Not all, apparently. “I swiped it from the RV,” Rook said. “I figured we’d need something kind of rubbery.” It was true that, given the limits on HB manufacturing, blankets were as rare as anything else. And there had been no reason for anyone to fabricate a rubberized sheet like this.

And when Nick actually moved the remains with his bare hands, Yahvi felt like throwing up.

Then Nick and Rook and Ellen, who was taller and stronger than any of them, raised the sheet bearing the dog’s remains and began scuttling toward the Beehive, a couple of hundred meters distant.

“You two cover this over,” Nick told Yahvi and Dulari. That didn’t take long; the soil was light and loose. Of course, even scraping it all back into the grave left an obvious depression.

“This will fool no one,” Yahvi said.

Dulari shrugged. She likely didn’t care. Yahvi was sure she only came along because she had a crush on Nick.

Bringing up the rear, Yahvi and Dulari found that they had to act as lookouts, a post that required no orders or encouragement. Yahvi kept glancing back toward the Temple and the living area, wondering if some adult just happened to be checking on the girls’ quarters.

Or if one of the other girls just happened to wake up and realize that three were missing.

This wasn’t usually a huge problem; girls were frequently sneaking off to meet boys. Dulari, in fact, was one of the most active sneaks. But tonight . . . all it would take was one curious parent who decided to search toward the Beehive. Or, just as dangerously, happened to catch them coming back—

“Yahvi, come on!” It was Nick, furious with her for falling behind.

The others had carried their sad burden into the Beehive entrance, a cave mouth twice as tall as Yahvi and at least twice as wide as it was tall. It looked rocky, dirty, and moist, as if the evening mist-rains clung to it . . . or, more creepily, as if water or some other fluid were oozing out of it.

The whole area smelled, too.

Inside it was dark, except for a kind of yellowish glow from the many different-sized cells that lined the walls as high up as any of them could reach. All of the cells were roughly rectangular—“like coffins,” Rachel had told her, which then prompted a discussion about what a coffin was—and all had been laid open, leaving dried-out shards of some kind of casing in their openings.

“Okay,” Yahvi said, “we’re here with the thing. Now what?”

Brows furrowed, as if considering a problem in math, Nick was surveying the walls of cells. “Find one that looks as though it might work.”

“I think you’ll be looking a long time,” Rook dared to say. He rarely challenged Nick.

“And how will we know?” Ellen said.

“Look for one that seems . . . fresh.”

“And I don’t think you have any idea how these things worked,” Yahvi told Nick.

“How would you know?” he snapped. “I’ve been talking to Jaidev for a whole year.”

“Jaidev doesn’t know everything,” Yahvi said, though he was considered the smartest of all the HBs. She was a bit offended that Nick had overlooked her mother when making inquiries.

“Jaidev knows more than we do,” Nick snapped. “And tells more than anyone else.”

“Then why hasn’t he tried this experiment?” Ellen said.

Nick ignored that, though Yahvi thought it an excellent question. She had a pretty good idea why no one had done much experimenting with the Beehive since it stopped working almost twenty years ago, after disgorging human Revenants and several dozen terrestrial animal Revenants: It was just too terrifying to imagine what life in the habitat would be like if those who died kept coming back!

Yet, here they were, five teens thinking they were smarter than the adults. Of course, Nick was smarter than most of them, possibly even Jaidev.

Which made this even more dangerous.

He had completed his survey. “Let’s try this one,” he said, indicating a cell toward the back of the Beehive, near the other exit, which had been blocked off by HBs in the past. (On the other side, they said, was vacuum: a tunnel leading to the surface of Keanu.) Its lowest point even with Yahvi’s waist, the cell appeared large enough to hold a human being, which troubled Yahvi—what if this was the cell her grandmother had emerged from? It just seemed wrong, even more wrong than digging up Cowboy in the first place.

“You’re picking that one because you can reach it,” she said to Nick.

Nick shot her a look that, had his eyes been heat weapons, would have burned her to the ground.

But that didn’t stop him. With Rook and Ellen’s help, Nick raised the tarp containing the dog’s remains to the cell, then dumped them inside. The whole process looked crude, as far from scientific as it was possible to get.

Yahvi kept stepping back, her heart pounding. Now was likely to be the time Rachel or Pav or some other adult walked in. What on earth would she say? She had no excuse. She would simply have to stand there and suffer the consequences . . . or possibly run.

Once the remains had been completely placed in the cell, they rolled up the tarp. (Yahvi wondered what Rook was going to do with it . . . she hoped he wouldn’t just try to put it back where he found it.) “And now what do we do?” she said.

“Pray?” That was Dulari, with a typically inane suggestion. Yahvi remembered that Dulari’s family was one of the few openly religious among the HBs.

“Not necessary,” Nick said, regaining his normal confidence. “Jaidev said that the one amazing thing about the Revenant process is how it seemed autonomous, almost like magic. They figured out later that it was all Keanu’s control systems starting and stopping it, after they’d retrieved whatever morphogenetic pattern they needed—”

“But how did they know to find whichever morpho-whatever pattern that was?” Rook asked that question, and it made Yahvi want to kiss him, not because she needed the answer; she just wanted to see Nick flounder.

“They never did figure that out,” Nick said. “But given that their technology is probably ten thousand years more advanced than ours—”

At that instant, a shudder went through the Beehive. Yahvi and the others found themselves outside before they could complete a thought. Nothing magical about it; they were just so terrified they turned and ran.

Yahvi had never been brave enough to return to the Beehive.

But Nick had. The Cowboy-kidnappers had never been a group, but they surely avoided contact after their creepy adventure.

One day, however, several months before the Adventure launch, Yahvi had found Nick lurking around the Temple. She assumed he had just returned from a shift on the Substance K conveyor. “Are they working you too hard?” Yahvi said. She had endured her own first shifts on the conveyor and found the work incredibly tiring. And Nick, pale, even unsteady on his feet, seemed to have had it worse.

But he said, “No.”

Yahvi wasn’t the type to accept an answer that struck her as ridiculous. “You look like death.”

“I guess I can tell you if I can tell anyone.” Then he glanced around, as if afraid of being overheard. “I went back to the Beehive.”

By that time Yahvi had tried to forget about the Beehive. She was angered by the reminder. “You asshole!”

Nick didn’t notice. “It was gone, Yahvi.”

“What?”

“The dog.” Apparently Nick had made his way to the cell where the five of them had left Cowboy’s remains. “The cell was empty!”

“So someone came along and dug him out of there, just like we dug him out of the ground.”

“Maybe,” Nick said. “But that cell looked . . . fresh, like it had worked again.”

“What are you saying? When was this?”

“Two days ago. And what the hell do you think it means? There’s a Revenant Cowboy running around!”

“And that’s what you’re doing? Looking for him?”