If I stand by what we did, why then did we wish to keep it a secret? The answer lies in perception. We can’t change what happened in the past, but we can use it to direct the future. And because we had to keep the narrative under our control for it to be successful, any threat to our particular version of it had to be silenced.

—Mil Cothi, personal journal

“What? They’re coming here? Why didn’t you lead with that?” Oliver asked.

“We—” Flustered, Ryan reddened.

“Never mind. We need to decide what to do, now,” Oliver said. All eyes turned to the head of the table. “Mil?”

“Ethan knows where we are—”

“Thanks to you,” Oliver interrupted. “How long until they get here?”

Ryan scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know. Ethan said they needed to ‘do it right.’ They’ll take their time, gathering weapons, making a plan.”

“Aren’t they worried we’ll run?”

“A woman with him said that Mil would never leave his life’s work behind. She seemed pretty confident that you would stay. Is that true?”

The lines on Mil’s face deepened. “It is. I couldn’t run anyway, even if I wanted to. You know that, Lily. I don’t have a lot of time left.”

“So what will you do?”

“We can collapse the mine tunnel entrance into the compound. They won’t be able to get in. We have years’ worth of supplies here. We can wait for a very long time.”

Oliver snorted. “Well, that’s great, but we won’t be able to get out. So how does that help us?”

“There is another way out of here, an emergency exit. It comes out several miles away.”

“I’d say this qualifies as an emergency. How do we know they won’t find that exit?”

“We don’t. But there are also five false exits.”

“False exits?”

“They look like exit tunnels on the outside, and they do lead into the hill, but not to here. There’s a warren of mining tunnels. Only one leads to the compound. The rest…it’s a maze down there, miles of it. A person could get easily lost.” Mil smiled dourly.

“What if they dig us out?”

“They can certainly try. It’ll take them a long time, and they’d have to be careful. Blasting the tunnel will make it very unstable. Then there’s the matter of the doors. They’re built to withstand explosions. They can try and blow them up, but they’d risk taking down the whole place, and Ethan would know that.”

“So you’re saying we should just stay here?”

“No. But I am saying that we have time.”

“What about them?” Cindra nodded toward Ryan and his family.

“You’re welcome to stay with us, of course,” Lexa replied. “Cindra, why don’t you take them into the kitchen, fix them up with something to eat? Then they can have a shower and get cleaned up. We…we have a few spare rooms upstairs.”

Lily stood on unsteady legs. “Thank you, Lexa. All of you. I’m so sorry that it’s come to this.”

Cindra led them to the kitchen, wrapping her arm around Grace’s thin shoulders.

I pushed myself away from the table and stood up. “I’m going after Callum. I’m certain Umbra is behind this corruption.”

“You’re positive it wasn’t Ethan and the others?” asked Fane. “How can you be sure? I thought you were staying out of Callum’s mind.”

“I’m pretty confident. I don’t dare go into Callum’s head the way I normally would, but when I was out after my—after what happened in Goldnesse, I saw scraps from everyone. Callum and Umbra were arguing. Callum was trying to stop her, saying we would find out. She seemed to know what was happening to us.”

“That’s a bit vague, don’t you think?” Lexa asked.

“Oh, and he also wrote her name on his wall in blood. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

Oliver shook his head. “I agree that we underestimated her. I can understand how she managed to corrupt some of the nanites—I mean, she was surrounded by them and she’s part of Callum’s system—but I still don’t understand how they got from him to us. I—"

“Through me,” I said, closing my eyes as the realization hit me. I turned to Fane. “Remember when you found me in the hallway? And I said she’d tried to do something to me and all she could manage was to breathe on me?”

Understanding lit his face. “They’re airborne. She released them in that breath, and you inhaled them.”

“And then I must’ve passed them to everyone else,” I finished. “But how?”

“The coughing,” Oliver said.

“Coughing?”

“Remember? In your room, when we were all gathered there? When Tor and Fane were butting heads like two rutting stags? You were coughing everywhere. And if the corrupted nanites were airborne…”

Even though it was far too late, I covered my mouth with my hand. “Could she do it again?” I asked Oliver from behind my fingers. “Or worse?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea what she’s capable of, or what’s going to happen to Callum now.”

“We need to find them. We can decide what to do once we’ve got them back.”

“I’ll come with you,” Fane volunteered. “She was interested in me. Maybe I could speak to her.”

“I’ll come too,” Tor said. “But how do we find them?”

“I don’t know. I should be able to get a sense of his general direction. But then Umbra will know we’re coming.”

“Actually, I think I can help with that,” Pax said.

“I thought you didn’t want to influence the variables.”

“This information won’t. The variables occur around the moment of interaction. Umbra wants to be like Fane, right? And Callum knows everything that happened to us on the road?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the one place an artilect would be welcome?”

My stomach twisted. “The Saints of Loving Grace.”

“I think so. That’s where I would go.”

“If that’s the case, that changes things,” Oliver said. “They shouldn’t be capable of doing anything with Umbra, but I didn’t think she’d be capable of doing what she’s done, either. If she gets to them, and they’re able to do something with her—”

“They don’t have the technology, Oliver. There’s no way.”

“Ethan,” Pax said.

“What? What does Ethan have to do with this?” I asked.

“If the Saints somehow manage to salvage Umbra, and Ethan finds out about her and has control of the compound…Callum—and by proxy, Umbra—knows what Ethan could do with the right equipment. And if Ethan wants to start recreating AI…”

“Complete and utter clusterfuck,” Oliver finished. “Goddamn. You guys need to go now. And don’t worry about bringing him back alive. It’s the safest option.”

“I hate to agree, but Oliver’s right,” Tor said gently.

“We at least need to talk to Callum first. But I agree, if we have to, we’ll kill them,” I added as Oliver seemed about to protest my diplomacy. There has to be another way.

“You can’t all leave,” Lexa said. “We’re about to be under attack. What will we do without you?”

I turned to her. “You’ll deal with it, Lexa. You planted these seeds. Think of it as a bitter harvest.”

“What do you mean? We had nothing to do with what happened in—”

“Stop lying to us.”

“What’s going on?” Cindra had rejoined us, her eyebrows raised at the sharpness of my tone.

I looked at Oliver. “Do you want to tell them, or should I?”

“You tell them. I want to savor the moment.”

“We know about the silver rain.”

Mil and Lexa looked at each other. Mil put his head in his hands, exhausted at last. “It isn’t what—”

“Stop. You can’t say that. After everything you’ve done, it doesn’t matter what we think. What matters is what you did.”

“What did they do?” Tor’s gaze bored into me as though to say, When did you stop telling me things?

“They created the silver rain. Pantheon Modern dropped a number of bombs during the war, and not just here. They weren’t meant to destroy anything, but Pantheon Modern knew that the particles from them would mix with the ash, and the wind would spread them like dandelion seeds. The bombs contained our nanites and some kind of catalyst. Their intention was to cyberize people in mass numbers. It would take only a small amount, consumed, or even absorbed into a person’s wounds. I mean, everybody had at least one of those, right? Sure, many of them would die, but enough would survive. Only the catalyst wasn’t ready. So instead, it ended up killing everyone.”

Cindra grabbed Oliver’s arm for support. “Lexa, Mil, is this true?”

Their silence was the only confirmation any of us needed.

“But why? Why would you do something like that? What would’ve happened to those who survived?”

“We-we wanted to level the playing field. We didn’t have the power the Terrans and Cosmists did. When we knew the war was about to happen, that there was no way to stop it, we did what we could. We believed the Cosmists were bent on total annihilation, that they wanted a clean slate from which to build their race of artilects. They didn’t care about the human race anymore. They wanted it out of the way. We thought…if we could create enough of you, we could still save people, non-cyborgs. We wanted to salvage what we could, still act as the bridge between human and machine.”

“So Oliver’s ‘death-squad’ theory? Was that true?”

“Of course not. Yes, you were divided into squads and given special abilities, but it wasn’t to hunt down surviving humans. It was to lead the other cyborgs.”

“But why? Why make cyborgs this way? Why not just keep going the way you were?”

“Because we were losing. There was too much pressure from the Terrans and the Cosmists. All our research, our programs, our funding…all of it was to be taken away. We thought if we could show people how useful it was to be a cyborg, how having enhancements was in their best interests—”

“So you decided what their best interests were then tried to force cyberization on them? Like a pair of over-zealous missionaries?” Oliver interrupted. “Did you actually think people would accept that?”

“How did you find out about all this?” Tor asked.

“When I touched one of the victims of the silver rain, I understood what she was thinking. Like a very muted version of what I can do with the rest of you. And so I asked Oliver to do some digging. But that wasn’t all he found. We also found out about Ella.”

Lexa covered her face with her hands.

“Ella? You mean the woman Eire keeps asking you about? Where is she?” Cindra looked over her shoulder, as though expecting Ella to reveal herself.

“In a box. In a store room. Well, part of her, anyway. She found out about the silver rain, and they killed her. Only, Lexa here thinks she’s a good person, so she kept as much of her consciousness as she could.”

“We didn’t know what else to do,” Lexa whispered. “Everything had gone so wrong. We thought more people would’ve survived. If she’d told anyone—”

“She wasn’t the only one who knew, Lexa. I think Eire also knew. Like Pax, she can see through time. Only, she can see what already happened rather than what could happen. She said you’d done terrible things. Are you going to kill her now as well?”

“It doesn’t matter now. None of this matters now.” Weariness creased Lexa’s eyes.

“Maybe not to you. But it does to me. After we stop Umbra, I’m leaving. I won’t be returning.” Tor had stepped back, as though he was already gone.

“Are you coming back, Ailith?” Pax asked me aloud.

“I am, but only for the rest of you, if you’ll come with us. And to bury my father. Then we’ll leave here. We’ll find our own place to call home.”

“What about us? Mil and me? We created you. Made you what you are.”

“Mil will never leave here, Lexa, he said it himself. As for you, you’re on your own. Stay here, go somewhere else. I don’t care, as long as it’s far away from us.”

She tried one last time. “But what about our equipment? You’ll need supplements and checkups. What if something goes wrong with you?”

“We’ll take what we can with us.” I glared at her. “And I know you’re not going to try to stop us, or damage anything while we’re gone. Oliver will see to that.”

Oliver winked at Lexa, amused by her dismay.

“What about Eire? How will we take her with us? We can’t leave her behind.”

“I think I may have a way to wake her up now, Cindra. Be ready to go by the time we come back.”

She nodded. “How are you going to do it?”

“We’re going to give her what she’s been looking for: Ella.”