The others remained silent.

Eta raised a mass spectrometer wand, scanning the walls with a broad green laser beam.

“Eta—”

“Shut it!”

A hologram appeared above his wrist, listing possible manufacturing options given nearby materials. He looked up from the display and smiled. “Chain golem it is . . .”

He tapped several menus, and the black cube suddenly cast a blinding light as it sank into the steel door—eating through it like fire through paper with a deafening sizzling sound. As it did so, white-hot light wavered menacingly. Ribbons of black material started streaming down from the edges of the expanding burn site. These ribbons then curled back up and started knitting themselves into a series of chain links. Unlike in a regular chain, these seemed not to be looped together. Instead, they regrouped and re-formed magnetically or by some other method not clearly understood by anyone present. The links kept piling up, then coming together to form still larger groups of links that began to move collectively with purpose.

Already most of the steel door was consumed, and the process began to eat into the hinges and frame. Flakes of rust and dirt had fallen free from the reaction, gathering on the floor in a pile.

But by then the kinematic automaton stood, its metal feet clattering on the concrete floor, like a barrel full of chain mail.

Eta pointed through the opening and looked at the chain golem’s face of seething chain links. “Double time. Human target. Hunt acoustically . . .”

 • • •

Looking at the extent of the tunnel ahead and behind, Davis thought out loud. “New York division would have known to watch these tunnels.”

He cast a look back at her. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just . . . I’m surprised they don’t have these tunnels guarded.”

“It’s not the FBI. It’s the BTC. They might have better technology, but they don’t always seem to know how to use it.”

“Where are we heading?”

“Subbasement of Pupin Hall—the physics building. That much I do remember.”

“Did you travel down here a lot?”

“It got me into buildings. I think I lived in Pupin Hall’s basement. There was a way into the tunnel system from there.”

They were now coming out into a much more modern utility corridor lined with color-coded foot-wide steam pipes with labels like “Low Press Steam” and “Chilled Water Sup” and arrows showing the direction of flow. Above and below these were orderly bundles of power and data conduits curving around a bend a hundred or more feet ahead.

“Mr. Grady, you need to tell me what’s really going on.”

“I know I sound crazy, but everything I told you in Chicago was true. The BTC exists, and they’re very dangerous.”

“But why would they choose you? No offense, but you don’t exactly have a record of scientific achievement.”

He looked back at her. “They made sure of that. But they knew what I was working on. They have AIs that try to find people who fit a pattern—disruptive innovators. People like me.”

Davis pondered Cotton’s list of undistinguished victims at unknown companies.

“The BTC was created back in the ’60s, and they’ve been hoarding major technological advances for decades. If you knew just how advanced human technology really is, Agent Davis . . . well, you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

He turned right down a branch in the passage. They had to duck under a convergence of pipes. “Watch out for these. They’re hot.”

On the far side she asked, “But why would the BTC cover up new technologies? Money?”

“They don’t need money. Their quantum computers eat the stock market for lunch. No, they think they’re protecting society from disruptions caused by sudden innovations. If somebody somewhere comes up with a technology they think will disrupt the existing order, they grab them. Neutralize them.”

“They actually kidnap them?”

He glanced back at her as they ran. “They made hundreds of clones of this one guy named Morrison—some top Special Forces soldier back in the ’80s.”

“Oh, come on . . .”

“I’m not joking. Keep an eye out for him. I met the original Morrison—he’s sixty or so, but his clones are much younger. Tall blond guys with thick necks. Like ugly Fabios.”

Davis felt a wave of shock pass over her. “Blond guys?”

“Striking specimens. That’s why Cotton’s followers were always masked. There is no antitechnology movement blowing up research labs. The bombings are just the BTC covering their tracks.”

“But we have body parts of victims.”

“You had body parts for me, right?”

She didn’t have a ready explanation.

“They can grow body parts. Replacement organs, teeth—hell, they can clone whole people if time isn’t a factor. They grab people they want, fake their deaths, then offer them a chance to join the BTC.”

“And if someone refuses?”

“They send him or her where they sent me: a prison called Hibernity. It’s somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t know where. Very remote. But it’s the reason I contacted you. There are others like me there.”

Grady stopped in the middle of the tunnel and produced a small white plastic device from a chain around his neck. He aimed it at a blank spot in the wall, and suddenly a hyperrealistic holographic image appeared in midair. It showed a balding Indian man in very simple clothes sitting in what looked like a gray circular chamber. Davis was stunned at the image’s clarity—it was as though a three-dimensional sculpture had just materialized from nowhere. She could barely hear the audio amid the steam and exhaust motors in the corridor.

“My name is Archibald Chattopadhyay, nuclear physicist and amateur poet. I have a lovely wife, Amala, who has given me five wonderful children. I led the team that first perfected a sustained fusion reaction, and for this I was imprisoned by the Bureau of Technology Control in April 1985. I am not dead. I live still . . .”

Grady paused the hologram and pointed. “What you’re looking at is a prison cell in Hibernity, and that man, Archie Chattopadhyay, saved my life. And the lives of many other prisoners. He leads a prison group called the Resistors. There are dozens like me—maybe hundreds, and we need to save them.”

Davis pointed at the device. “Can I hold onto that?”

Grady shook his head. “Not yet. Not until we get access to a serious electronics facility. This device has holographic data from many more disappeared prisoners on it—people abducted from all around the world. It runs on DNA-encoded software, so it contains huge amounts of data—including the complete genomic sequence of each of these prisoners to prove they were the ones who made the recording.” But he held it up. “It also has a nanoscale inertial gyroscope that’s been recording my movements since I left the prison. There are instructions in it for parsing that data. And that will make it possible to lead help back to Hibernity. So I’m not letting this thing out of my sight until we get it to a lab.”

Davis gazed at the first physical evidence she’d seen so far. It was a nearly miraculous device—but then, she was never very technological. Was it miraculous? “Why did the BTC take you, Mr. Grady?”

He turned off the device and slipped it back beneath his shirt. “I invented a gravity mirror.”

“That’s a mirror that reflects—”

“Look, it’s not important. What’s important is that I get this data to people who can help rescue those I left behind. These are people whose innovations will literally transform the world, Agent Davis. Fusion energy, a cure for cancer, quantum computers, immortality, and a lot more. You need to help me find them and free them.”

A booming sound echoed in the steam tunnels.

Davis looked behind them.

“I spent three years in solitary confinement at Hibernity with an AI doing experiments on my mind. It was a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”