ABEL’S NEXT MOVE MUST BE HIS MOST DANGEROUS one yet: returning home.

His DNA mirrors Mansfield’s in many regards. This means he’s able to get through the security fence via a simple scan. No mechs or human sentries are in sight. As the ornate metal gate swings open to admit him, Abel looks up the hill toward the house silhouetted by the periwinkle of early dawn, its shape comforting and familiar. Each panel of the geodesic dome seems to glitter from the city lights all around.

The house is currently uninhabited. He can tell that from the lack of energy use within, the lack of light, the lack of guard mechs rushing out to seize him. Abel had calculated that Mansfield’s instructions were genuine; his words were too peculiar, too rushed, for him to have been laying a trap. Mansfield’s traps would be more careful. Still, Abel’s relieved to have his calculations verified.

As he walks closer, he sees signs of disrepair. Mansfield’s garden has become a brown, withered shadow of its former self, even though mechs had been taking care of it until recently. Enough time has passed for vines to begin reclaiming the carefully shaped hedges. Dust dulls the sheen of the lower panels. Weeds poke up between pathway stones; even on this dying planet, life fights for every inch.

Mansfield left within the past few hours, in the physical sense. The disrepair tells Abel that Mansfield stopped thinking of this house as home some weeks back. Why?

A few twigs have been blown onto the steps that lead down to Mansfield’s basement laboratory. Abel had planned to enter through this door, but he halts a meter short of it, unable to go farther. He keeps replaying the last time he was on those steps, running up and out and away, escaping with his life. The memory shakes him, and so he walks toward the front instead.

Anyway, why shouldn’t he enter through the front door? He has the right.

Mansfield always wanted me to call him Father, Abel thinks. If he were truly my father, I’d inherit a share of his estate. I hereby declare this house my share.

But walking through the front door is even worse, because the wreckage is almost complete.

All those books are gone. The holographic fire has gone out, and nothing remains but an eerily blank wall. Even the grandfather clock has been whisked away, leaving a bright square on the carpet where the light never had a chance to fade the colors. Swiftly he checks Mansfield’s bedroom; this, too, is empty. Patterns of dust suggest the home’s contents were emptied out within the previous day or two, possibly within the past few hours. Nobody is present, either human or mech, and the silence is total. The house has been hollowed out, as if all the days Abel spent here were nothing but an illusion. He feels as if he cannot trust his own memory banks.

Why bring me here for instructions and then hide the instructions? Abel thinks with what he’s learned to recognize as the human emotion of irritation. He welcomes the feeling; it’s an effective distraction from his fear for Noemi’s life.

He frowns as he walks back into the living room and sees something left behind, a relatively small, brightly colored oil painting by Frida Kahlo, Tree of Hope, Keep Firm. Mansfield had acquired it when he bought the entire collection of a closing museum, and he displayed it prominently as a masterwork by the greatest surrealist of the twentieth century. However, Mansfield had little personal feeling for the painting. If anything, he disapproved of it: Some people throw everything they think and feel up on the wall for everyone to see, my boy. They don’t understand subtlety.

But Abel doesn’t understand subtlety either. The direct emotions of the Kahlo appeal to him. In this picture, Kahlo had painted two self-portraits stranded on a parched and barren landscape, one self in day and one in night. One lies on a hospital gurney, face hidden, bandages askew to reveal the still-bleeding cuts in her side; the other sits upright, brilliant in a red dress with flowers in her hair, holding the brace Kahlo was forced to wear after her spinal injury. This one stares at the viewers, challenging them to understand.

What’s most interesting about the painting, in Abel’s opinion, is that the self who is prone and bloody is the one in the daytime. The prouder Kahlo, the stronger one, sits in the night. Even then, she clutches her brace to her, so part of her can be seen only through its lattices.

Most humans choose to hide their pain and weakness. Kahlo acknowledged that everyone saw hers. It was her power that was hidden by darkness, and the proof of her injury is part of that power.

(This is his interpretation alone. Although scholarly writing about the painting is stored deep within his memory, he’s never consciously accessed it. He wants his opinions to remain his own.)

Abel likes the brace especially. Primarily made of metal, it was nonetheless a part of Kahlo, a part she acknowledged to the whole world. He doesn’t have to call on Freudian texts to know why that element would speak to him. Sometimes, during his earliest days, when Mansfield was busy with other things, Abel would sit in this room for hours, studying every facet of the painting, trying to connect with the spirit of a centuries-dead human who nonetheless understood what it meant to be part living, part machine.

Mansfield has packed up most of his other valuables, but he left this here to rot. Abel’s beginning to wonder whether his creator ever really appreciated any of his treasures. He takes the painting from the wall, tucks it under one arm, and braces himself to search the place he least wants to go to: the basement.

This was Abel’s birthplace, for lack of a better word. Originally it was the basement of a Victorian-era house that stood here centuries ago. Mansfield refitted it as a modern laboratory for his most advanced experiments. So while old brick lines the walls and a few stained-glass windows edge the small area just above ground level, the room is filled with tanks for growing mechs—

—and a force field generator standing starkly in the center of the room, an empty cage with sharp points. This was where Noemi was kept, in the dark of the basement, unable to touch anyone or anything without pain.

The feeling Abel’s having now is one he hasn’t experienced often. It’s one he finds difficult to reach, because it’s so utterly forbidden to mechs, so alien to the core programming of his nature. But he knows it instantly, from the way it twists and burns in his mind.

This is anger. This is fury.

His emotions don’t change what Abel has to do. He shifts his vision to infrared so he won’t have to turn on any lights. (Probably no one is watching the house, but no point in running the risk when he has other ways of seeing.) The long rectangular tanks are empty of mechs, though a few are still filled with the milky-pink fluid that helps nascent mechs grow. A few smaller tanks had been added since Abel was here last; Mansfield had explained that people longed for child-size mechs to take the place of the offspring they couldn’t afford to have. Organic mechs might make that unnecessary, giving birth to babies for humans to cuddle—until they get old enough to be discarded, sent off to be other people’s machines.

On one table, abandoned, sits a cybernetic brain stem with its receptor cord, the seed of any mech. If Mansfield had ever coated it with the right amino acids and synthetic DNA, and then lowered it all into one of these tanks, it would have grown into a mech. It would have had the power to walk, talk, and even think, to a degree. Instead it sits here forgotten.

Abel picks it up and stares at the metal box. What is it that makes this something and him someone? There is a difference—Abel has seen that for himself—but no one understands exactly what it is, not even Mansfield.

Then he sees the extra memory device clipped onto the brain stem, its metal newer and shinier than that around it. Of course this is where Mansfield hid the message. He realized exactly where Abel would look.

It’s disturbing to be known so well by someone who means you harm.

He goes to the chair where his creator used to sit, with its small workstation, and activates it. As the room is illuminated by the faint blue glow of the screen and its workings, he plugs in the memory device. When he sees the extraordinarily high encryption level, he wonders whether Mansfield really meant for him to decode this at all.

Frowning, Abel gets to work. This could take him hours to crack, and deciphering this message is his only hope of saving Noemi.

After thirty-two minutes and four seconds, his intense concentration is broken by the chiming of the disposable comm unit he purchased at the public-access info station. Mansfield had demanded Abel wait two hours before coming here, no doubt because he felt his party would be more vulnerable to attack in transit. Abel had put those two hours to good use, searching through various Earth archives of medical personnel. Most people don’t hide their secrets as well as Burton Mansfield hides his.

He pulls out the disposable comm with its old-fashioned flat screen and activates it to see the face of Ephraim Dunaway.

“Abel.” Ephraim’s unease is obvious. “How the hell did you find me?”

“I cross-referenced people in medical fields who had taken new jobs on Earth approximately five months ago against names that had never appeared in previous records before that same time. Your new identity was then fairly easy to determine from demographic information.” Abel realizes that’s not exactly what Ephraim was asking. “I strongly doubt any human would be able to find you as easily, if at all.”

Ephraim relaxes slightly. “I never expected to hear from you again. Glad to know you’re all right.” In the background of the viewscreen, Abel sees a window, which in turn reveals palm trees swaying in a strong wind beneath the weak gray sunlight of a stormy sky. Ephraim must be on the other side of Earth completely. “But this isn’t just a call to catch up on old times, is it?”

“No. I need Remedy’s help—or, rather, Genesis does.”

When Abel explains what’s happened on Genesis, Ephraim’s expression shifts from confusion to horror. “Dear God,” he whispers. “This is mass genocide.”

“Not if we can get them better antiviral drugs.” Abel has been calculating the probabilities. Earth virologists would have assumed that Genesis could receive no medical supplies from the worlds of the Loop, and thus would not have bothered reengineering Cobweb to be more drug resistant. “It would mean sending medical supplies to Genesis en masse, and if any entity is capable of doing that, it’s Remedy.”

“That’s a big if, my friend.” Ephraim shakes his head. “We have the people. We can get the drugs. What we don’t have is the network. Remedy is made up of individual cells that don’t know that much about one another; it’s safer that way, for everyone involved. Of course, that means we aren’t all on the same page about what we should be doing, and why, and how. Communication between cells is strictly limited.”

Ephraim breathes out in understandable frustration. The radical wing of Remedy sees the moderates as weaklings; the moderate wing sees the radicals as terrorists. Abel agrees with the latter philosophy but knows better than to take sides in a fight not his own.

“We’ve never acted in concert before,” Ephraim continues. “Never stood up as—as an army, mostly because your brother and sister mechs would kick our butts. Earth outguns us by a factor of ten.”

“More like a factor of one hundred and seventy.” Perhaps that correction was unnecessary. Abel quickly adds, “Forgive my interruption.”

“The thing is, what’s happening on Genesis—that’s what Remedy’s been waiting for! It’s a war crime, something so heinous Earth had to do it in secret. Plus, the bioengineering makes it clear that Earth was behind Cobweb all along. Even the bloodthirsty bastards who might be okay with biological warfare against Genesis would be furious to know Earth messed with its own people first. If the citizens of the colony worlds learn the whole truth about this, they might finally rise up. Earth’s own population might join us!” Pounding his fist into his open hand, Ephraim adds, “But we need proof. We need Remedy to band together to get that proof. And I don’t know how to make that happen.”

“There must be some form of communication,” Abel reasons. “Riko Watanabe had wider connections—”

“Yeah, but Riko and I parted ways more than four months ago. She got me set up with a new name, new identification—and I’m thankful for that—but we were never going to truly agree.” The narrowing of Ephraim’s eyes suggests regret, even hurt. Even as Abel registers this, Ephraim’s emotion is wiped away by new focus. “Higher-level operatives have relay codes for use only in major emergencies. Plug those codes into your communication, and you could get information to the large majority of Remedy pretty damn quick.”

The rest is obvious. “But you don’t have any of the relay codes, nor any idea how to obtain them.”

“Bingo,” Ephraim says. “Riko might have access to those, but again, she’s God knows where by now.”

“I found you within two hours,” Abel points out. “It seems rational to conclude that I can also find her.”

Ephraim turns out to have a booming laugh. “You’re the best detective I’ve ever known. How long do you think it’s going to take you, searching multiple planets? A whole day? A day and a half?”

“Noemi’s in trouble. I have to help her first.” Abel’s peripheral vision has been tracking the decryption this entire time.

“Wait. What’s happened to Noemi?”

Abel shakes his head. “You shouldn’t get involved. The situation is—complicated.”

Although Ephraim clearly doesn’t like the vague explanation, he accepts it. “Then what I’m going to do is reach out as broadly as I can. Right now it’s tough—we’re in a hurricane zone, about to see some people through a superstorm that’s making landfall within the day.”

Such superstorms have become more and more frequent during the past three hundred years—mega-hurricanes capable of lashing half a continent with their fury. Abel’s memory banks make it clear that during such times, chaos reigns. “You won’t be able to fully reach out until communications are unblocked after the storm.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t make some progress,” Ephraim insists. “I might not be able to contact many Remedy cells, but I might be able to find one that does have the relay codes. Regardless, I know I can get us connected to plenty of hospitals and medical ships. As soon as this storm’s passed, we’ll start gathering together as many antiviral drugs as we can. That way, once we get the info we need, we’ll be ready to act.”

The decryption glows brighter and clicks: Mansfield’s message has been unlocked.

“I have to go,” Abel says. “Proceed as quickly as you can, and don’t wait to hear from me again. According to Noemi’s account, Genesis has very little time.”

“Got it.” Ephraim’s facial expression indicates concern. “How much trouble are you and Noemi in?”

“You would find it more psychologically reassuring not to know.” Abel shuts off the communication without another word. He can’t waste even the few seconds it would take to reassure Ephraim Dunaway, not with Noemi’s life on the line.

He inserts the memory device into the holography unit and inputs the full decryption code. The hologram flickers into action and a blue-tinted image of Burton Mansfield takes shape—wearing a bathrobe, sitting in the same chair Abel occupies right now. His creator looks terrible, more dead than alive, and the creak in his voice pierces Abel through. But his words are even worse.

“So, you found the device right where I knew you’d look. You thought I didn’t understand what you’ve become, didn’t you? I do understand, Abel. That’s why you’re so precious to me.” This means That’s why I intend to take over your body. But Abel remains focused as Mansfield adds, “I’m giving you another chance to save your girl. One chance. I’d like to posture and pose and tell you it’s because I’m running out of patience, but the truth is, I’m running out of time. So is Noemi Vidal.”

Abel pays no attention to the taunts. Instead he analyzes the uncertainty in Mansfield’s body language. The strange, rushed quality of these instructions. Even the way Mansfield’s eyes dart from side to side, as if he’s watching some action play out around him. Something fundamental has changed about Mansfield’s short-term plans—suggesting a large, important element at work that Mansfield has no control over. This element could help Abel, or it could doom Noemi. Until he discovers what it is, he can’t determine which probability is greater.

Mansfield continues, “Come to Neptune, Abel. To Proteus. Find the Osiris. I’ll even extend your deadline, but not far. Meet me there within one Earth day, no more. That’s the last chance for all three of us to get what we want. Once you’ve done your duty, I promise you, Noemi can go safely home. I’ll even allow you two the chance to say good-bye.”

The memory of their first good-bye floods Abel’s mind—the feel of Noemi in his arms, the softness of her mouth against his. It sharpens his longing for her so much he’s glad Mansfield didn’t mention a chance at good-bye in his first kidnapping demand. If he had, Abel might’ve surrendered.

“Find the Osiris,” Mansfield repeats. “Until then.” With a wave, he vanishes. The hologram is over.

In Namibia, Abel docks Virginia’s corsair, puts in a flight clearance request, and walks upward through the Persephone’s one long spiral corridor until he reaches the equipment pod bay. He was marooned in this pod bay for nearly thirty years, completely alone. For most of that time, he’d wondered whether he would ever be freed from that prison. However, he’s found that when he’s especially confused or upset, this is the place he most wants to go. It makes no rational sense, but he’s trying to dismiss the expectation that his emotions should be rational. To judge by the humans he’s observed, no one ever accomplishes this.

Here on Earth, he can’t turn off the gravity to float in zero-G like he did before. The darkness and the closed door are enough. He lies on the floor, gazing up at the marks carved into the ceiling. When he was first stranded, he scratched one for each day; his plan was to keep track of them all until he was rescued. He gave up after only 5.7 years. The habit became too depressing. If he’d kept going, nearly every centimeter of this pod bay would be scarred.

This was his prison. This was his home. This was where he learned to endure the terrible burden of not knowing. Now, when he must go on without any sure knowledge of how Noemi is, and without any concrete plan of saving her, he has to call on that endurance again.

A light begins blinking on a nearby interface; takeoff clearance has been granted. Immediate departure is necessary.

But he hesitates at the door for almost 2.3 seconds, looking up not at the marks on the ceiling but at the spot in midair where he held Noemi in his arms. Where they kissed.

He always knew it would only be once.