He pushed Rachel. Pav shouted, “Cowboy, come on!” The dog held its ground right to the moment when the Long Legs swiped at it, the tip of its claw grazing his fur. Cowboy yelped and retreated.

Zhao let Rachel, Pav, and Yvonne head up the ramp first. It wasn’t chivalry, but practicality: Yvonne was the only one of the four with any idea what lay upstairs.

And Zhao wanted another look at this Long Legs. Was it trying to grab them? Touch them? Kill them?

He almost regretted it. The alien charged directly toward him, one arm extending so far its claws missed him by only half a meter.

He made it up the ramp with a speed that was surely his personal best.

The second story was dark, no windows, filled with objects that might be machines or furniture, he couldn’t tell. “Keep going!” he shouted. He could hear the Long Legs chittering up the ramp a few steps behind him.

“Next ramp’s on the far side,” Yvonne said, leading the way.

Another story. Lighter here, as if the walls were translucent. Another collection of boxlike objects, like personal possessions placed in storage.

But the Long Legs was still in pursuit.

To the top.

They emerged on the roof of the museum, but a roof unlike any Zhao had ever seen. It wasn’t flat, for one thing, but rather bowed, as if the space underneath were a flattened dome. Nor were there any pipes, vents or power lines—no obvious infrastructure.

“It’s still coming!” Rachel said. She was hugging the dog, who looked as tired and frightened as the girl.

Pav had worked his way to the edge. “Can we jump?”

“Where to?” Zhao said. “Every other structure is higher! Or too far away!”

“How about down?” Rachel said. “Gravity is lower here, right?”

“Not enough, honey,” Yvonne said. “We’d be lucky to just break our legs.”

“That doesn’t leave us any options,” Pav said.

The Long Legs emerged. It was probably his imagination, but to Zhao the creature looked bigger. It’s your senses telling you you’re going to be sliced and diced by something big and nasty.

Then it hit him. “Everyone, back up to the edge!” he said.

“What good will that do?” Yvonne said.

Zhao didn’t answer. He watched the Long Legs approach, searching for a weakness. “It’s got some of that plasm on it,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s helpful,” Pav said.

It wasn’t—yet. Maybe never.

“Spread out!” Zhao said, “as close to the edge as you can, as far apart as possible. Rachel, you and the dog, next to me!”

He was pleased that the others followed his suggestion. In moments they were arrayed across one side of the roof…the Long Legs would be able to reach only one at a time.

Zhao was first. He had positioned himself closest. “Come on, you ugly piece of shit…” The Long Legs was within three meters.

Then he said, “Rachel, the dog!”

Rachel let Cowboy loose. It charged the Long Legs from behind.

The alien swiveled its head and whipped both arms around to deal with the attack—

—giving Zhao the opening he needed to hit it from one side.

Knocking it off the roof.

“Way to go!” Yvonne shouted.

They looked down. The Long Legs lay in three distinct pieces. “Wow,” Pav said. “I bet he felt that.”

What Zhao felt was triumph. Ever since volunteering to go in search of Rachel, he had felt lost, out of place, and useless.

No longer.

As they watched, however, tiny bits of the three segments of the shattered Long Legs began to crawl toward each other. It was like watching a time-lapse movie of a building being built.

“What the fuck?” Pav said.

“It’s reassembling itself,” Zhao said, amazed.

“Well,” Rachel said, “let’s not stick around to watch.”

They headed for the ramp going down.

ZACK

So Dash needed their help.

That was Zack’s takeaway from several hours of terrible sleep and intermittent conversation between Zack, Valya, and Dash, with a bit of help from Makali.

Quizzing Dash was the only useful activity available to them, especially as they were hampered by lack of oxygen. They had tried the Tik-Talk several times and failed to get any kind of response from the human habitat, which was no surprise. “They’re essentially walkie-talkie tech,” Scott said. “We’re way out of range, and even if we had another Tik-Talk close enough for a signal, the rocks here would probably kill it.”

“So it’s a paperweight,” Zack said.

“Until we get closer, yeah.” It was easy for Zack to get curt with Dale Scott, but in this case, his anger was triggered by worry about Rachel. Bad enough to have lost one parent for the second time…What must she be feeling, having her father lost somewhere on Keanu, out of touch?

Then there was Harley, not only worried about what had happened to Zack and what that might mean for the Houston-Bangalore group’s survival…but just having to answer all the questions about where Zack went.

And now their new alien friend was in trouble. He had a plan, however, which reduced itself, in Zack’s mind, to several one-word steps.

“Escape” was part one. Specifically, get out of this prison cell in the Sentry Beehive annex.

“Transit” was next. Get through the Sentry habitat.

The third was “Locate,” as in find the NEO’s control center or a control center. That was followed by “Reboot.”

“Why do we need to reboot anything?” Zack had asked.

For the next fifteen minutes, Dash recounted the failures of the Keanu system over the past many cycles. “I think he means a century,” Valya had said. She had been working to convert Sentry definitions of time and measure to figures humans could use.

Zack put the question directly to Dash. “How can you tell?”

“Terminal habitat loss,” it said, which sounded terrifying in its blandness. “Random generations,” whatever that meant, though Zack suspected it had to do with resurrections and Revenants. “Equipment failures.”

That was clear enough.

It had been difficult for Zack to conceive of the technology on display in Keanu—propulsion, the creation of environments, access to an entirely unknown form of universal information, the ability to manipulate that information.

The idea that it wasn’t working properly…yikes.

It added more urgency to a situation that was already quite urgent.

So, “Reboot.”

Then, the final step, which was even more disturbing. “War.”

“You mean, armed conflict?” Zack said, not really sure the term had been correct.

“The warship is infected,” Dash had said, clearly struggling with the right terms. “It must be disinfected in order to function properly.”

“Sounds more like fumigation than a war,” Zack had said to Valya. “What or who is the enemy?”

“Pillagers,” Dash said.

“Or Reivers,” Zack blurted. During their time together on Keanu, Megan—channeling the Architect—had mentioned “Reivers,” just the sort of vaguely Irish word she would have used for entities that could be pillagers or destroyers or wreckers.

Valya looked at him. “You know this term?”

He explained, then said, “Ask Dash who the Pillagers or Reivers are.”

“The Builders’ enemy,” was all Dash would say.

“Okay, I think that’s the best we can hope for,” Zack told Valya. “Is it my imagination, or is everything really slow with Dash?”

“I would imagine that translation at this level—even for human languages it requires tremendous bandwidth—creates a lag.”

“Sure,” Zack said, “if we were using our level of technology.” He nodded at Dash. “These people are centuries or millennia beyond us. And it’s not just speech. It’s everything. Movements, too.”

Makali had been busy fiddling with the black box from Brahma. Now she said, “It’s the problem of scale, one of the things we investigate in exobiology. Muscle response times and even the transmission of thought in beings of different sizes.”