CHAPTER FORTY-NINE—CONXENCE   

They met in a parking garage in the southern sector of the capital, one with four levels and a single camera at the entrance of dubious functionality.

The gray hatchback they were told to look for was already on the third level when they arrived, the only other vehicle there at that hour, with two men waiting outside. One of them, middle-aged with ash blonde hair and a roman nose, was smoking. The other wore a black surgical-style mask over the lower half of his face.

“Is that them?” Su said as Richard parked a few spaces down.

“The car fits the description,” Richard said, trying not to stare at them too directly. He felt like they were walking straight into a trap, into a world that would eat them alive.

“Wait here, Sesame,” he said, undoing his seatbelt.

“What?” Sesame whined. “I want to talk to them too.”

“Sentient robots aren’t really—a thing people know exist right now,” Richard said. “I’d like to make this as safe and streamlined as possible.”

“You’ll be talking about Heather,” Sesame protested. “It’s gonna come out anyway.”
Richard glanced in the rearview mirror and realized Sesame was waving to the two men. They exchanged a glance, surprised. The younger of the two, a twenty-something with black hair, multiple ear piercings, and the face covering lifted an uncertain hand in return. The older one put out his cigarette under his boot.

“See, they’ve seen me,” Sesame said. “It’s okay.”

Richard stifled an extremely heavy sigh and undid the child lock. “That wasn’t my point, but fine.”

Sesame was already on his way out of the backseat.

Richard took a steadying breath and got out of the car. The rebels waited until they were close.

The young one spoke first, “Are you Su-Wei?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Call me Su.”

The man’s monolid eyes scrunched in a calm smile and he extended a hand. His voice was warm and deep, “I’m Ganymede. We spoke on the phone.”

That could easily be an outright lie, Richard thought, recalling the cloaked voice. It made sense they’d want to protect their true identities, but it only increased his anxiety about trusting these people.

Su accepted the handshake. “This is my spouse, Richard, and this is Sesame.”

Sesame shook Ganymede’s hand, eager to participate. The rebel didn’t outwardly question it.

The older one also shook hands, considerably more serious. “Noran Kaczmarek. Friends call me Rann.”

Richard nodded, trying to suppress an urge to look at Su. She’d read him as much as she could dig up about the Conxence during the drive to the capital. Kaczmarek was the bold-faced leader of the entire operation.

“Thank you for meeting with us so urgently,” Su said.

“Of course,” Kaczmarek said. “So, run us through the situation in a little more detail. What are we up against?”

Su reviewed the background information through what had happened that night, leaving out the parts about organorobotic transference as before but including James’ infusion. Sesame was right, it was going to come up, but neither of them were ready to tell complete strangers about the complicated subject of their daughter’s trauma. As they spoke, Richard sent a text to the number of the device they’d been using to communicate with Heather: Meeting with the Conxence right now. We’ll keep you posted.

“They attempted to escape tonight, but failed,” Su was saying. Her throat tightened and she paused. Richard put a hand on her arm. “They were recaptured. Something was done to James, we think injected with Q-13. He, uh, burst into flames. Heather was connected with us at the time, so Sesame relayed the video footage to us, when you called me earlier.”

The Conxence members exchanged a glance.

“And you’re still not sure if Siles is dead?” Ganymede asked, surprised.

Su shrugged, and Richard offered, “Benson seemed surprised by the result, so we’re hoping maybe he made it through.”

“Do you have a photo of him and your daughter?” Kaczmarek asked.

Su pulled out her phone and searched through the photos, finally handing it over. On the screen was a snapshot they had taken at the beach, just a few days before Heather was kidnapped. She had roped Su and Richard into a selfie, despite Su’s protestations. Heather had made it her mission that weekend to get a good picture of her parents—the camera shy, and the un-photogenic—and she had been proud of this one.

The three smiling faces in the photo had no idea what horror awaited them.
With shaking hands, Richard searched through his own photos. He landed on a department photo and zoomed in. “And this is James.”

Kaczmarek and Ganymede leaned in, and Richard realized they both had a common disfigurement in the cartilage of their right ears, like a large hole had been clamped out of it. Ganymede wore a silver ring in his so that it accented his other earrings, while Kaczmarek had left his to scar.

“Young,” Kaczmarek commented. “He looks barely out of high school, yet he was one of your full time engineers?” He glanced at Richard. “Prodigy type?”

“He didn’t like the term,” Richard said quietly. “Or—doesn’t. I shouldn’t talk about him in the past tense.” Even though it was difficult not to. People didn’t burst into flames and survive.

“Did you approve of your daughter’s friendship with him?”

Richard hesitated. “Yeah, I guess. James was shy, and consumed with work, but I believed he was a good person. After the move, Heather didn’t have any local friends, and they were closest in age. She pestered him a bit, but I think she looked up to him, and she was interested in his work, which meant a lot to him.” He could feel Su’s gaze on him. She, too, had known James and Heather were friends at work, but didn’t think he was nearly as dangerous as he had proved to be. “And she brought him out of his shell, so he seemed to appreciate her company too.”

Kaczmarek nodded, thinking. “Supposing our rescue is successful, what will you do with him, as the one that dragged your family into all this?”

Su crossed her arms.

“We honestly haven’t thought that far ahead,” Richard admitted. “He says he didn’t mean for all this to happen.”

“Hm,” Kaczmarek grunted.

A long pause set in. Itching to shift the subject, Richard spoke up. “If I may ask,” he said, indicating his right ear. “What are those marks? Some kind of group signifier?”

The leader of the Conxence and his associate paused. Kaczmarek cracked a wry smile.

“Oh this?” he said, tugging on his ear and turning his head so they could see it better. “Gift from the feds, bestowed upon anyone arrested for ‘political deviance.’ Tags you as a threat.”

Richard hesitated. He looked at Ganymede, who nodded. The latter came as a surprise.

Kaczmarek exuded the calculating confidence of a seasoned rabble rouser, but Ganymede’s soft voice and kindness of expression didn’t quite fit the bill of what Richard had always imagined when hearing about the rebel group.

“Still up for associating with us?” Kaczmarek asked.

“Yes,” Su said, and Richard nodded, readjusting his glasses.

“Good. So, a high profile extraction. I’m sure Ganymede here has already warned you that we’ve never done a job quite like this, and that preparing for it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, is your daughter reasonably safe, at least?”

“We don’t know,” Su said.

“I see. And we’re not giving up the possibility Siles survived whatever Empetrum’s director did to him?”

Richard nodded along with his partner, trying to swallow the tightness in his throat. “Also, there’s another prisoner James and Heather wanted to break out. So the extraction would need to be for three people, if we can manage it.”

Ganymede blinked and Kaczmarek’s lean face broke out into an impressed grin.

“Well, we got our work cut out for us, then,” Kaczmarek said. He looked at Su. “In planning tonight’s escape attempt, I don’t suppose you picked up any of Empetrum’s security protocols that can help speed this along?”

“Not that specific,” Su said. “But Heather might, if she’s in a position to check in.”

Su handed over a folder from her bag containing a stack of printed pages, which held the contents of the flash drive Alice Benson had given them. “The defector we spoke with gave us this. They told us as much as they could, but they haven’t been near Empetrum in three years.”

Ganymede flipped through the pages while Kaczmarek read over his shoulder, arms crossed. Richard held his breath as the speakers for the Conxence read up on the nightmare lab he and his family had been pitted against.

“Human weaponry…” Kaczmarek mused. “Have you come across anything mentioning the ICNS?”

“No,” Richard said. “Though James said they were steering him into something other than the project he came in with. Could that be related?”

“Possibly.” Kaczmarek said. “Hope he really did make it. I’d like to talk with him and see what he knows. The government’s released what I guess you could call ‘human weapons’ just recently, and we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with them.”

“How recently?” Richard asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“About a week,” Ganymede said.

“But they’re not—” He glanced at Sesame, who knew where this was going. “—robotic, in any way, are they?”

The rebels looked at each other.

“No, they’re organic, as far as we can tell,” Ganymede said. “Why?”

Richard and Su hesitated. Sesame shifted from foot to foot, and Richard thought if he or Su didn’t speak up, the ex-mouse would.

Richard took a breath. Then he told them about organorobotic transference. About Sesame’s journey, about Heather.

The two stared at him. Even Kaczmarek looked nonplussed, and he seemed to Richard someone who didn’t truly surprise easily.

“I’ll admit, most of what I’ve heard about the Conxence is from the news,” Richard went on, before that information could sit for too long. Heather’s transfer was done. Reversal was impossible, and what mattered that night was bringing her home. “They say you’re a gang of anarchists and vigilantes…”

“And what do you think?” Kaczmarek said, eying him, as if sizing him up, looking into his soul and assessing what he saw there. Something about this man seemed dangerous, but Richard wanted more than anything to trust him. The leader of the rebellion, perhaps the only person left with the resources to organize a successful rescue mission, who also, miraculously, both believed them and seemed willing to help.

“Unless she manages to escape on her own,” Richard said. “I think you may be our best shot of getting our daughter home.”

+

CHAPTER FIFTY—CHANGED

After the initial meeting with the Conxence, Kaczmarek and Ganymede took the Knights and their robotic charge to an unmarked brick building in a decrepit district of the capital. The area appeared to have once hosted business parks, but for reasons unknown to the Knights, had since been abandoned.

Ganymede drove the Knight’s car. He turned the headlights off, driving slowly past dark, condemned houses with overgrown yards, and long stretches of homeless encampments on the fringes of dead and mouldering office blocks. Richard had heard once that this was a signal used by local gangs, which only increased his apprehension.

The outside of their destination wasn’t any more reassuring, and Richard held his breath as they followed Ganymede and Kaczmarek through a back door and up a narrow stairwell, landing on an old linoleum hallway that seemed sturdy, at least. They went to a large meeting room to start setting up for planning, but Richard and Su were starting to feel the strain of everything that had happened that night. Ganymede suggested they rest and pick things up the next morning.

“You’re probably right,” Su said. “What’s done is done. There’s nothing we can do for them tonight, and we’re not going to be much help with stripped nerves.”

Ganymede directed them to a different room, in which they found a couple couches around a central coffee table, and a mini fridge in the corner. Sesame plugged himself into an outlet, and Richard and Su made up a bed on a pullout couch with clean sheets and pillows from a nearby closet. Ganymede had said they were clean, anyway. They just had to take his word for it.

Richard lay still in the dark, listening to the soft rumble of voices across the hallway as the rebels regrouped, and prepared to sign off for the night as well. Footsteps filtered past their door, and the foreboding din of sirens wailed in the distance.

Richard closed his eyes, breathing a shaky sigh. Su lay her head against his shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” Sesame said quietly from where he sat hooked up to the electrical outlet. “I’ll stay awake and keep watch.”

“Thank you, Sesame,” Su said quietly.

“Do you trust them?” Richard didn’t know why he was asking. Hoping Sesame had retained some animal intuition, perhaps.

“I don’t know,” Sesame said. “I want to, though.”

“Me too,” Richard said.

+

James felt the pain before he even knew he was awake.

A heart monitor beeped languidly beside him, the sound oddly muffled. He thought the wires running across his chest had been fused to him, because there was something very wrong with his skin. When he tried to move, he felt it stitching, as if all his tissues were melted together, held intact by tiny metal barbs. His head throbbed, and his eyes felt hot and sticky in their sockets. His mouth tasted like copper.

He managed to crack open one eye, and the air needled cruelly on its dry surface. Slowly, he turned his head and opened the other eye, craning his painful, stitching neck to take stock of himself and expecting to see a charred mass. He vaguely remembered being on fire.

There were electrodes taped to his bare chest, the latter miraculously whole. Jagged patterns of dark unnatural black engulfed his ribcage, like ink spilled under the skin. Dimly, wincing, he bent his arms upward to find them swirled and zigzagged with the same dark hue. His hands completely drowned in it. Anything not claimed by the stain was red and swollen and peeling like a bad sunburn.

He realized then, that he wasn’t strapped down. Instead, he was enclosed in a cylindrical chamber with a transparent, domed lid. Some kind of pressurized oxygen chamber, he guessed.

He stared up through it at the paneled ceiling in dumb, emotional shock. As he slowly grew more lucid, he could only despair about what he and Heather were supposed to do now.

How had he even survived the infusion? No one survived the Q-13, Yeun had said. Not even Benson had expected him to make it.

He lifted a trembling hand to his jugular to feel his heartbeat for himself. He really was alive. But now would come the tests and humiliation, the poking and prodding and eventual dissection.

He closed his aching eyes. Being a test subject meant his only interactions with Heather would be when Benson used them against each other. The time for mind games had passed. The director would likely give him black and white options from here on out: Comply or die.

He couldn’t believe that after everything, Heather had refused to leave him behind. The whole purpose of their escape attempt was to get her home. She didn’t owe him anything.

Why couldn’t she have just left him behind?

He thought he heard a sound, greatly impeded by the transparent acrylic chamber. He opened his eyes to see Benson had entered the room with a couple of guards. James blinked and returned his gaze to the ceiling, pain rising in his chest.

Benson reached down to a panel on the outside. His voice purred clearly in James’ enclosed bubble, making him feel increasingly claustrophobic. “You even made it through the night. I’m impressed.”

James winced, turning his head just enough so he could see him. He felt like he would disintegrate if he did anything quickly.

Benson slid a computer tablet off a nearby cart, consulted the panel at the base of the oxygen chamber, and made notes. The heart monitor continued to beep.

“Your vitals seem to have stabilized,” Benson muttered, as if mainly speaking to himself, though the speaker was still on. The right side of his face was swollen and bruising under a large bandage. “I look forward to finding out why.”

James swallowed with difficulty. It hurt. It hurt to breathe, to see, to think.

“Where is Heather?” he rasped.

“In her cell.”

“Have you…”

Benson switched off the speaker and stepped away from the chamber, ignoring him. James blearily watched him and the guards wash their hands in the sink across the room and don sterile gloves, coats, and face masks. Then Benson moved to the head of the chamber outside James’ field of vision. He heard clamps pulling back. The panel came free with a hiss of air.

“Don’t move,” Benson warned. He motioned for the guards to come over. They took hold of the edge of the frame holding up James’ thin inclined mattress, unhooked some safeguards, and carefully pulled the whole setup out of the chamber like a gurney. The air outside was freezing cold, like ice water soaking deep into his bones.

“Why was I in there?” James asked, shivering.

“Your skin was too fragile post-infusion to tolerate much contact,” Benson said, as one of the guards tugged straps out from under the mattress.

Benson turned off the heart monitor and carefully took to removing the electrodes from James’ stained chest. The adhesive seemed mild, yet the removal still ripped skin. James gasped as the sensation rippled around the removal point like Benson had carved the electrodes out with serrated spoon instead of simply pulling them.

Benson’s eyes tightened in annoyance. Once it became obvious there was no way to remove the electrodes without damage, he took less care in removing the others. James braced himself, his nerves sizzling in the strain.

The director disconnected the electrodes from the wires and put them in separate specimen bags, while James lay back, short of breath and sweat standing out on his forehead. He closed his eyes and felt tears track down his face, all his strength gone.

He faded in and out of consciousness as he felt the guards slip gauze around his wrists first, then straps. Benson made a physical examination, listening to his breathing, heartbeat, testing the quality of the stained and unstained parts of his skin, swabbing his mouth for DNA, and taking a series of photographs. Finally, deciding James wasn’t an infection risk, he ordered him taken to a cell.

They wheeled him out of the room, which he discovered was on the basement level, and down to the cell blocks. Anxiety bloomed up James’ spine as he realized the cell he’d been assigned to was the one next to Hodgson’s.

With Benson overseeing the operation from a distance, they took him inside the cell and up to the bed, where they lowered the gurney and undid his restraints.
The guards helped him sit up, the touch of their hands stinging and painful on his seared shoulders. He slipped his legs over the side of the bed, and, bracing his arms on theirs, they slowly raised him up.

James set his jaw, struggling to breathe while an unsettling, gauzy crackling overtook his body in the transition—like the metal barbs stapling his cells, crushed together, were now splitting apart as his muscles stretched. They practically dragged him over to the other bed, where there sat a change of clothes and blankets.

“How nice,” James muttered, weak and winded. “Thought a concrete floor was going to be it for me…”

Benson scoffed as he and his assistants took their leave. “Don’t push your luck.”

The door closed behind them, leaving James alone. He sat still for several long moments, then found a sweatshirt in the pile of gray and fluorescent orange fabric and pulled it on. The fibers scratched against his tender skin, but James was so cold. Nothing helped it.

Carefully, agonizingly, he planted his feet apart. After a long while, he very slowly stood up, his attention on the acrylic mirror mounted above the sink. He was extremely dizzy and sick to his stomach, but he managed to shuffle across the room. Now that he’d been awake for more than a few minutes, he had begun to feel desperately thirsty.

He managed to make it to the opposite wall, but he was afraid to look in the mirror. He instead focused on the faucet, insulating his hand with the sleeve of the sweatshirt before pulling the lever. The action sent deep, groaning pain stitching up his hand and arm. He cupped his stiff, fragile hands under the modest water stream and endured several types of pain in his back enough to bend over and bring the water to his lips. It cooled his dry throat like liquid hope. And for just a moment, he felt relief.

He lifted his gaze to the small mirror above the sink, and that relief gave way to blank despair as he saw his reflection. The black stood out starkly against his pale skin. A curling stripe of it claimed the left side of his face, webbed and veiny at the edges as it ran over his cheek, down the side of his throat and under the collar of the sweatshirt. The ebony skin was smooth and cool to the touch, and everything else was swollen and tender, with burst blood vessels that were more black than red.

Patches of his brown hair had been burnt off at odd angles. His left eyebrow and eyelashes had met the same fate, everything above the black stripe burnt clean.

Even more disturbing, he realized his hazel irises had turned gold, reminiscent of the color of the Q-13 before it had entered his veins. As if he had become an incarnation of the substance itself.

The word “metamorphosis” tapped like a long fingernail at the back of his mind.

He took hold of both sides of the sink, his face going cold and a sudden high pitched ringing in his ears. He heard his breath rushing muffled and strained in his head. He tried to sit down on the floor, his joints cracking and protesting as if cushioned with glass.

He lost his bearings and sat down hard, his shoulders hitting the concrete panels of the wall. A shiver of needles radiated from the contact point, then heavy pain like the grinding of cinder blocks between his bones. His body seized up and he collapsed onto his side, a snarl of utter agony pulling from his throat.

After several eternal moments, the sensation began to fade, and James lay panting on the floor, the sound of water running in the sink keeping him dimly tethered to consciousness. Behind its obnoxious spluttering, a voice filtered into his cell from above.

“Hello?” it said. “Anyone alive in there?”

James opened his eyes. The prisoner cells were encased in concrete, but at the top of the walls dividing them spread a narrow span of empty space covered in a mesh of metal.

He realized the voice had to be Hodgson’s. Everything was hazy.

“I think so…” he said, wincing from the exertion.

“What is your name?” Hodgson asked.

Very slowly, he forced himself to sit up. His throat tightened, and tears welled up in his eyes. He exhaled, trying to get ahold of himself.

“I know you must be scared, and unsure of what’s happening to you,” Hodgson said. “But you’re not alone. I’m Erika.”

Benson probably suspected they had been in contact the night of the escape attempt, and had caged them in close proximity with hopes they’d incriminate themselves. Though, how that would benefit him, he wasn’t sure. To punish Yeun, perhaps.

“My name is James,” he said finally, hoping Erika understood the danger.

An extremely long silence answered him.

He carefully drew his knees to his chest. Bowing his forehead on them, he crossed his aching arms over his stomach.

Finally, she said, “Yeun’s lab partner?”

“Not anymore,” James said.

“What happened?”

“I tried to get a prisoner out but we got caught,” James said, hoarsely. “Benson injected me with his pet project.” His voice wavered. “I don’t think I was supposed to survive it. I don’t know if I have yet.”

Another long silence ensued, as she grappled with what both of them knew they could not say where someone could hear them. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” James said. He didn’t know if his survival was a second chance, or just a slower death.

He wanted to hope the former, but it was only a matter of time before Benson wanted to see if his serum worked.

In the silence, he debated asking Erika to take care of Heather after he was gone.

He almost did.

+

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE—PLOTTING

Heather activated the pain simulator intermittently to check in. She received a text from Richard saying they were meeting with the Conxence, and then later, that they had agreed to take up their case. She couldn’t believe the very same rebel militia she had been afraid was after her dad at the beginning of the summer had become their allies. She hoped Benson was as afraid of them as she suspected. 

Since James’ traumatic infusion, the director seemed to be ignoring her for the most part, and she spent her time trying to squirm out of the rubber straightjacket binding her limbs, and wracking her brains on what her next steps were. Benson might have thought he’d already won, but this would never be over until one of them destroyed the other.

A faint sound attracted her attention, filtering through the vents at the top of the prisoner cells. A cry of pain. Heather tipped her face up, her eyes wide. She accessed the memory and replayed the sound several times in her mind, trying to figure out what it was, and it simultaneously broke her heart and made her dizzy with relief to find she recognized the pitch of that howl. James had survived.

Heather climbed up on her cot close to the vent, turning up her hearing as high as she could and listening hard. She heard Hodgson’s voice, “Hello? Anyone alive in there?”

Then James. “I think so…” He sounded weak, frustrated, but coherent.

The conversation was short and basic, and then silence settled in. After listening longer, with no change, Heather adjusted her hearing back to baseline and sat down on the bed, activating the pain simulator to let her family know James was still a factor in further rescue efforts. She clung to that tentative spark of hope and relief, that all three of them would see freedom if they could just hold on. 

+

Planning began the next morning. A young femme-presenting person with large rimmed glasses and a bomber jacket who introduced themself as Jaeger joined them. Richard gleaned that they were Kaczmarek’s intelligence and technology specialist, and together, they began organizing all the information they had about Empetrum’s layout and operations.

At one point, Sesame managed to make contact with Heather and spent the next hour downloading over their spotty cellular connection her visual memories of the escape attempt, from which Jaeger built out a map of the facility—where the prisoner cells were, and what it took to get to them. During this process, Heather mentioned the name of the other prisoner, which all the Conxence members present were shocked to recognize.

“I told her not to go anywhere near that place!” Kaczmarek declared. “Of all the stubborn, reckless—” He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Ganymede crossed his arms on the table, troubled. At the Knights’ quizzical stares, he explained, “There was a death in her family, and she told us she was going to stay with them and needed to take a break from the movement, so I never thought to check. Her family must be worried sick. Do we have their contact info?”

“Heather does,” Sesame said. Heather was still connected, participating in the planning as much as she could stand, though she had to take breaks from the pain simulator. “Erika gave it to her.”

Sesame relayed the phone number, and Ganymede excused himself to make the call.

It was all so hard for Richard and Su to swallow. Heather tried to omit parts and pull punches in her own narrative, and Richard suspected Sesame further cleaned it up before passing it along, possibly even at her request. Richard wished she would be more open with them, so they could attempt to comfort her across the distance.

But Heather wasn’t looking for comfort in that moment. There would be time to grieve when she was safe at home, with James and Erika in tow.

Finally, after looking over the data, Kaczmarek sat back with crossed arms. “We’ll have to stake out the location from a distance before we even think about getting close. Then, a small infiltration to gain access to their systems—bootleg access badges, futz with cameras et cetera. After that, the extraction of three prisoners will likely get chaotic on the way out. I think I know how to get my hands on some equipment to help with that.”

Richard balked. “Equipment? You don’t mean…”

“Tranqs, gas, stun grenades,” Kaczmarek said without skipping a beat, watching how each of the list items landed. “We already have a good supply of smoke bombs.” He cast a grin at Jaeger. “We make ‘em in house.”

“We never use lethal force,” Ganymede gently assured the Knights.

“Just deeply unpleasant force,” Jaeger smirked. Then it was back to business. “What kind of device is Heather using to communicate? Maybe she can meet us in the middle for phase two.”

“She doesn’t know the mechanics of it,” Su said. “We’d have to ask James for that, but I doubt we can get ahold of him at this point, if he’s even conscious.”

“We’ll make do,” Kaczmarek said.

“I don’t mean to sound rude by asking this,” Richard spoke up, “But, why are you helping us? Empetrum is dangerous, and involved, and I’m sure is taking you away from other work. How are you benefitting from this?”

Ganymede glanced at the leader of the Conxence, who looked at Richard, his dark eyes steady and calculating. Kaczmarek leaned forward, lacing his fingers together on the table.

“In plenty of ways,” Kaczmarek said, choosing his words carefully. “On an immediate level, I’ll be damned if I let a government lab take children and get away with it. More transactionally, we’ll be retrieving one of our own, and moving on Empetrum will likely give us more information on the sudden rabbit hole of sentient bioweaponry we’ve fallen into.” He smiled. “So you could say I’m looking to karma for this one.”

Richard nodded and exchanged a glance with Su. Sesame sat next to her, watching Kaczmarek especially closely.

The door opened behind them, and a voice spoke up, “I’m here! Finally. How far did we get?”

Richard, Su, and Sesame twisted around to look at the young woman who had just entered.

Striding across the room like a champion returned to her king, she was the image of everything Richard had stereotyped the Conxence to be—cocky, athletic, and crackling with aberrant energy in a skull jacket and skinny jeans. In the gap between a black face mask and baseball cap bloomed a large dark bruise on her eye socket. She looked proud of it.

Ganymede’s expression clouded for a moment, his attention on her black eye. Then he smiled, gesturing her way, “This is Io, one of our main squad leaders. She’s agreed to work on this mission too.”

“Hey,” Io said, shaking Richard and Su’s hands with a firm grip. When Sesame extended a hand, she grinned and shook it too.

“Sorry I’m late. Day job woes,” Io said, dropping into the empty seat beside Ganymede. “So, bring me up to speed, how close are we to marching orders?”

+

Erika had a physical therapy session with Yeun that afternoon, and from the moment he appeared in her cell subdued and exhausted rather than his sunny, chatty self, she mulled over how wise it would be to ask him about James.

She burned with curiosity. Benson’s biggest threat to her had been to take her memories and sell her off to the military’s existing Compatible squadron. Siles’ actions, however, had earned him swift and explosive attempted homicide, and Erika wondered how anyone could have riled up the cold, invulnerable director so much. Empetrum was enough of a cult that she would have thought it standard protocol, except for how much it had disturbed Yeun.

“I heard your lab partner was a turncoat,” she said finally, once they were a few minutes into the session.

Yeun winced, handing a weighted ball to her right accessory arm. She sympathized with James and the robot, but it was also morbidly satisfying to watch how much drama their uprising had created among the other scientists.

Yeun didn’t answer.

“Benson did something to him and dumped him in the cell next to mine.” Erika said. “That’s weird, isn’t it? He was supposed to help you fix my modulators, and after a single misdemeanor, he’s even worse off than me? What kind of dumpster fire are you guys running here?”

“It wasn’t a single misdemeanor,” Yeun said, his voice a tired, worried monotone, as if trying to justify it to himself. “But that’s the director’s business.”

Silence sat between them as Erika worked. Her arms were finally starting to feel remotely useful. 

Yeun stood by, brooding. She hadn’t known it was possible for cheery sunflower Elias Yeun to brood. 

“Have you spoken with him at all?” Yeun asked finally.

“A little.” If she denied it, they’d find out she was lying anyway. They hadn’t said anything incriminating, and the resources James and the robot had given her were still safely stashed under the sink.

“What did he say to you?”

“Not much. He said he was sorry.”

“I bet he did,” Yeun muttered. As she finished a set and switched to a new exercise, she considered the dark rings under his eyes. 

Even though the escape attempt had failed, James had changed something. Broken something. 

“It seems like what happened actually affected you,” Erika said.

“Well yeah,” Yeun rubbed the back of his neck. “He was going to be my lab partner. He was a brilliant engineer and a decent person. I liked him.”

“You’re talking like he’s already dead.”

“He crossed the director,” Yeun said, not looking at her. “He might as well be.”

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