Pav met her before she reached the conference room, and he seemed upset. “I’ve been looking for you for an hour.”

“You couldn’t have looked very hard,” she said. “This is a big building, but how many places would I be?”

“Good point,” he said. One thing she loved about him was his ability—rare in men, in her experience—to accept correction or pushback without feeling wounded.

Or, at least, not showing it.

“Actually, I had contact.” That explained it; that throbbing in one’s head would make anyone look pale and shaken.

Pav’s conversation with Keanu turned out to be longer than Rachel’s. He had told them about the missile attack on Adventure and learned that there had been major progress on the backup plan led by Zhao.

She asked him if Harley or Sasha had discussed Dale Scott. “Yes!” Pav said. “Why the hell did he return to the living?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I can’t take that as a good sign.”

Pav smiled. “Good things rarely follow Dale.”

Then Rachel yawned. She realized that she wanted only to sit down, or better yet, lie down.

Pav saw this and took her into his arms. “We’ve got a huge day tomorrow—the agent meeting. . . .”

“And figuring out just what the hell our real next step is.”

“Let’s just go to bed.”

Kilroy was here

Kilroy was there

Kilroy was everywhere

GRAFFITO SCRIBBLED BY DALE SCOTT

AT MANY PLACES INSIDE KEANU’S FACTORY

DALE

They hadn’t had to drag him; the guards just casually marched Dale to a small hut—one of several occupying a patch of ground behind the Temple, halfway to the “north” wall. “Is this your jail?” he said.

“We don’t have a jail,” the young man snapped, clearly insulted. But the woman was more forthcoming. “Occasionally people need a time-out. Sometimes they just want to get some mental or physical space.”

“Ah, so these are meditation cells.”

That effectively ended the conversation.

The hut was exactly that: four walls with a cot. No entertainment devices, not that Dale had seen any such items in twenty years.

But also no sink, faucet, or toilet. As he stood in the dark space—it was probably three meters across in both directions, lit only by two slit windows near the top—he spread his hands and said, “Suppose I need to urinate.”

“Yell and you’ll be escorted,” the man said. Then he closed the door, locking it.

So much for meditation, Dale thought.

Within moments he was alone again . . . as he had been for most of the past two decades.

But now he was confined.

And hungry.

Food was one of the reasons he had had problems with the HBs.

On his earliest walkabouts, before he removed himself entirely from the human habitat, he had been able to take some food with him.

In his first months in the Factory, he had grown quite adept at theft. But that was ultimately unsatisfying; the fields and supplies most accessible to him were limited in their menu.

And he had had an unpleasant encounter with Xavier Toutant, the self-proclaimed King of Food. Seeing Dale heading toward the passageway early one morning (like poachers throughout human history, Dale had found that he was most effective when the “farmers” were asleep), the fat young man had shown surprising speed in intercepting him.

“You know, you could just ask, you asshole. Nobody needs to go hungry here.”

“Then who cares? You’ll just make more, anyway.”

“It’s just good manners.”

“I gave them up for Lent.”

He had brushed past Xavier, who had waited until seconds before Dale disappeared into a cleft in the rocks to throw a rock at him!

Dale had continued to poach, but less often. He had turned his attention to finding a proteus station inside the Factory. He believed that he would recognize one, since he had spent hours with the unit in the human habitat Temple.

The search was a bit like locating a particular distillery in a town the size of Dublin, but with no map.

So he had searched, systematically, starting from one of the giant dishlike pools of Substance K that dotted the Factory.

Dale had been lucky; within a few weeks he had located not just one likely proteus printer, but a building filled with them . . . and other buildings next to that one. The section reminded him of server farms in formerly distressed areas of downtown Los Angeles. He dubbed this area the Nanotech Quarter.

He spent at least a year mastering the system to where he could have won a contest with Jaidev. By the end of that time he was able to produce his own food. He even created a “garden” in an open space near his living quarters.

Such things already existed in the Factory, though none of them seemed to have been occupied for an extremely long time. (Even in the carefully controlled and engineered environments within Keanu, especially the Factory, dust accumulated. In a few structures, Dale saw signs of dead Reivers, powdery residue that ranged from film to heaping mounds, likely what was left of the smallest to the larger, anteater-like Aggregates, all killed in the plague the HBs had engineered and launched.)

Not one of the structures was truly optimized for human habitation. The Architect Dale had met was literally twice as tall as he was, and some buildings seemed suited for a being like that. Others had three floors where a human building would have one, suggesting that their inhabitants were really short, or very flat.

Dale’s ultimate “home” was an open area under the overhang of a building entrance. Given its nature, the Factory had no regular rain or fog . . . until the day it did, which came as a surprise.

It had happened only once or twice a year, but there was no predictability that Dale could see—no correlation between the sudden rains and occasional failure of the ceiling glowworms. (The first time Dale found himself in absolute total darkness, he had foolishly tried to run—slamming into a wall and breaking his nose.)

Fortified by his own solid if uninspired menu, Dale spent another two years using the Factory systems to learn about Keanu . . . where its power came from, how it propelled itself, how the transit system operated (or in this case, didn’t), how Keanu was able to create different gravity fields in the habitats . . . how it turned energy into the nanotech goo known as Substance K.

How it created the “vesicles,” the spherical space balloons that managed to launch off Keanu and land on Earth—then return with samples and humans. (Or launch off Keanu carrying a few hundred thousand Reivers . . . and never return.)

He never learned more than a fraction of what he wanted to know. No human could—and certainly no human rummaging through the system without a guide or a key.

One thing did strike Dale, however: Some of Keanu’s systems were off-nominal, either failed (the transit system) or failing (the weird reboots in the environmental support). That was certainly troubling . . . not that he could do anything about it.

Yet.

Eventually Dale tired of these explorations and decided to concentrate on experiments. More precisely, on making direct contact with Keanu itself.

The idea of Keanu being an individual wasn’t his—Zack Stewart suggested as much during that first week, after his own encounters with the Architect . . . whom Zack considered the voice of Keanu itself.

It was only contemplating the still-murky link between the Architect and the human Revenants that led Dale to agree with Zack’s conclusion. An entity the size of a small planet, with God only knew what sense of time passing, with a life span of ten thousand years, would naturally require some kind of avatar in order to communicate with tinier beings whose lives were limited to one hundred years.