another. Fortunately, thanks to the space-time-folding Gates, the lapses turn out not to be too dramatic—people can travel between worlds and still be more or less in sync—but those small shifts still count.

With the Masada Run approaching fast, being off by even a day could be fatal.

Twenty days, Noemi thinks. When the Damocles ship attacked, we had twenty days until the Masada Run. One day to find the Daedalus, another to get through the Kismet Gate, one on Kismet, one here—is that right? Time will be passing differently on Genesis than it is here. Day and night have become almost meaningless.

She rubs her eyes, covers her face with her hands, and tries to relax. Virginia made her this pallet of blankets and pillows on the floor before turning in; Noemi can hear her snoring lightly from her own makeshift bed across the room. This place is comfortable, she feels reasonably safe, the thermomagnetic device is in her hands, and she’s pushed herself to her limit. By now she ought to have passed out even if she were trying to fight it.

Instead she lies in semidarkness, blanket twisted around her, trying to count the number of days her friends have left—the number of days she has to save her world.

From the corner of her eye, Noemi sees movement. She turns her head in time to watch Abel sit up and get to his feet. His uncanny balance means the hammock hardly even sways.

He crouches by her pallet, looking oddly informal in the athletic shirt and pants Ludwig loaned him, and with his dark blond hair flopping forward into his eyes. Noemi remains lying down. She nods toward the orange backpack beside her makeshift bed. “We got the thermomagnetic device.”

“So my auditory records told me.”

“You listen to everything we say while you’re asleep?”

“Not consciously, but I can replay it upon waking.” He cocks his head, studying her. “If you prefer, I can switch off that functionality.”

Noemi shrugs. It soothes her to know it’s not something Abel is consciously choosing to do. He overhears. That’s all.

“You’ve remained awake longer than is medically advisable. Is there anything I can do to assist you? Do you require painkillers, or—”

“It’s not that. I just can’t stop thinking about everything. How many days have passed since I left Genesis? Genesis days, I mean.”

“Approximately six.”

Noemi nods. She still has fourteen days left. They can afford to repay the Razers for their help so far, then return through the Kismet system. Everyone there will no doubt be on high alert after the Orchid Festival bombing, but she and Abel only have to make it to the other Gate. He alone can steer back through the minefield, so no other ships will pursue. They’ll get back to her system, back to the Genesis Gate, and then—

She looks up at him. His blue eyes meet hers steadily, without the slightest hint of doubt, or hurt. Where she goes, he will follow.

He has no choice.

Is that alone proof that he can’t truly be alive? If he had the level of consciousness a person has—if he had a soul—surely he couldn’t give his life up so easily.

But her prayers for guidance on this subject have so far gone unanswered, like so many other things she’s prayed about.

“I had wondered,” Abel says, “If you were troubled by what Virginia said earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

“When she called the people behind the bombing ‘terrorists.’ I know that you disapproved of their actions, but not their cause.” Abel must see the unease in her face as she glances toward the far corner, because he adds, “Virginia has fallen asleep wearing devices that play music directly into her ears. We are unlikely to wake her.”

“Okay.” Noemi struggles for the words. “What I’ve seen since leaving the Genesis system—the way things have changed during the past thirty years—I don’t know what to think any longer. I mean, I still believe in the Liberty War. Our leaders did the right thing. Earth couldn’t be trusted to treat our world any better than they did their own.”

“Given the historical record, that is a reasonable assumption,” Abel admits.

Noemi props herself up on her elbows. “But people are suffering. They’re starving. They’re wandering through the universe with nowhere to call home. And on Genesis, we have so much. Even if we can’t hand our planet over to a government that would ruin it, surely we should do something to help these people.”

Abel considers this. She wonders what’s going through that cybernetic mind, the one designed for some extraordinary purpose neither of them knows. He finally says, “What does your church tell you to do?”

She sighs, so weary her bones feel heavy within her skin. “Like every other faith on Genesis, it tells me to look for the answer within myself.” How can she put this? The moment is so strangely intimate—both of them in sleep clothes that don’t belong to them, speaking in whispers, tucked away in a cave together. Maybe these surroundings are casting a spell on her, making her imagine Abel will really understand. “We’re supposed to seek inner enlightenment. My whole life, I’ve hoped that I’d experience grace.”

“Grace?”

“The moment when faith becomes more than rules you’ve been taught,” Noemi says. “When it becomes a living spirit within you, and guides you. When you’re open to God’s love and are finally able to show that love to others. I go to church like everyone else, and I pray, and I hope… but I’ve never felt it. Sometimes I think I never will.” But she can’t dwell on that. She smiles crookedly. “Of course you don’t believe in God.”

“I have a creator,” Abel replies. “But mine is flesh and blood.”

“I guess that changes things.”

Noemi figures the theological part of their conversation has ended, but Abel surprises her. “I don’t believe as you do. I can’t; it’s not in my nature. But I know that religion serves purposes beyond mere mythology. It has taught you to look within, to question yourself deeply. If you seek inner knowledge, eventually you will find it.”

She sits up straight, the better to look him in the eyes. “You’re saying you don’t believe in God, but you believe God will speak to my heart?”

He shrugs—a gesture somehow more natural, more human, than any other she’s seen from him. “Probably we wouldn’t agree on the source of that wisdom. But you don’t run from a challenge. You keep going until you have an answer, no matter what. That makes you someone who can transcend her limitations.”

Her whole life, Noemi’s believed that nobody but Esther could really understand her. That she made herself too angry, too hard, to ever let anyone else see inside. Maybe she got some of that from the Gatsons, but believing a thing like that makes it closer to true. And yet Abel claims to see her, and what he sees within her is what she’s been most afraid would never be found—not by her or by anyone. “Do you really believe that?”

Abel hesitates then, considering. “I generally do not believe things. I know facts, or I do not.” He smiles at her. “But yes. I believe in you.”

This is a mech. This is only a mech. But if he can believe—

The metal door explodes. Noemi screams, though the sound is lost in the deafening roar of the blast and the clattering shards scoring the walls and floor. Abel leaps to his feet as Virginia scrambles from her bed, confused and bewildered. Noemi clutches her blanket to her chest and stares toward the smoke-veiled doorway.

And the Queen steps through, blaster in hand.