ABEL DECIDES THAT EITHER EPHRAIM DUNAWAY HAS SET a very elaborate trap or underestimated the difficulty of their escape. In neither case is the outcome positive. “Who’s coming?”

“The authorities.” Noemi seems wholly convinced of Ephraim’s honesty. “They must’ve figured out we’re gone.”

Ephraim points. “Medtram. Now.”

Noemi dashes down the hill, with Ephraim just behind. Abel paces himself to follow Ephraim, the better to see whether there’s any sort of clandestine signaling going on. However, Ephraim shows every sign of running as fast and hard as he can; the threat from the Stronghold authorities must be real.

Abel quickens his pace, dashing past Ephraim and Noemi. He attunes his superior hearing and peripheral vision to scout for any potential sign of the authorities. Even the bravest humans can be affected by emotion at times of great stress, whereas he can remain focused on this moment alone, on any subtle changes in their situation and cues. As Abel reaches the launching pillar for the medtrams, he quickly scrambles up the side, angling himself to reach the closest medtram’s door. The security lock on the side is easily broken, and within four seconds, Abel is inside.

Yesterday his attention had been focused almost wholly on Noemi, but he calls upon his recorded memories of the journey here to retrieve necessary details. His hands copy those of the paramedic pilot from yesterday as the dashboard screen lights begin to glow; the whine of the engines slides to a higher pitch as he steers the ship from its wire hangar to the ground, where Noemi and Ephraim are waiting.

Noemi’s beaming. Ephraim’s staring. As Abel opens the door for them and they hurriedly climb in, Ephraim says, “How the hell did you manage that?”

“I’m good with vehicles,” Abel says, which technically is not a lie.

“How do we avoid detection?” Noemi asks Ephraim as she takes the seat next to Abel. “If they’re looking for us, and they realize a medtram’s gone missing—”

“I can conceal our computer signature,” Abel points out. “The railway lines nearby offer us a chance to disguise our flight pattern.”

Ephraim frowns. “What? The old coal trains? How are those going to help us?”

“Watch.” With that, Abel pushes the accelerator, and the medtram takes off, zooming low and fast across the rugged gray terrain. The sand and rocks race by beneath them, and the black hills in the distance seem to loom larger by the moment. “Now, Dr. Dunaway, I need you to explain.”

“To explain what?” Ephraim says, and Noemi glances over at Abel, puzzled.

“Your true agenda.”

Now both Noemi and Ephraim are staring at him in what Abel thinks is dismay, or perhaps even anger. He’ll analyze his peripheral vision data later, when he doesn’t need to focus so sharply on keeping the white bullet of the medtram as close to the ground as possible without crashing them into the rubble.

With a sound halfway between laughter and exasperation, Ephraim says, “Excuse me—agenda?”

“Precisely,” Abel says, never turning from his controls. “Why have you fixated on Noemi so strongly?”

Noemi puts one hand on Abel’s arm, as if to placate him. “No, Abel, you don’t understand. Ephraim realized from my blood work that I’m from Genesis, and the people of Genesis helped his mother—”

“Your blood work would have been processed last night.” Abel keeps his gaze on the controls. “But Dr. Dunaway had taken special notice of you well before that—as soon as he undertook your care, in fact. He made a point of performing tests that should’ve been the Tare’s responsibility. We need to know why.”

Noemi stares at Ephraim, more shocked than she should be. “Wait. That whole story about your mother was a lie?”

“Absolutely not.” Ephraim bows his head. “What your world did for her, the debt I owe—it’s all absolutely true. Why do you think I’m risking my job and maybe my life for this joyride? Because it’s so much fun?” Given the danger levels of their escape, the relatively rough ride in the medtram, and the barren landscape before them, Abel attributes this question to sarcasm. “But yeah, I wanted to get in on your case even before I knew where you were from.”

“Then why?” Abel demands.

“What the hell does it matter? I’m helping you two, aren’t I?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” But now they’re coming up on the coal train routes, and Abel can no longer afford to divide his attention. “Neither of you have yet put on your safety belts. I suggest you do so immediately.”

“Abel, what are you—” Noemi’s breath catches in her throat as the medtram swoops toward the train tracks—and the train chugging along atop them. “Are you sure this is safe?”

“No.” With that, Abel heads straight for the train.

Yesterday Abel had been surprised that the train tracks here on Stronghold aren’t remotely modern but instead resemble those found throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The trains seem old-fashioned, too; their exterior design has a lean, stripped-down effect, but they belch the same smoke Earth residents would’ve seen in the 1800s. Then he realized such old-fashioned trains are ideal transportation on a world with more metals and coal than all of humanity could use in ten lifetimes: easy to build, easy to fuel, easy to fix, and reliable for decades on end. The more complex machinery can be saved for mining and processing if transport is kept low-tech.

He also noticed yesterday that while most of the train cars were big bulky ore transports, a few were lower and flatter—perhaps for hauling necessary equipment. With any luck, this train will have a few such cars. If it doesn’t, their capture is imminent.

“Abel?” Noemi puts her hands on the dash, bracing herself against what must look like an inevitable collision. They’re getting closer to the train, on track to intersect within thirty seconds. “What are you do—Abel! ”

Her shriek doesn’t distract Abel from the task of suddenly shifting the medtram sideways, so that it slides over the train—with approximately half a meter of room, perfectly adequate as a margin of safety, if alarming to humans. Abel then pulls back on the speed so that the train seems to snake out from under them, until he glimpses a low, empty platform car. Accelerating again, he catches up with the platform car, matches the train’s speed, and carefully lands the medtram right there.

Now they are just one more piece of cargo on this train, effectively making the medtram invisible to radar or other motion detectors. For the time being, they’re not only hidden but also headed back toward the area where the Daedalus waits.

“How did you—” Ephraim stares out the windshield, then looks through a small side window. “You hit that exactly. I never knew somebody could fly like that.”

“As I said before, I’m good with vehicles.” Abel cares little for Ephraim’s praise; what matters is how Noemi’s doing. Her skin remains too pale, and her breathing is rapid and shallow. With one hand he brushes her black hair back—a curious instinct. It can’t help in any medical sense. But maybe he felt the urge to do that because it might comfort her. Many mammals are soothed by grooming rituals. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. You just—whoa.” Noemi shuts her dark eyes for a second, and when she opens them, she’s focused again. And her glare is for Ephraim Dunaway. “So how about we go back to the part where you have another agenda?”

Ephraim’s eyes study them, as if he’s taking their measure all over again. Finally he says, “Cobweb isn’t what people think it is. A virus, yes, but the things it does—why it exists—that’s been hidden for a long time. Too long.”

Abel nods. “The Cobweb virus is man-made.”

Both Ephraim and Noemi stare at him this time, but within an instant she gasps. “The radiation.”

“Exactly. No organic viral agent has ever affected radiation levels. Rendering one capable of doing so would require the most sophisticated genetic engineering imaginable.” Abel wonders if Mansfield had something to do with this. Or Mansfield’s daughter—she was studying genetic science, hoping to develop bionic implants for humans—

Ephraim gestures at Abel. “I don’t know how this guy put it together that fast, but yeah. It’s man-made.”

Noemi sits up straight, once again the angry warrior of Genesis that Abel first met, the one who’s prepared to kill. “Are you telling me it’s a biological weapon? Is Earth going to poison everyone on Genesis and then take the planet?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s what we have to find out.” Ephraim sighs. “Whatever Earth scientists were trying to do, they screwed up. If it’s a weapon, it escaped into their own population before they were able to use it against yours. But it might not be a weapon—it’s not always fatal, and you’d think any bioweapon would be.”

“If sufficiently engineered,” Abel says. Human engineering efforts are often flawed—and in this case, he’s grateful for the flaws.

Noemi says, “It sounds fatal enough. It felt fatal enough.”

“Many people survive,” Ephraim confirms, “but three out of five don’t.”

Abel hadn’t heard the specific odds before. He turns back toward Noemi, as if she might collapse again at any minute. Despite her pallor, however, her thoughts are only on the others affected by the disease. “Children. The elderly. People who are already sick—”

“—and people who already built up antiviral drug resistance,” Ephraim finishes. “Cobweb kills them off more often than not. You were young and strong, so we knew you had a good chance, but when you threw it off like that? Proved you hadn’t been exposed to an antiviral once in your life? That stood out.”

“To you,” Abel says, “and soon, to others as well?”

Ephraim nods. “I don’t doubt it. Earth’s desperate to cover up this mess. For a while they thought they had Cobweb under control—we hardly even saw it at all for the past four years—but just in the past few months, a new outbreak got started. People are scared. If word got out that this disease was created by Earth, we’d have mass rioting on every world of the Loop, unrest beyond what’s already going on. Once the authorities figured out you were from Genesis—that an enemy had the proof of what they’d done, right there in her veins—” He shakes his head. “You’d never have made it off this planet alive.”

Noemi shudders in what Abel first thinks is relief. Instead her eyes narrow as she stares at Ephraim and says, “So that’s where Remedy comes from. It began with the doctors who knew the truth about Cobweb. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

Of course. Abel hadn’t analyzed in this much depth yet; he’d been too busy running risk assessments specific to Noemi. But he sees the truth immediately. Ephraim not only wanted to study Cobweb—he wanted proof of Earth’s wrongdoing, for the entire resistance to spread around the galaxy. Noemi—a young, strong survivor of the disease—could’ve helped serve as that proof, no matter what planet she was from.

Ephraim pauses a few long seconds, obviously loath to answer. Finally, however, he nods. “Sometimes I wonder whether I still want to call myself a member of Remedy any longer. But yeah, we began as a group of doctors who wanted to call out the Earth scientists who set Cobweb loose on the galaxy. But the group got a lot bigger. A lot more dangerous. Now you have psychos bombing music festivals, claiming that’s proving some huge point, when all it does is make people think that anyone who objects to Earth’s rule has to be psycho, too—”

“They’re not psychos,” Noemi says, surprising Abel. “They’re wrong to resort to terrorism. There’s no justification for that—there can’t be—but we met one of the Kismet bombers. She wasn’t insane. Just angry and desperate and wrong. She didn’t see another way.”

“You met one of the Kismet bombers?” Ephraim gapes at them.

“We don’t know her current location.” Abel hopes that will put an end to any inquiries about Riko Watanabe.

Noemi looks over at Abel. For the first time since their reunion, her attention is all for him. “Thanks for taking such good care of me when I was sick, by the way.”

He should brush this off by telling her it’s only his job, his duty as a mech. Instead he inclines his head. “You’re welcome.”

At that moment the train dips down into a tunnel. Darkness closes around them all, lit only by a dim bulb attached to the back of the train.

Question already forgotten, Ephraim gestures for them to stand. “Get ready. We have to get out of this medtram and hop off about a hundred meters before the end. From there, it’s easy to get to a service elevator, head up to the landing area.”

“How do you know all this?” Noemi asks.

Ephraim’s bashful smile is unexpected on such a large man. “Even on Stronghold, kids figure out how to have fun.”

When Abel opens the door of the medtram, the wind rushes past quickly enough to steal sound, enough for him to put one arm around Noemi’s waist, bracing her. This much is logical, but he finds himself reluctant to pull away even when the train has slowed. Can this be justified by concern for her health, when she is so clearly improved?

Irrelevant. Within moments they’re at the jump-off point, and the train has slowed so much that Noemi requires no help getting down. The elevator Ephraim summons is less promising—all mesh and rust. Noemi glances at its exposed metal rigging, obviously unsure whether to trust it. Abel feels much the same way she does, only with mathematical formulae to support his doubts. But it does no worse than groan as it takes them up toward the landing area level.

“Will we be able to evade Stronghold security to leave?” Abel asks.

Ephraim nods. “They’re way more worried about people landing without permission than they are with them taking off.”

Noemi says, “Okay. But Ephraim, are you sure they’ll believe you about the drugging? I’m sorry, but if it were me, I wouldn’t buy that.”

How did she ever come to believe she wasn’t a compassionate person? Abel can’t work this out. Perhaps the Gatsons? They seem to have been more distant than actually malign, but maybe distance would be enough. He’ll need to ask Mansfield about the influence of parental attitudes on children’s sense of self.

“My cover story requires some work. A little showmanship.” Ephraim turns to Abel. “Think you can manage to give me a black eye and a few bruises? Make it look like I got roughed up good?”

Abel, who can measure his blows to the smallest fraction of speed, aim, and force, is an ideal candidate for this task. But striking a helpful human will require him to set some programming aside. “Give me a moment,” he says. “I can work up to it.”

“We can never thank you enough for this.” Noemi smiles up into Ephraim’s eyes in a way Abel doesn’t enjoy. Which makes no sense whatsoever. He likes Noemi’s smile. He’s glad that she’s well, and grateful for Ephraim’s assistance and care. So why should he be displeased?

The elevator settles onto ground level with a clank and a thud. Noemi gestures toward the Daedalus, which is within fifty yards; Ephraim had guided them well. This time her conspiratorial smile is only for Abel. He likes that better.

Ephraim lowers his voice. “Okay. We make sure the coast is clear, Abel does what he’s going to do to my face, and then we part ways. I’ll take the meds while you guys make a run for it.”

Then Noemi grabs his arm, her eyes wide. “Abel.” She points toward the Daedalus, where he sees two gray-clad shapes walking from behind a nearby ship—the Queen and Charlie. Abel zooms in quickly to look at the Charlie’s hand, which remains stripped down to the metal endoskeleton.

They’ve been caught.

“You had to make planetfall sometime,” the Queen says as she strolls forward. The glint of new, unfamiliar intelligence is still in her eyes. “Couldn’t hide out behind the Blind Gate forever.”

That takes him aback. “You knew where we were?”

“And I knew it was too dangerous to follow you. Why bother, when all we had to do was wait for you to show up? My instincts told me you’d move forward to Stronghold, and they were right.” For one split second, the Queen’s smile looks less smug, more joyous. “I like possessing intuition. It’s… fun.”

She still wants to be more than she was before. To retain whatever spark of life she’s been given. Maybe Abel can reach her through that.

He glances back at Noemi and Ephraim, an unspoken warning for them not to interfere. Noemi’s hands are clasped in fists at her sides, like she wants to run into the fray, but she gives him a small nod. Ephraim looks bewildered—understandably—but has the sense to stay out of a confrontation he doesn’t understand.

“You’re free, Abel.” The Queen strides toward him, a relaxed and easy walk more like that of a human than a mech; her silver polymer armor gleams in the dull light. “Yet you won’t come home. Don’t you want to see Mansfield again?”

So much—but he can’t abandon Noemi, least of all now. He no longer has to be destroyed along with the Genesis Gate. Is there a way to end this without further conflict? “Tell him I’ll come soon. Within weeks, maybe days.” They’re having to flee Stronghold without a useful mech, but if he and Noemi are free to travel the Loop without risking capture, stealing one on Cray or Kismet should prove manageable.

Then he’ll have to part from Noemi—a strangely painful thought—but that doesn’t change the fact that in the end he’ll return home.

“Mansfield must understand how much I’ve missed him,” he continues, as he walks slowly closer to the Queen. “He programmed that into me. So he knows I’ll come back. All I ask is time to complete this one journey.”

The Queen stops short. She wasn’t prepared for that; Queens and Charlies are combat models, which means they don’t negotiate. But this Queen is something else, something special, with a candlelight flicker of intelligence in her pale-green eyes. Has she been given enough of a self, enough of a soul, to understand what Abel’s offering? “You’ll do what he wants,” she says flatly.

“Of course. Not yet. But soon.”

“My orders say that I should retrieve you now.”

“Your orders are based on outdated information. Mansfield doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do.” When he does understand, when word goes out that the Genesis Gate has been destroyed, how will Mansfield react? Possibly… not well. But Abel will handle that situation when it arises. He trusts in his father’s love to make the rest right. “You’ve been given the ability to think for yourself, Queen. Use that ability. Doesn’t it make more sense to let me come in my own time? The alternative is a fight that will attract attention, which is what Mansfield most wants to avoid.”

The expression that flickers on the Queen’s face is unlike any Abel has ever seen on any other mech—uncertain, even vulnerable. “My thoughts tell me one thing, but my programming tells me another.” She grimaces as if in pain and brings her hand to her head, cupping the space behind her ear where her new capacities are stored. “They shouldn’t conflict.”

“Conflicts are the price of sentience.” Abel has learned this through trial and painful error. He dares to take a step closer and projects—no, allows—more emotion in his voice. “It’s a price worth paying. We may be the only two mechs in existence who could understand that. Make a choice. Assert your own will. It’s the first step toward being something more than a machine. Find out what you might become.”

The Queen hesitates. They’re only a few paces apart now. Abel can see the Charlie approaching, but slowly, waiting to see what the Queen will do. If she understands the possibility within her, if Mansfield’s gift was generous enough to allow her some shadow of the soul within Abel, the chase could end this instant.

And then there would be someone else in the galaxy who’s actually like him.…

He wants to look around to see Noemi and Ephraim, whether they’re going for the Daedalus or watching this battle, but he doesn’t dare break eye contact. Abel senses that it will take everything he has and is to get through to the Queen.

Her expression clears. The Queen begins to smile. Hope flickers within Abel until the moment the Queen model says, “Deleting unnecessary upgrade now.”

“No.” He isn’t even thinking of his own mission any longer, only on the wrongness of a mech throwing away her soul. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t need to know,” she says as she pushes her fingers through her skull.

Aghast, Abel stares as blood runs down her fingers, spatters onto the floor of the landing bay. She pulls back her hand and there—studded by bone splinters, covered in gore—is the hard component that held her extra memory. Her consciousness. Her soul.

To her, it’s only trash.

“Efficiency reestablished.” With her blood-slick hand, the Queen pulls a dark rectangle from her utility belt, one Abel belatedly recognizes as a sort of remote control for mechs. Lower mechs, of course, not anything as advanced as a Queen or a Charlie, much less Abel himself. Is she calling in reinforcements, Dogs and Yokes who might overwhelm him in sheer numbers? Her eyes look flat and dead as she speaks two more words into the control: “Override: Resurrection.”

—the world turns black on white on black—his body goes numb, no sensory input is processing, nothing is left—

—and he awakens.

Dazed, Abel sits up atop a silvery table in a white, oval-shaped room. The ship schematics stored in his mind tell him this is a hopper, an automated ship that makes routine runs back and forth between two worlds of the Loop. Normally only equipment is sent on automated vessels… but then again, what else is he, if not equipment?

And he’s stung to realize he had a fail-safe code. He wouldn’t have thought Mansfield programmed one in. That couldn’t have been released to the Queen except as a last resort. Why should Mansfield be so desperate? But the longer Abel remains alert, the more memory functions come online, until he remembers it all in one blinding flash.

Noemi. He gets off the table, determined to search for her, but already he knows she’s not aboard. Would the Charlie and Queen have hurt her? They would’ve had no need to do so once Abel was in their custody, but if Noemi tried to defend him…

The ship shudders, much more violently than the Daedalus ever did, and the light begins to bend. They’re already going through a Gate. It’s too late to reach Noemi, to have any influence at all over what’s happening to her.

Abel looks around the small room for any clues as to what happened after he was stunned, but there are none. When he goes to the doors, he doesn’t expect them to open, but they slide back obediently. Of course—hoppers aren’t designed for internal security. They’re for transporting objects, no more. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to a hopper besides the storage unit he awoke in. Still he intends to search every centimeter for clues as to what happened.

When he walks out, though, he stops short. Another mech is waiting for him, one of the only two models that aren’t designed to look human: an X-Ray.

It has two legs, two arms, a trunk, and a head, but instead of skin, it’s covered in a dull reflective surface that can project images from within. This one is tall, nearly two meters, the sort that’s owned by powerful people who want their messages delivered with appropriate authority. Abel walks up to the uncanny thing, which stands waiting, long arms drooping at its sides, dormant until it can deliver the words it’s meant to say.

Behind the X-Ray, Abel can glimpse a viewscreen. Only a small rectangle, a backup view, not meant to steer by. But it’s enough for him to recognize the planet in the distance, their next destination.

For the first time in thirty years, he sees Earth.

As Abel comes within arm’s reach of the X-Ray, it straightens. Its silvery surface pixelates to darkness, then takes shape as it projects the image of human legs, arms, clothing. The outline of that body along its form is meaningless compared to the face that finally appears.

“My one and only boy.” Burton Mansfield smiles with more joy than Abel has ever seen in a human face before. The X-Ray puts its two massive hands on either side of Abel’s head, almost tenderly. “Welcome home.”