“Maybe,” says Valentine. “We don’t know for sure.”

I feel the night pressing in. The warm breeze rustles the grass out there in the darkness and every half-glimpsed movement makes me want to bolt.

“Tell me how to activate my Zenith,” I say.

Lyle grins at his friends. An I-told-you-so grin.

“Here we go, then.”

He holds up three fingers on his right hand, thumb and pinky touching. “Default configuration. Think of the device,” he says. “Feel that tickle in your head. Concentrate on that, while you do this.” Then he counts down quickly, dropping his fingers to rest on the back of his thumb. Three, two, one. He tucks his fingers underneath, making a tight fist.

“Simple as that,” he says. “Think of the Zenith and count down with your right hand. You don’t picture the Zenith, it won’t activate. And if your hand ain’t working, just think about moving your fingers. It’ll be enough.”

“What? In case someone cuts off my arm?” I joke.

“Right,” he says. “There are five levels. You got to consent to each one. After you drop a level, that’s how deep you go from then on. Every time.”

Lyle looks me up and down. “You never been in the military.”

“No,” I say.

“Don’t matter. The Zenith knows stuff. It can tell your body what to do. How to stay alive in bad situations. How to escape. And how to kill, if you let it.”

The word orbits there for a few seconds: kill.

“How do I turn it off?” I ask.

“That’s the hard part, ain’t it?” Lyle says. “What goes down don’t necessarily come back up. You got to focus. Concentrate on yourself, on your actions. Force the amp to give back control. It ain’t always easy. But you’ll figure it out.”

Lyle extends his hand, palm open.

After a second, I shake it gamely. He pulls me in and claps me on the shoulder. “You never activated that Zenith, so you got no clue what you’re capable of. But you’ll find out, Gray. And we’ll see what kind of man you are pretty damn fast.”

“And what kind are you?” I ask. Valentine bites off a chuckle.

“Me?” asks Lyle. “I’m a mystery man. Full of surprises. For one, you really think I brought you here just to watch these meatheads tear each other up?” Lyle looks up at the sky, finds the moon, and squints at it. “Come on,” he says. “Should be about time.”

Around the side of the shed, a rectangle of light splays out onto the brushed concrete. Lyle’s teeth shine in the moonlight. He puts a finger to his lips and we creep.

Just outside the door, Lyle straightens his shirt and cocks his hat back on his head. Stilman, Daley, and Valentine form up outside the door, turn their backs to it. Lyle plucks the toothpick out of his mouth, looks at it, then crams it back in. He walks into the light.

I start to follow him but freeze up when I see what’s inside the toolshed.

Shirtless and massive, the Brain sits on a rolling stool. Steam rises from his wet skin. He stares expressionless at the rusted tools hanging from the wall while a skinny doctor in a dirt-stained lab coat methodically sews up his torn pectoral muscle. The hunk of meat flaps from the Brain’s chest as the doctor works, but the man might as well be a statue. A big, meaty statue.

The Brain’s deep-set green eyes flicker over to us as Lyle swaggers inside.

“Hey there,” says Lyle. “You don’t know me but—”

“I don’t want any,” says the Brain. His voice has the low hollow strain of a big mammal. A bull or an elephant.

“That’s good, because I’m not here to sell you nothing,” says Lyle.

“I’m not for sale, either,” says the Brain.

“Settle down, now,” says Lyle, hands out.

With a menacing scowl, the Brain starts to rise. The doctor steps back, impatient for Lyle to get beaten down so he can get back to work. Lyle watches the mountain of a man carefully, his boots scratching lightly on the concrete as he backs out of reach. For an elastic second Lyle actually seems scared, and then something locks into place behind his eyes.

“Ho there, partner. Just came to talk. I was a Son of Silence like yourself,” says Lyle.

The Brain stops rising. “What chapter?”

“Northside Dirty White Boys,” says Lyle.

“Mad Dog set?” says the Brain.

Lyle pauses, thrown. Then he takes the toothpick out of his mouth and points it at the Brain. “Dragon set, you redneck fuck,” he says.

The Brain eases back down. The doctor goes back to stitching him up in precise lunges with a spool of black thread that looks more like clothesline rope.

“Right,” says the Brain. “What do you want?”

“Street ain’t the place for men like us. Running drugs, it’s for peons. And look at you. Cops see you coming a mile away. You and me were meant for something bigger. What I want is to invite you to be part of another brotherhood. A group of people that you can relate to.”

Lyle takes off his hat and pushes a lank piece of hair away from his forehead, revealing the nub of plastic on his temple. The Brain’s small eyes flick between Lyle’s nub and my own. I can almost hear his thoughts: Does this really make us brothers? Is there finally someone I can trust?

The cowboy is here to recruit muscle—the sort of muscle that doesn’t even exist outside of amp circles. And for some reason, he also wanted me to see this. The outer limits of human amplification.

“You ought to come out and see us at Eden,” Lyle urges. “Hang out. Be yourself for a little while. Nobody there to judge, you know it?”

Unconsciously, the Brain reaches up to his own bald head and touches the nub there. As his great arm rises, I catch a glimpse of something on the back of it—a peach-colored slick of mottled scar tissue. Burned skin. It’s a removed tattoo.

Faint, very faint, I catch sight of an outline that could be a dragon head. Some kind of gang insignia that’s been burned off the back of the Brain’s arm.

Clever cowboy.

The relic of the tattoo disappears into a fold of muscle as the Brain sends his massive arm out like a crane, hand extended. Lyle pops his hat back on and bounces forward to shake it, his nimble fingers disappearing into that massive paw.

The Brain’s fist closes tight and he yanks Lyle forward. The Brain frowns, small eyes trained on Lyle’s forearm. A phrase is tattooed there. Tight black capital letters: AD ASTRA CRUENTUS.

“What’s it mean?” asks the Brain.

Lyle flashes a grin, impenetrable as ever. “It means we’re going to the stars together, stained in the blood of our enemies.”

[SECRET]

ARMY RESEARCH LABORATORY (ARL)

White Sands Missile Range, NM 88002-5513

Impact of Experimental Zenith-Class Neural Autofocus on Battlefield Situational Awareness

ARL—TR—6445

Reaction Time (Excerpt)

Decreasing the time course of mental operations in the human nervous system confers wide-ranging advantages, particularly for amplifying situational awareness. Previous research gauges average human reaction time to visual stimulus at approximately 60 milliseconds. This is widely recognized as a hard limit.

Brain implants, however, allow us to drastically increase the speed of reaction time for complex behavior involving multiple brain systems (sensory, cognitive, and motor). Completely bypassing input from higher brain regions, implants may autonomously intercept and monitor sensory information and direct action at the speed of reflex.

High-level behaviors such as situational awareness, evasion, and even combat maneuvers can be turned over to the implant. In the following study, we demonstrate that implanted test subjects become capable of acting in complex real-world situations with hard limit spinal reaction times—approximately twice as fast as nonimplanted control subjects.