Maybe they had orders to torture her and it didn’t matter what she’d said.

Maybe they were just mean.

The ground floor of the Edwards building was buzzing with so many Aggregate formations that Yahvi thought she would black out again, from the noise, the sight, and, now that she was sensitized to it, the smell. The whole scene suggested chaos.

She saw several THE counselors, too, including Nigel, Cory, and Ivetta, who watched her from across the room with a look that Yahvi found troubling. It was as if they were surprised she was still walking, still alive!

Counselor Nigel stepped forward, sliding between whirling Aggregates with a grace Yahvi didn’t expect. “We didn’t know,” he said.

“Didn’t know what?” Yahvi said, forced to shout over the buzzing. She waited for an elbow in her ribs from one of her escorts.

“The thing you mentioned.” Counselor Nigel looked human and vulnerable for the first time. “It’s bad for them.”

The thing she had mentioned? Oh, Yahvi thought: the cloud in the east.

Rachel and Pav were sitting outside in a tiny quadrangle filled with metal tables. It was a place for lunch or even a picnic, Yahvi realized, in better times. Or at least in daylight.

They flung themselves at each other. Yahvi heard a groan from her father, and saw, even in the near-darkness, that he had a huge bruise on his face; he had clearly been beaten. “Oh my God, Daddy, did those things do this?”

“Those little shitboxes? Their arms would break if they hit you. No, this was the human guards.”

“Your father tried to overcome four-to-one odds,” Rachel said, in a tone that Yahvi recognized as teasing. Tonight, though, it was clearly affectionate, possibly even proud.

Looking closely at her mother, she saw signs of distress. “Did they question you?”

“Of course.” She held out her arm, displaying the same kind of blistering Yahvi had experienced on her leg. “What about you?”

“It was mostly THE,” she said. When Rachel gave a confused look, she added: “Trans-Human Evolutionaries or whatever they call themselves.”

“The kids in the black suits,” Pav said.

Rachel seemed to accept that. It was too dark for her to see how Yahvi had been damaged, and while Yahvi had no particular desire to spare her mother’s feelings . . . this was not the time to offer complaints. “Where is everybody else?”

“Tea was in the room next to us, upstairs,” Rachel said.

“They kept you together?” Yahvi said.

“For a while.” She made an unhappy face. “I wasn’t able to hear everything, but I’m pretty sure she went through what I went through.”

“Which was?”

“A billion questions, many threats.”

“Was it people or Reivers?”

“People,” Rachel said. “There were three Reivers in the room, but they just watched.”

“Same with me,” Pav said. “The people were bad enough.” He seemed to shudder, which made Yahvi want to start crying again. “Xavier is in one of the rooms on this floor,” Pav said. “They took him and all our equipment to the same place.”

“Probably forcing him to make it work.”

Pav smiled. “Good luck getting Xavier to do anything he doesn’t want to.”

“He doesn’t really look like a fighter,” Yahvi said.

“You don’t have to hit someone to be resistant,” Rachel said. “Every daughter knows that, right?”

Yahvi was pleased to hear Rachel joking. It meant that she was bouncing back from the depressing flight and capture.

Pav was less amused. “He can be as passive-aggressive as he wants; the Reivers will turn him inside out to get what they want.”

Zeds was captive in another building. “He really slammed a couple of the soldiers around,” Pav said.

Rachel turned to him. “Probably giving you ideas, except that he’s twice your size.”

“I didn’t need his encouragement, darling.” To Yahvi, he said, “They might have fired on him, but I think they had orders to take him alive.”

“You know Zeds,” Rachel said. “He only knocked them around enough to show he could. Then he just backed off and said, ‘Where do you wish to incarcerate me?’”

Neither of them had seen Edgely. “He was pretty subdued,” Rachel said. “I don’t think this is turning out to be the adventure he wanted.”

“And Mr. Chang?”

“They shot him,” Pav said. He did not hesitate, Yahvi noticed.

Rachel added, “That’s why your father fought them.”

“Why did they kill him?”

“Does it make a difference?” Rachel said.

“They probably saw him as our ringleader. Also, he’s Chinese. I think the Reivers really hate and fear them.”

Now that the grim and near-grim updates were over, Yahvi realized how tired and sore she was. And still quite uncertain. “So where does that leave us?”

“Prisoners.” Rachel smiled. “I have to face the fact that I’ve totally fucked up this trip. The only thing we’ve done is stay locked up in rooms or airplanes.”

“What did you think you were going to be doing?” Pav said. “Grabbing a gun and shooting Reivers one by one?”

The idea had a certain appeal to Yahvi, even though she’d never held a gun—she’d barely even seen one. “Do either of you know what these things are so upset about?”

Rachel looked at Pav. “You mean, beyond our presence?”

“The cloud in the east. My THE boy said it was bad news for the Reivers. I think it was some kind of accident.”

Pav sat up straighter. “You know—”

“Oh, shit,” Rachel said. “I overheard one of the humans, not in a black suit, say something about an accident and a facility that was critically damaged.” She glanced around and lowered her voice. “The Ring is off that way!”

“It would be nice to think that someone hit our target for us,” Pav said.

Rachel was shaking her head. “The word was accident, not attack. They probably blew some gaskets. And the Reivers never give up; even if the place burned to the ground, they’d build it right back up again.”

“Might take a while.”

Yahvi saw her opportunity now. “We would still like to get inside it, right?”

“Well, yes,” Rachel said. “You know enough to know why.”

“Even though our original plan can’t possibly work,” Pav said. Yahvi knew that her father meant the poison pill strategy.

“What if the Reivers or Aggregates got the idea that the proteus and cargo could help them fix the Ring?” The idea had come to her between two steps as she was marched down the stairs by the Aggregates. She had to assume that their interrogations had told them everything she knew. And even though her parents didn’t think they had been subjected to Reiver Aggregate torture, it was likely it had been so intense that they didn’t remember.

This idea just seemed right.

“Do we want that?” Pav said.

Rachel was already on her feet. Yahvi knew from experience that her mother thought better when in motion. “No! But we do want to get inside the place. I’d rather take the chance we might be bringing them a tool if it puts us in position to wreck the whole thing.

“Now, who wants to be the one to tell them?”

FIRST LIGHT

+17 hours and counting

FIRE LIGHT

09 MAY 2040 0001:00 MDT

COUNTDOWN CLOCK AT SITE A

CARBON-143

SITUATION: The critical anomaly aborting the First Light test required immediate action from all Aggregate formations.

All test data was frozen, then transferred to a new unit that initiated failure analysis.

The vehicles of the invading force remained on standby in Staging Areas 1, 2, and 3.

Since assembly functions were on hold, Aggregate Carbon-143’s formation was one of those tasked with failure analysis.