“Uh, here we go again?”

“My voices just went silent, too,” Yvonne said.

“What do we do?”

“Well, the last time the power went out—” Before she finished the statement, the lights and power resumed, though not without a disturbing shower of sparks and arcing from somewhere nearby.

“Yvonne, is this place falling apart?” Pav had a tough time thinking of a millennium-old alien starship as needing maintenance…but on further consideration, why not?

“There,” she said.

A giant creature, easily twice the size of a human being, like some kind of ancient knight, but with four arms, sat on the bench like an old man in a park.

She sent Pav back to the rendezvous point to meet Rachel and Zhao. “We found him.”

“Found what?” Zhao said.

“An Architect.”

For a young man who never expected to ever meet an alien creature, two in one day was almost too many for Pav. Even so, trying to be calm and grown-up…Pav thought Yvonne and the Architect seemed like an unhappy couple. The alien was still slumped, almost immobile, its two legs sticking out like logs, its four arms limp like spaghetti…while Yvonne stood directly in front of him. She looked like a pilgrim making an offering to a badly designed stone god.

Zhao approached Yvonne, speaking so softly that Pav and Rachel, left behind, couldn’t hear. Cowboy simply flopped on the ground, happier than he’d been in a while, apparently willing to see what these creatures got up to.

Only now did Pav notice that the Architect was partly covered in the same coating as the earlier Revenants. “I think he’s just come back from the dead,” he whispered to Rachel.

“That’s not good.”

“Why?”

“Because all the Revenants take a while to boot up.”

That had certainly been the case with Yvonne. And, judging from the Architect, here, too.

Yvonne turned away from the alien and walked toward Pav and Rachel. “God, this is so frustrating.”

“What’s wrong?” Pav said, suddenly alarmed. “Isn’t he the one you’ve been hearing in your head all along?”

“No! At least, I don’t think so. I think he was just reborn like me.”

“My dad said my mother could speak directly to her Architect.”

“I can speak to him,” Yvonne said. “I’m just not getting much back.”

“How much speaking did you do when you were just…alive again?” Pav said, looking at Rachel, as if to say, Shouldn’t we ask this?

Yvonne frowned. “Good point. But we don’t have all the time in the world.” She tapped her head. “My Wi-Fi was pretty clear on that.”

“Yvonne, come back here!” Zhao said. “Bring Rachel, too!”

Zhao had stayed with the Architect, essentially keeping the giant alien company. As he and the others approached, Pav saw Zhao stand on tiptoes to touch one of the Architect’s “hands”—which flexed, then folded up, as if the alien were doing a curl.

“What the hell are you doing?” Yvonne said.

“Just testing our friend,” Zhao said. “He seems to be in distress.”

“Noted,” Yvonne said. “Now what?”

Zhao pointed at Rachel. “I heard her talk about her mother. And it occurs to me that the Architect might know about her and about Zack Stewart, too—”

The mention of Zack’s name caused the Architect to stir and stand up to its complete, towering height. For Pav it was like watching a building being erected…and took a considerable amount of time. They’re slow, he realized.

“He’s trying to tell me something,” Yvonne said. She put her hands to her head and groaned. “God, it’s just so…noisy!”

Zhao put his hands on Yvonne’s shoulders, rubbing them like a trainer with a boxer. “Relax, find the message…he obviously wants to communicate with us. You just have to allow it.”

Yvonne’s tortured expression suddenly relaxed. To Pav, it was as if the woman had just found the right channel on a radio. “He says, ‘I am the Builders or the Designers or Architects.’ Plural.”

“Is there more than one of them in there?” Pav said. The creature was big enough to hold multiple personalities.

“It says, ‘We have no time for debates or education.’” Yvonne looked at Rachel. “‘We knew your parent.’”

“Which one?” Rachel said. “My mother? My father?”

“‘Both!’ and he’s quite emphatic about that.” She closed her eyes for a moment. There were tears now. “He just gave me a blast of imagery and…God, emotion about your mother. God, Rachel, I’m so sorry…I had no idea.”

Pav tried to keep his mouth from simply falling open. Only on Keanu would a woman who had been brought back from the dead be expressing sympathies to a girl who had lost her mother—or was it because she had been brought back to life only to lose it a second time?

“Does he know my mother? Can he talk to her?”

The Architect made a gesture with all four arms, as if embracing all of them. It was so fast and large that it caused the dog to bark.

The Architect bent down to look at the dog, which only increased the barking. “Dammit, control that animal!” Zhao said, amusing Pav, who had no control over Cowboy.

But he did kneel and try to soothe the dog, a move that put him squarely in the shadow of the giant Architect. No wonder the dog was tense.

“What happened to my mother?” Rachel said. She was almost frantic. “What happened to her?”

“‘She died.’”

“I know that! I saw her body! But how?”

“‘Conflict with the Race of Guards,’” Yvonne said.

“The Sentries?” Rachel said. “Yes, my father said she had been killed by a Sentry—”

“Just like Pogo Downey,” Yvonne said. “The first time.”

Rachel was practically jumping up and down.

“‘Your father is alive. He is a prisoner of the Sentries.’”

That news hit them hard. “How could that happen?” Zhao said. “Have the Sentries invaded the human habitat?”

“‘Your parent left the habitat,’” Yvonne said. “‘He is fighting the same war we are.’”

“What war?” Pav said. He couldn’t just stand to one side trying to keep the dog quiet.

“‘The war we are losing.’”

Zhao was growing impatient, and for once Pav agreed with the Chinese agent. “Who are we supposed to be fighting, and why?”

“‘I or we have contained the Reivers,’ whoever they are, though the emotion associated with the word is incredible fear and loathing,” Yvonne said. “‘You let them loose inside us,’ he says.” She added, “I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about.”

Zhao replied, “I don’t see how humans could have released or unleashed these Reivers, no matter who or what they are. We’ve only been present a couple of days. We were barely surviving—”

“And until the dog fell down the hole, we were trapped in that habitat,” Rachel said.

Yvonne was shaking her head. “Our friend is quite certain of this. ‘Your people,’ meaning you and me, ‘gave them access.’”

“Fine, we screwed up, though I still don’t see how, or what difference it makes,” Pav said. “I want to get back to the others.”

“‘You can’t,’” Yvonne said, “‘the return route is already infected. The Reivers must be contained, and their access to—’” She frowned. “I’m getting the image of a big white blob of some kind, something called a ‘vesicle.’ Ah, ‘their access to the vesicle has to be prevented.’”

It took a moment for Zhao to convince Yvonne that what the Architect meant was the same type of vehicle that had brought the Houston and Bangalore groups to Keanu. “Why would these Reivers want or need a vesicle?”

“To get off this ship?” Rachel said.

“‘To invade and infect,’” Yvonne said. “And the image was Earth. These Reivers want to take over Keanu, then use a vesicle to invade and infect Earth.”

“We still don’t know what these things are!” Pav said. He was getting a headache, almost certainly from hunger…and from being chased and pushed and terrified for the entire past day, or four days.

Zhao was more deliberate. To Yvonne he said, “When the Architect says ‘Reivers,’ what do you see?”