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  “No matter how many of them get killed in the process.”

  “Where’s the revolution if there’s no injustice?”

  Yin spoke with a wicked brilliance. The strategy, after all, was flawless. In crushing its enemies, the Collective only pumped more fuel for the fanatics. Once that enmity reached critical mass, the chain reaction would continue on its own until it flooded the streets with anticorporate venom. Then Yin would be in a position to deal—and the Assembly would have no choice but to accept.

  “An interesting proposition,” Cray observed.

  “You’re a poor liar,” Yin countered. “None of this is any mystery. You thought of it long before you came near this place.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “All the difference in the world.” Yin took him by the arm and continued their march to the core. Lea watched them both, trying to decipher the cryptic intent that passed between them. “I keep coming back to the same question: Why did you return to the Works? You had the head start. You could have easily disappeared. What could possibly convince you to go back, to face almost certain capture?”

  Cray had already explained his motives to Lea, and up until that moment she had believed him. But there was a vacancy in his eyes that invited doubt—and a willingness to follow. Cray was slipping. Lea was helpless to prevent it.

  “It’s very simple,” Yin coaxed. “You wanted to be found.”

  He stopped at the entry to the core, where several technicians were preparing the sarcophagus to receive another body. Cryogenic hoses snaked across the floor to its base, alongside coils of fiber link that carried test pulses back to an extraction apparatus. Cray fixated on the open lid, while a cool vapor spilled across the floor and beckoned absolute zero.

  “Seeing Lyssa like that,” Yin said, “understanding her the way you understand yourself, you needed me to find you. Even if you didn’t know it, even if you didn’t believe—all of your instincts were driving you home. It’s the only place left for you, Cray. The only purpose that has any meaning.”

  The technicians pushed Lea aside and started to remove Cray’s clothing. She tried to intervene, but Avalon was on her before she could flex a single muscle. Brought to her knees, Lea watched through tears as each garment crumpled to the floor. Cray, meanwhile, just stood there and allowed it to happen. His eyes stayed on Yin the whole time.

  “You know what I saw,” he said.

  “Don’t listen to him, Cray!” Lea shouted. Avalon twisted her arm, making her cry out, though Cray didn’t seem to notice. “He’s trying to trick you!”

  “As much as any human being could know,” Yin replied, ignoring Lea. “Zoe started it the moment she assimilated the flash. She just didn’t know how quickly it would take effect.”

  “Please, Cray,” Lea pleaded. She was breaking down, her voice laced with sobs. “He’s the one who killed Zoe, remember?”

  Cray didn’t hear her at all.

  “She was the one,” he said. “When Lyssa broke out.”

  Yin nodded slowly, teacher to pupil.

  “She touched Zoe first,” Cray went on. “That was her first contact.”

  “She was Ascending,” Yin affirmed. “Then she passed the gift on to you.”

  Life sparkled in the color of his eyes. Alien life.

  “My Ascension,” Cray said.

  “Yes,” Yin told him. “The potential that exists within each one of us. A mind even more powerful than Lyssa.” With quivering hands, he clasped both sides of Cray’s face. “That’s why she sought you out.”

  Lea felt the tears freeze on her cheeks, the pain that crippled her escaping like so much ether. This was the secret Cray had discovered while he was alone in the Tank—the truth he would not confess to her.

  “You are the Other.”

  Cray’s resistance collapsed. The spires surrounding the core absorbed his loose energy, giving spontaneous rise to neural impulses and thickening the air with electricity. Those bursts then jumped the loop, higher and faster than Yin had managed, before coming back down on the extraction banks like pulse fire. Sparks exploded as Yin’s mercs scrambled to contain the overload, but the man himself was undisturbed. He was too in awe of Cray to be concerned with anything else.

  Avalon released Lea from her grip, then stepped forward and stood next to Yin.

  “You’d be wise to observe him for a time before you proceed,” the free agent said. “He may already have abilities that we don’t know about.”

  Yin folded his arms. The mercs came over and gave him the damage report. It was minimal—some fused circuits in the reception pool, nothing that couldn’t be repaired in a matter of minutes. Yin waved them away to complete the job.

  “The containment field will bring him down,” Yin said. “As soon as he’s in the freeze, we’ll be able to control him.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  Two more mercs approached and took Cray by the arms. They led him over to the sarcophagus and placed him inside. An extraction team then moved in and began to hardwire his body with life support and fiber clusters. Cray went along blindly, his eyes almost catatonic.

  “No question,” Yin decided.

  He strolled away from the free agent, over to where Lea was just getting to her feet. She was unsteady, still cradling her shoulder. The Inru closed in on her, moving at Yin’s command, until they were close enough to fall on her with their fingernails and their fangs. Yin was waiting for the terror to appear on her face, but Lea had already resolved to deny him that. Instead, she kept her gaze leveled at him—seething with a violence that invited Yin to move closer, just so he could taste it for himself.

  “Whatever you have in mind,” she said, “you better make it quick.”

  Yin smiled. He had no such intentions.

  Yin granted Lea an unobstructed view, up in a glass booth that overlooked the core. A single row of control nodes lined the darkened space, linked to vital systems that ran throughout the facility and up into Point Eiffel. Reams of information poured out of virtual displays, assuming form as logical constructs that were monitored by a Japanese crew. From their tattoo scars, Lea had them pegged for ronin—disgraced gangsters who were denied the dignity of ritual suicide. Avalon methodically patrolled their stations, keeping a careful vigil. Hopped up on the same drugs as the Inru, the ronin looked like they had been down in it for some time.

  “Still you shed tears.”

  It was Yin who addressed her, projecting his insincere charm. It was true her crying had never stopped. Lea just hadn’t noticed—not until she saw her own likeness staring back at her.

  “All for a man who would destroy you,” Yin continued, shaking his head in pity as he came forward to join her. “Alden brought me countless heads in the time we worked together—but none he would have prized so much as yours. Heretic was his special project.” A lewd smirk crept across his lips. “I see now that he was yours.”

  Lea stole a sideways glance at one of the displays. One of the partitions spouted out a stream of cryogenic stats, which supplied data to form a construct of the sarcophagus itself. The vessel was sealed, filling up with the liquid elements that would take Cray down. His respiration was already at half-normal and dropping fast—though brain wave activity was still off the charts. He was aware of every moment, even as his body slipped into stasis.

  “Don’t push your luck,” Lea said, then turned around to face him. Tears evaporated under the heat of her resolve, a shift in the balance of power between them. “You can play your little games with the Inru, but don’t you dare try it on me.”

  Yin was curious.

  “What would you have me do?”

  “Put a stop to this,” Lea demanded. “You know as well as I do that the flash has no termination sequence. Once it’s active in a living system, extraction is impossible.”

  “Precisely as it was intended,” Yin explained. “The host genetic sequence must be irrevocably altered before flash-DNA can begin process
ing. Otherwise, the host would be dead in a matter of hours. We had hoped for a few more months of testing before actual deployment—but your friend Zoe altered the schedule.” He leaned over the window to observe Cray, and remarked, “All things considered, it worked out remarkably well.”

  “Then why do this?”

  Yin raised an eyebrow.

  “I should have thought that obvious by now.”

  Yin had made no attempt to hide his design. He had, in fact, walked Lea straight through it—but only now did she realize what she had seen.

  She whirled around in a panic, planting her hands against the window. Down in the core, sporadic pulses of energy were gathering around the sarcophagus, organizing themselves into tethers of coherent light. They traveled up and down the lengths of the spires, intertwining with one another in a delicate expression of intelligence, before returning to their point of origin and sinking back into a cryogenic void.

  “It’s beginning,” Yin said.

  Lea pushed past him, jumping onto one of the nodes. She grabbed some mixed packets of telemetry from the other stations and dumped them onto the virtual display. The resulting model clearly showed the corollary she had already worked out in her head: the further Cray went down, the more powerful those pulses became. If it continued, the core would be generating a supernova of energy by the time Cray flatlined.

  Going straight up through Point Eiffel.

  Lea went numb.

  “You’re projecting him into the Axis.”

  Yin didn’t acknowledge her, but it was all the confirmation Lea needed. Stars then rocked her vision, exploding from a steel vise that clamped down on her wounded shoulder. Cold breath creased the back of her neck, and Lea knew Avalon had her.

  The free agent yanked her away from the node, then spun her around. Avalon hooked one hand into a claw, meaning to finish Lea with a single stroke.

  “Wait,” Yin commanded.

  Avalon put Lea down, but held fast to both of her shoulders. She forced Lea to look at Yin, who approached with arms open and threatening. Lea knew what he wanted. She could smell it on him, that cheap anticipation.

  “You can’t do this,” Lea warned. “A bionucleic matrix can’t exist within the confines of logical space. The two will tear each other apart.”

  “Out of destruction comes salvation,” Yin replied. His words were as slow and deliberate as the steps he took. “Once the structure of the Axis collapses, those impenetrable walls protecting the Assembly will come tumbling down. Within moments, those old men will be drowning in a flood of chaos logic.”

  Avalon pushed Lea to her knees.

  “Think of it, Lea,” he said. “A whole new order, forged from your creation.”

  Lea grimaced, twisting her expression into a defiant smile.

  “With you,” she observed, “waiting in the wings to assume control.”

  Yin shrugged modestly. “The burden of leadership must fall to those willing to serve. Order will have to be restored—but only after a suitable period of revolution.”

  “Sounds like a real party,” Lea said, chewing on her pain. “Still, it’s not the end you had planned. Is that why you took those little coffin trips down there? So you could pretend that you were the one bringing the Assembly down?” She laughed at him—a pitying laugh. “It must really hack you that Cray is down there making history, while you’re sitting on your ass and watching.”

  Yin stopped. Lea had found his weakness: envy. That most human of failings.

  “How does it feel,” she goaded, “knowing that Zoe stole the only thing that ever mattered to you? Because I can tell you, it didn’t mean a damn thing to her.”

  Yin’s eyes went glassy, his hands clenched and quivering with rage. Slowly, deliberately, he held out one of those hands and demanded of Avalon:

  “Quicksilver.”

  The free agent gave him the blade. Lea was enthralled by the play of light across the weapon’s edge, as much as she was terrified of its singsong resonance. Yin raised it above her head, the clumsy move of a man who didn’t care where the blade landed—only that it would kill.

  He froze when the lights went out.

  Alarms filled the closed space of the control booth, different alerts from different stations melding into a cacophony of urgent warnings. The displays all went blank, coming back up with static as they lost their connections to the vital subsystems.

  Yin wrapped an arm around Lea’s throat, clutching her against his body while his eyes tried to make sense of the dark. Everything moved in strobe, a crazy patchwork of images tied together by azure light erupting out of the core.

  “What’s happening?”

  Avalon was an illusion in black. She vanished from Yin’s side, a blur in the brilliance as she crossed the room to emerge at the security station. There, she hard-linked her sensuit to the node, using its power to deliver enough juice to run the display. Raw numerics came pouring out, which Avalon placed in context with her own subdural processors.

  “Carrier breach,” the free agent reported. “Multiple levels, media and interface layers. The local domain scrammed itself to quarantine the point of incursion.”

  Lea felt Yin’s grip on her loosen.

  “Where?” he breathed.

  “Point Eiffel.”

  Yin shook his head in disbelief, his lips mouthing the word endless times before he finally got it out.

  “Impossible.”

  “Verified,” Avalon assured him. “Without domain control, the transmitter will cycle down. Residual ice should give us a few minutes of cover, but after that we won’t be able to contain our signature.”

  Yin breathed hard, the steam of his panic on the back of Lea’s neck.

  “Time,” he said.

  Avalon performed some calculations.

  “Three minutes.”

  Tremors from the core reflected off the hollow spaces of the surrounding catacombs, pounding its foundations with steady waves. Cray was breeding energy, its glow flooding the entire complex in a deep ocean blue. Lea guessed that three minutes was optimistic. With nothing to restrain him, Cray was on the verge of becoming unbound. When that happened, his bloom would be visible to every Collective satellite in orbit over the continent.

  “Fields collapsing,” Avalon said. “Quarantine is breaking down.”

  Yin lowered the quicksilver, absently dicing the air as his mind wandered. His body trembled against Lea, an emulsion of sweat and heartbeat.

  “Terminate cryogenic support,” he ordered. “Shut everything down—now.”

  Avalon tried, but the node wouldn’t respond. The numerics on the display froze, and a feedback alert sounded. It was only a soft beep, accompanied by a flashing indicator that washed Avalon’s face in crimson light—but in the utter silence of the booth, the sound was deafening.

  The free agent removed her glasses, affixing her ruined eyes upon Yin.

  “It’s too late,” she said. “They’re already here.”

  Covalent explosive penetrated the vault door, seeping in between the microscopic spaces that ran along its perimeter. When it ignited, the force of the blast was so confined that it turned back in on itself—thousands of times in the space of a millisecond, creating an implosion of such magnitude that it generated temperatures equivalent to a fusion laser. The circular edge of the door sublimated into hot energy plasma, consuming itself as it expanded outward—but gravity fueled the most violent stage of the reaction. Five hundred metric tons of steel started to buckle under the stress of its own weight, releasing a groan into the catacombs as it broke free from the enormous pins that held it in place.

  Everyone down in the core became still. It was a mirage at first, the bulge that appeared in the brushed surface of the door; but its growth was relentless, and brought several of the Inru closer to see. Their outlines appeared in silhouette against the glowing façade, motionless in spite of the white-hot embers that spilled out all around them. It was as if the dead on the other side had come ca
lling, and the Inru could not resist the compulsion to answer.

  The door collapsed in front of them.

  A solid wall of heat advanced on the Inru. Their bodies burst into flame as they were overtaken—becoming ash in an instant, still standing in the positions they assumed in life. Then oxygen rushed out of the core to feed the voracious fire, pulverizing those figures before sucking them into the molten crater left by the fallen vault door.

  That was when the ghosts of the catacombs appeared. Lea heard them before she saw them: a steady howl, coming up from the steam that rose out of the crater. Bone dust, impossibly thick and cold, blew in from the cathedral like a pyroclastic flow—a hurricane force that rushed back into the core to fill the momentary vacuum. The gray cloud snaked its way through the field of neural energy, responding to its flux and contours and assuming intelligent form as it descended upon the surviving workers. Lea caught glimpses of it in lightning flashes, but what she really tried to find was Cray. She was aware of him out in the confusion, a leader among the ghosts, and every bit as vengeful. But then he was gone, drawn back into the sarcophagus and his own physical being—and the cloud was left to play out the laws of physics.

  Lea saw it coming. She closed her eyes.

  The cloud smashed against the booth, shattering the windows like an explosive decompression. Lea lost her sense of everyone around her—everyone except for Phao Yin, who clutched her like a shield against the onslaught. They both stumbled backward against the full brunt of the wind, suddenly alone in the compressed reality that swirled around them.

  Reaching backward, she cupped her hands around the sides of Yin’s head and slapped down as hard as she could. Lea heard him scream. His arms fell away from her, and as they separated she steeled herself to take a breath. At the same time, she detected a sweet harmonic splitting the air between them—a swipe of the quicksilver blade, disjointed and fluttering as it tumbled out of Yin’s hand. Lea made an instinctive reach, and caught the weapon by the handle before it could hit the floor.