He can’t be real. He can’t.

My father smiles.

“Hello, peanut.”

His words crush me, steal the strength from my limbs. I lean against the tunnel wall to stop myself from falling.

Peanut.

That’s what he used to call me. Call Matilda. Call us.

I know he’s not my dad. Matilda was born—I hatched. In the deep fiber of my being, though, she and I are the same person. Which means no matter what this thing is, I feel a connection to him so powerful and so real it doesn’t matter who came from where.

This is my father.

Am I imagining this?

“Huan,” I say, “what do you see?”

“A man.” Huan sounds almost as shocked as I am. “A black-haired man with a mustache.”

“You’ve done well, peanut,” my father says. “We know that many of you died on the journey here. That is to be expected. Only the strong survive, and only the strongest merge.”

This is madness.

“You’re dead,” I say, my voice cracking on the words. “You’ve been dead for a thousand years.”

That smile…so warm, so loving.

“Think of me as an echo. An echo of a concerned parent, if you will, perhaps no different than the memory in your thoughts that lets me take this form.”

This is a memory? I don’t understand.

“Can you read my mind?”

“Not in the way you mean,” he says. “I drew from your experiences to find a form that is important to you.”

He can’t read my mind, but he can read my memories? I don’t know how those things are different.

He is anguish and heartbreak dragged from my past and sculpted into reality. My father. So many times I’ve wished I could meet him. Now here he is, but he’s not real. Whatever this thing is, it is cruel.

A tiny part of me is glad I’m not looking at an “echo” of O’Malley. I don’t know if I could take that.

Maybe this thing would have chosen my mother, but I don’t remember what she looks like. I don’t know her face.

Am I going insane? This whirlwind of emotions

—love and hate and terror and killing rage—

whips at me, makes it hard to see, impossible to think.

“Em,” Huan whispers. “Em, say something.”

My fingers flex on the handle of my knife.

Have to focus…I’m here for answers.

“My people received a signal,” I say. “Very long ago.”

My father shrugs. “Long is a relative term, peanut.”

“Don’t call me that!” I draw my knife, shake it at him even though I’m not sure if there’s anything really there that I can cut. “Did you send that signal, or not?”

“I did. But not for myself. As I told you, I’m an echo. I’m not real. You know one like me….his name is…ah, now I have it—his name is Ometeotl.”

The Observatory computer.

“You’re a machine,” Huan says. “A godsdamned robot?”

My father glances to the tunnel ceiling, a painfully natural, human expression—he’s thinking over Huan’s words.

“No, not a machine, but perhaps robot is close. I am a small piece of a sentient, biological organism.”

He smooths his mustache. He does this because I remember my father doing the same thing.

But…why my father?

“You take a form only I know,” I say. “Were you Huan’s mother before?”

My father nods. “I was. Now you are both here, and of the two of you, peanut, I sense you’re the natural leader—you are the stronger one.”

He isn’t talking about physical strength. He can look into our thoughts. Or, perhaps, into whatever passes for our souls. I don’t know what lies in Huan’s heart, but I know the blackness that buzzes within mine.

“Stronger,” I say. “To you, that means more violent, doesn’t it?”

My father’s smile widens.

“Violence and strength are the same thing. In all the history of all the worlds before this one, and in all the history of all the worlds yet to come, the violent always win. Those who are capable of committing violence, or getting others to commit violence for them, or who build systems that create mass violence, more efficient violence—those beings eliminate the opposition and, therefore, create the future.”

He’s spouting some kind of philosophy. I don’t care about that.

“The signal wasn’t for you,” I say. “So who was it for?”

He beckons us to follow him.

“Come. I will show you.”

He wants to take us deeper into this place of hate and fear.

I want to run away. I want to be with my friends, touch their faces, hear their voices, celebrate all that is real and solid and true.

But if I don’t get answers, those friends could die.

And I realize something ironic, something twisted and dark—I never met my real father, but I often feel his spirit within me.

He would expect me to be brave, to follow through.

If you run, your enemies will hunt you.

I will not run.

I sheathe my knife. “Lead on. Show me who did this to us.”

Huan glances at me, that guarded look again in his eyes. He hears the barely controlled rage in my voice. I’ve been hurt before, badly, but this is different—something has invaded me, forced its way into the most private place anyone can have.

And that something is going to pay.

My false father leads us into the tunnel on the right. A few meters farther is a narrow opening on our left.

“Do not be afraid of what you see next,” he says. “This could be the destiny of your people.”

He walks through the opening.

Huan and I follow, into a small cavern. Two flashlights aren’t nearly enough to light up the whole space.

Our beams play against something large, something with the satiny gleam of dull metal.

Metal…that moves.