NO, NO, NO, PLEASE NO—

Noemi stands alone on the bridge, staring down at the controls that tell her Abel just opened the primary air lock—while he was inside it.

Horror-sick, she switches the main viewer to show her what’s going on. The image on the enormous domed screen changes from the nebula-bright asteroid field above them to the side of the ship itself, dully reflecting the rainbow colors of surrounding space. Noemi spots Abel immediately and zooms in to see him skittering up the side, arms and legs at almost unnatural angles, climbing like a spider or some other inhuman thing. Within moments he’s reached the damaged tip and set to work.

He’s not even wearing an evac suit.

He’ll freeze solid. He’ll die. He knows that, of course.

If Abel has soul enough to have wronged her, he also has enough to value his own existence. And yet he has laid it down.

Noemi goes into action. She doesn’t think she can accomplish much before Abel finishes the repair. Not that it would do either of them any good if she did, since then they’d both die shortly thereafter. Putting on her own evac suit isn’t an option either; that would take more time than Abel has. So how can she save him?

“This is a science vessel,” she mutters to herself, frantically searching the bridge controls. “Science vessels launch research satellites. If they launch research satellites, they have to be able to bring them back in again.”

There! Next to the equipment pod bay is an extendable manipulator capable of grabbing satellites, pods, or maybe even mechs. It’s only about nine meters long, though. Will that be enough to reach Abel?

Noemi sits at the console and holds her hand above its screen. Green beams of light shine upward, illuminating her to the elbow. As the viewscreen shifts to show the manipulator arm extending from the mirrored surface of the Daedalus, she can see Abel again. He’s still working hard, but his movements have become stiff and choppy. The cold is taking its toll.

She reaches forward with her hand; the computer, reading her movement, pushes the extendable manipulator forward, too. Slowly she curls her arm upward, and slightly to the side.

Abel has almost been immobilized. He can’t move his hand to push something in, so he leans forward, using the weight of his shoulder. The red lights around the bridge all simultaneously shift to yellow, and Noemi realizes she’s been holding her breath. But he’s done it. He fixed the breach. He saved her.

Time to return the favor.

By now Noemi’s trembling, but that doesn’t matter. The motion doesn’t disrupt the sensors on her hand, and the manipulator continues reaching for Abel. Gently, she thinks, as if he were a hurt animal she can only approach with the greatest tenderness. She curls her fingers inward, centimeter by centimeter, staring at the viewscreen without even blinking. Abel’s pale shape against the darkness seems to burn an outline into her retinas.

He’s too far gone to take hold of the extendable manipulator, maybe even incapable of noticing it. Noemi imagines that she can capture him in her warm palm as she keeps tightening her fingers, finally taking hold of him. Then she pulls back quickly, deposits him in the equipment pod bay, then sets the air lock to cycle again as she takes off running.

Faster, she tells herself as she dashes down from the bridge along the ever-widening spiral of the corridor. You have to go faster. At this point, it hardly matters when she reaches Abel. Whether she gets to him in two seconds or two years, he’ll be repairable or he won’t. But she runs her hardest anyway.

The pod bay doors slide open as she runs toward them. As she jumps over the low threshold, Noemi sees Abel lying flat on the floor, staring blankly upward. His arms stretch out on either side of his body, unmoving. “Abel?” She kneels by his side. “Can you hear me?”

No response. His skin hasn’t gone pale or turned blue the way a human’s would, but the moisture at the edges of his eyelids has frozen into tiny crystals. When she reaches for him, she feels the electric burn of a force field—but this one is low-grade, something she can push through slowly. With great effort, she manages to shut off the device at his belt; the force field’s heat vanishes. She pulls off Abel’s heavy work gloves, hoping he’ll be able to squeeze her hands, but his fingers remain stiff and still. Noemi puts her hand over his chest, looking for a heartbeat, even though she knows that’s impossible.

She learned so much about destroying mechs, so little about repairing them.

Noemi does what you’re supposed to do for hypothermia victims, what she’s always wished she could’ve done for her parents and her baby brother: She lies down by Abel’s side, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and holds him tightly. That’s how you bring back people who have nearly frozen to death. You warm them with your own body heat. It’s her warmth that will save him, or fail.

Noemi treats him as a person, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

The minutes go on. Tears trickle from her eyes. Abel’s so cold he’s painful to the touch, but she doesn’t let go.

Finally, as despair begins to seize her, his finger twitches.

“Abel?” Noemi sits upright and takes his face between her hands. His stare remains blank, and she wonders whether she just imagined the movement. But then he blinks, and she begins to laugh weakly. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”

It’s not that simple. More than an hour passes before Abel can even sit upright; some damage has been done. But he remains with her.

“You’re still functional, right?” Noemi tries to push back his blond hair, but it’s still frozen stiff. Instead she strokes his cheek. “If you need fixing, maybe you can talk me through it.”

“Unnecessary.” Abel’s voice sounds hoarse, almost metallic. “I should be able to restore most primary functions shortly.”

“Thank God.”

For the next couple of hours they work together. They test his range of movement. They test his memory. Abel can respond every time, sometimes slowly, but always adequately.

“What did you rename our ship?”

“First the Medusa, then the Odysseus.”

“What’s the square root of”—Noemi fishes for a truly random number—“eight thousand two hundred and eighteen?”

“To the third decimal place, ninety point six five three. I can provide the full number if desired.”

“Three decimal places works,” she says as she rubs his hands between her own, allowing friction to provide heat. Though there’s not that much friction, really: Abel’s hands are surprisingly soft. “What’s the first thing I said to you?”

Abel cocks his head, and finally he looks like himself again. “I remember it perfectly, but you almost certainly don’t. Therefore, reciting the words cannot serve as a viable test.”

“If you’re feeling good enough to be smug, you’re definitely better.” Noemi can’t stop smiling. “Does anything feel like it might be broken? Malfunctioning?”

He pauses before saying, “Some inner circuitry I’d already questioned has been damaged further. But my operations are not significantly altered.”

What does that mean? Noemi isn’t sure, but Abel doesn’t dwell on it. Already he’s flexing his hands again, affirming his restored agility. It must not be anything worth worrying about.

When he’s ready, she slings one of his arms around her shoulder and walks him back through the ship to his quarters—really, Mansfield’s quarters, now home to the man’s greatest creation. This is the first time Noemi’s taken a good look at this room, and she doesn’t know whether to admire its beauty or be appalled at the extravagance. A four-poster bed carved of burnished wood stands in the center of the room, covered with a silk coverlet that shimmers emerald. A painting of water lilies, soft and blurry in shades of blue, hangs in an ornate golden frame. A wardrobe, like something out of Victorian times, sits in one corner, and when Noemi looks around inside, she finds a thick, wine-red velvet robe.

She slides this on over Abel’s clothes before tucking him in bed. “The more layers, the better,” she says.

“Don’t worry.” Abel’s smile is lopsided; he’s still thawing. “I’m improving rapidly. I’ll still be able to do it.”

“To do what?”

He gives her an odd look. “To take the thermomagnetic device into the Gate and destroy it.”

Noemi feels as though the floor dropped out from under her, horrified and a little sick. “Wait. You think that’s why I saved you?”

“Rationally, it would be a strong motivator.”

“Abel, no. You don’t get it.” Struggling for words, she sits on the edge of the bed. “Don’t you remember what I said to you before?”

“That I am responsible for my own actions, and therefore for my own mistakes.”

“Not that. Not only that, anyway.” Noemi takes a deep breath as she squeezes his cool hands. “If you’re responsible for attacking me when I boarded the ship, you’re also responsible for protecting me on Wayland Station, and for saving me in the underground river on Cray. For trying to save Esther. For understanding where to bury her. You did all those things for me.”

“That is a matter of my programming.”

“And you can disregard that programming if you want to badly enough.”

“So it seems.” He looks lost as he says it. Maybe Abel only just discovered this himself. It doesn’t matter when he figured it out, only that it’s true. “I have realized that I no longer follow your orders because I have to. I… I do it because I want to.”

How can he want that? How can he want to follow her even to oblivion? Noemi’s voice shakes as she continues, “Abel—you have a soul. Or something so close to a soul that I can’t tell the difference, and I shouldn’t even try. And if you have a soul, I can’t order you to destroy yourself in the Gate. I can’t hurt you, and I won’t. No matter what.”

Abel’s astonishment would make her laugh under any other circumstances. As it is, it’s almost painful to see how surprised he is to realize that someone believes his life has value. To realize she believes it. “But I attempted to kill you.”

“You attacked an enemy soldier who boarded your ship,” Noemi admits. “Pretty much anyone would’ve reacted the way you did. Human or mech. For that, and for Esther, I think… I think mostly I blamed you because you’re here to be blamed. I don’t blame you at all anymore.”

As stiff as he is, he manages to roll onto his side, the better to look her directly in the face. “Whether I have a soul or not can only be a matter of opinion.”

She shakes her head. “Nope. It’s a matter of faith.”

“You must still have doubts.”

“The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.” So the Elder Council always says, reminding people to avoid the cheap platitudes of dogma, to rely only on deep insight. She may be a terrible believer in so many ways—but this lesson, at least, she’s finally mastered.

“But Genesis—the Gate, the Masada Run—can you give up so easily?”

“Who said anything about giving up?” She’d begun formulating a new plan within half an hour after her argument with Abel. “You said only an advanced mech could pilot a ship carrying that kind of device through a Gate. A human would die from the heat, and a lower-level mech would shut down. Right?”

“Correct.”

Noemi begins ticking her points off on her fingers. “We need an advanced mech. You’re an advanced mech, but you’re not the only one advanced enough to do this. Some other models could handle it, too, couldn’t they? Which ones?”

Abel nods, though he answers her as if in a daze. “Either of the medical models, Tare or Mike. Any Charlie or Queen. Maybe even the caretaker models, Nan and Uncle—”

“See? Lots of possibilities.” Her voice sounds too chipper even to her own ears. Noemi’s been going over this in her own head, trying to calm herself down, but every second, she expects Abel to point out a new complication or flaw, something that will crush all her hopes. “Like I said, I don’t need you to fly the device into the Gate any longer. But I do need you to help me capture a mech that can. One of the ones that’s really just a machine. Not like you. You’re—more.”

Abel seems younger to her somehow, almost childlike in his wonder. “Do you really believe that?”

“Yeah. I do.”

He doesn’t answer, only pulls the coverlet more tightly around him. He’s so cold every scrap of heat must be welcome, so weary he can barely move; Noemi knows how he feels. Ever since Kismet, she’s been tired. It seems like sleeping only makes it worse, not better. But there will be time to rest when this is all over. Oceans of time to spend on a free, safe Genesis.

“You realize that capturing a mech isn’t easy.” Abel can’t quit arguing for his own demise. “Even a lower-level one has the strength and will to resist. The smarter ones will prove even more difficult.”

“That’s where you come in.”

“Be serious,” he says. “The fate of your world is in your hands.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that I have your fate in my hands, too. I’m going to take care of Genesis, and I’m going to take care of you. I don’t care how hard it is. We’re going to make this happen.”

“And then—” Abel’s voice trails off. “Then what? After it’s all over, then what happens?”

Noemi hasn’t though this part through in detail, because it’s not hers to decide. “After that, you take me home to Genesis, and then you go wherever you want.”

“I would decide?”

“Yeah. Take the Daedalus and go.” She zooms her hand up in the air, as if it were the ship, then feels silly for doing so.

But Abel hardly seems to notice. He’s still rocked by her suggestion. “You would leave the decision entirely up to me?”

“Yes, exactly.” Noemi’s heart sinks as she takes in Abel’s confusion. It’s like he can’t wrap his super-genius mind around something as simple as making his own choices. “I guess that’s one gift Mansfield never wanted to give you—the chance to determine your own fate.”

“You’re too quick to blame him.” Abel’s response comes so readily that she thinks it must be his programming reasserting itself. But the doubt in his eyes tells her he wonders about his own answer. “You were taught that he was wicked, evil, merely for inventing mechs—”

“Don’t you understand, Abel? Do you still not get it?” Noemi hopes he’ll hear this one basic truth, the one that has changed her plans and her heart. “We were taught that Mansfield was evil because he made soulless machines in the shape of men. But he did something worse than that to you, so much worse.” Her voice catches in her throat. “Burton Mansfield’s greatest sin was creating a soul and imprisoning it in a machine.”

Abel says nothing. No doubt he disagrees. But he seems to understand her at last.

After a long moment, he looks away. Noemi can’t meet his eyes again either. Together they’ve crossed a threshold, and neither of them knows what may lie beyond it.

“Sleep,” she says gently. “You have to be exhausted.”

“As do you. You must prioritize your own health and well-being.”

It’s a plea, not an invitation, but Noemi doesn’t care. She lies down on the other half of the bed, atop the silk coverlet. Abel hesitates, obviously wondering what else she might do; when she simply lies there, he closes his eyes, passing instantly into sleep.

Noemi shifts herself closer, so her head rests on his shoulder. She still needs to keep him warm.

And for the first time since Esther’s death—or maybe in far longer—Noemi no longer feels alone.