Kat drove while I sat in the back seat with Danae, attending to all the injuries I could see and understand.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” I said. “We’re close to Redhill. We’ll be there in minutes. That’s where your people are, right?”
Her hand twitched briefly inside the gauze I was wrapping around it, as if she were dreaming.
“No, not your people,” I corrected myself. “You. It’s the rest of you.”
She gave no sign she could hear me.
A single drop of blood trickled from the tiny puncture in the side of her forehead. I found a sealant patch and pressed it there, but it felt useless. Kat was right: we had no idea what the real wound was—what those needle-thin marks signified. I could only stare at her all-but-lifeless body and dread to imagine what was going on behind her eyelids, or whether she was still there at all.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the stranger. I kept instinctively reaching for the memory of who he was, who he had ever been, but it wasn’t there anymore. My grief over Naoto had similarly faded, and I felt as hollow inside without it as Danae looked, slumping against the slit window.
“Any news about the war?” I asked Kat—reaching instinctively for something even worse to think about.
She twisted her hands nervously on the steering wheel. “They didn’t break out the really nasty cyberwarfare until last night, but now it’s on every satellite in the sky, either to snatch them up for war business or just shut them down. Every piece of nodespace hardware I have left”—she motioned vaguely at the piles of electronics strewn around the cab—“is trying to brute-force its way through all that, but the bandwidth is shit out here, and so far I can’t break through. I haven’t heard any news since this morning.”
“How did it look this morning?”
Her reflection in the windshield visibly tensed, and her voice cracked to say, “Not good, Lex.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she held it back.
“We must be inside ten klicks of your destination,” she said. “I don’t suppose you know which of all these red hills is the specific one she wants?”
The landscape spread around us now was like no place I’d ever seen, though it resembled my imagination of the surface of Mars. The broken road had snaked out of the open desert and into a valley walled by mesas and buttes: mountain-sized fingers and toes sticking up out of the sandy earth; klick after klick of increasingly odd formations of striated stone, the colors of rust and blood, glowing ominously in the last sunlight.
Kat squinted into the heads-up display. “This whole area seems totally deserted. We haven’t passed a single sign of recent settlement or picked up any artificial heat or electromag since we left the trade road. If there’s anyone else out here, they’re real good at hiding. Any ideas?”
I watched the map trace and retrace itself in holographic light, but it was nothing but lines and curves to me. I shook my head.
“We’re running on empty,” Kat said bitterly. “If there’s nothing here, we’re boned.”
It was hard enough for me to wrap my head around what the rest of Danae’s unified being was. I had no idea what it would look like. I stared ahead into the surreal landscape, searching for anything at all besides sand and rock.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Something was watching me. I turned and saw what it was.
Danae’s eyes were open, staring at me. Blank, emotionless, empty.
I said her name, but it sounded like a question: Are you still you?
Hearing it, she blinked slowly. Her eyes seemed to search the air in front of her for the answer, until finally she nodded as if to say yes—but the motion was unsteady, tinged with visible dread. She balled the thin blanket in her fists and cringed hard. Yes, her body language replied but.
“What happened?” I asked. I grabbed my shard and ran Kat’s exploit program to unlock Danae’s cuffs, not bothering to ask Kat’s permission.
“I killed him,” Danae said. “I killed Luther. But not before . . .” She trailed off.
I saw her trembling, coming apart. I shouldn’t have asked, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Not before what?”
“We did unify. For a fraction of a second. It wasn’t a full unity. There wasn’t enough time for all of him to cross over. Only a small fragment, surface-level memories of the past few days, but that fragment of him is . . . it’s part of me now, and I—”
She started to dry heave. I found an empty food package in the back seat and helped her hold it long enough to vomit up whatever little she’d eaten in the past day. I gave her water, though we didn’t have much left.
“It’s going to be part of me forever,” Danae stammered. “He bombed Bloom City. He killed so many people.”
Kat was watching us nervously in the rearview mirror. “Was he acting alone? There’s a lot of details around Dahlia’s death that don’t add up, and inquiring minds want to know.”
“Yes, he—” Danae turned to answer, but the view through the windshield seemed to startle her. “We’re . . . we’re near Redhill?”
I nodded.
“Stop this thing,” she said. “Please. Stop here and turn around.”
Kat and I exchanged looks. She started to decelerate.
“I said get us out of here,” Danae said, more forcefully. She looked hard at me and said, “It’s over. You’ve done your job. Just take me to the nearest settlement, I don’t care which. Anywhere in the world but here.”
“Look, lady,” Kat said, slamming on the brakes and craning her neck to face her. “Lady, person, people, whatever. We bled our fuel cells dry getting all the way out here. It’s two hundred klicks to the nearest other human being. We couldn’t go back if we wanted to.”
“No,” Danae said. She
