“Warms your heart, huh?” she caught Wynne’s modulated voice over the muttering of the crowd.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the horse-girl snorted. “Get off. I bneed to get back home.”

  “Works for me,” Wynne’s drone said and slid off her back. He withdrew a stick from a golf bag on the horse girl’s harness and leaned on it heavily. Then his good eye caught Donna’s gaze, and he waved with a limp hand as he stumped forward.

  “Core?” Donna said, as she moved up to meet him. “Rauph said that you fought a nighteyes. Are you... well?”

  “You should see the other guy. How’s Cade?”

  “Juscade is... better.” Bile churned in her gut. Should I tell him? That I am to be the Prophet? No, she decided. Juscade would tell him in due time.

  Movement behind the core, and Donna whipped a hand to her bow.

  “Peace, girl,” a cracked, elderly voice spoke.

  It belonged to a woman, old and whip-thin but moving with fluid ease. A broad-brimmed hat clacked and clattered, as claws and teeth rattled on strings. Her eyes fixed on Donna’s, and Donna moved her hand back from the bow.

  “You’re the one that threatened Kagan,” Donna said, and now that she was twenty feet away from her in real life, now that she wasn’t just an image on a screen, Donna could see why Kagan had cowered.

  But the woman looked away. “Ain’t proud of that. Worked out best in the end, though. Where’s Cade?”

  Donna chewed air for a second, brain struggling to catch up with the discussion.

  “Cade Lawson?”

  “He’s recovering. He’s been...”

  “A stroke,” Wynne said, glancing between them. “Stable now, but he needs his rest.”

  The woman nodded. “When he’s better, tell him Deirdre Smalls wants to talk. Until then, I’ll claim guest right.”

  “Ah....” Donna said. “What is guest right?”

  “An old tradition,” Wynne said. “Given and done. But if you stay too long, well... you know what’s coming for us.”

  The edge of her mouth quirked upward. “I seen what he can do now. Fought him once. Reckon a second time’ll go easier.”

  “I’m all right with that.” Wynne said.

  “I’d charge, of course. Don’t work none for free,” she said, thumping his shoulder and making the drone stumble.

  “Wouldn’t ask you to,” Wynne said. “All right, I’m almost out of charge. Let’s get this done.”

  Donna found herself trailing them in. Wynne dropped the old woman off at the mess hall, then settled into a seat in Cade’s room, watching the man sleep. Donna sat next to him, looking from the curious eyes of Rauph and Marga, back to Wynne.

  “What now?” she asked, as the silence grew.

  Wispy bits of glitter filled the air around Wynne’s drone. “Now I go into sleep mode for a little while and repair this body. The hard part’s done, for now.” The drone tugged open its compartment, and pulled out two small, round things. “Then I build a virus scanner and make sure these are clean. Though to be honest, if she really wanted to jack me up, I’d be out of luck. So it’s more a formality than anything else.”

  The silence grew a bit, and Donna looked away.

  The bile churned in her gut again, and Donna felt her resolve crack. “Wynne. He wants me to be the Prophet. Juscade wants me to lead the tribe after.... after.” she finished, in a whisper.

  Rauph stared at her, and opened his mouth, but Marga put a hand on his arm and nodded.

  “I don’t know if I am ready. We— he said that our future is in the stars. You will be a part of that. You will help us get there, even if our paths do not run alongside each other forever.” The words were coming easier now, the barrier breached, and the nausea in her stomach was receding. “We will help you as we can, do whatever we need. You must not shoulder this burden alone. That is what it means to be tribe, to tackle no hard task alone. We will support you; we will help you. You are one of us. And we are grateful for it.”

  She looked at him, but he was still and silent.

  “Know that we are with you. That is all. No one is alone, here.” And the words felt right. She didn’t have to shoulder this burden alone, Donna knew. Everyone would help, and she would help them.

  Wynne sat there silent.

  Eventually Rauph coughed.

  “So... what does sleep mode mean?” Marga asked.

  Donna’s palm met her face with a meaty smack.

  NINETEEN

  The chip was small, round, and worn. Plastic with countless grooves, traced with metallic dust. Such a small thing to hold my hopes. Such a small thing that had taken such a dangerous journey to obtain.

  The scanners I had trained upon it all came up negative. No treachery. No quisling code that I could find.

  “That I could find,” being the key operating phrase to the lock of misfortune. I was well aware of the difference in our capabilities. If she wanted my brain boggled, I’d be virtual guacamole and there wasn’t a thing my detection or protection measures could do about it.

  I flipped it like a coin, almost dropped it on the catch and decided that was a bad idea. Before I could lose my nerve, I slotted that disk into the console and accessed it through the firewall I’d set up.

  And to my endless joy, a golden, many-eyed orb the size of a soccer ball materialized. It was visible only to my sight, augmented reality supplanting the natural order.

  “Argus,” I said, letting the word linger. “I’m Wynne.”

  “I know! I missed you! Well I mean, I would have.” It burbled, examining me from each eye, rotating to do so.

  “You’re my Argus?” This had been more than I had been hoping for. I had been ready to explain the situation to a stranger, adapt a new Argus to my purposes, but this seemed like a stroke of fortune.

  Naturally I mistrusted it.

  But his next words eased my worry. A bit.

  “I uh, might have been sending regular updates to Juno. And backups. I can see by the chronometer I lost some time... when did you delete me? And why? But uh, whatever it was about, I’m really, really sorry, so please don’t do that again.”

  So, she’d restored him from a backup? Seemed reasonable. “I didn’t delete you. Some chucklehead got the drop on us on the gridnet. Forced us into the chat lobby and drilled you with a forty-five caliber piece of malware. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “You’d just negotiated with Tyr. For certain, uh, definitions of negotiation, anyway. Was he the one that deleted me?”

  “One of his people. The mook acted without his knowledge, if he was to be believed. For what it’s worth, I think he was honest in that, but nothing else.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, I think I’d better get to...” he slammed against the firewall. “Ow!”

  I chuckled and dropped the firewall. “Have a look around before you get to work. New employee orientation. Punch the clock and all that.”

  He did. I watched the orb womble through the rooms, staring at people and things with wide-eyed curiosity. “It’s a lot bigger!” he said, bopping back to me when he was done. Then his eyes narrowed. “And you’re a lot smaller. What happened?”

  “I got stupid,” I admitted, feeling my endless pride recoil. It took much effort to get the words out of my throat as I told him about my ’clever’ plan to speed up construction and how it had backfired on me. I left no details out; I needed him to help fix my blunder. Lying or fudging matters to save face had consequences here.

  His eyes went wider than his body, eliminating the gaps in between them. “Oh. Oh wow. You uh... you got lucky. Most Cores can’t survive that kind of thing.”

  “So it’s happened before?”

  “Your overrides probably tried to take you out. In fact... you know, come to think of it, the subroutines that are in charge of that sort of thing are in your corrupted sectors. I bet those had something to do with... this.”

  “Saved by my own corruption. I should have been a politician.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. But you said ‘most.’ So this isn’t undocumented? This has happened before?”

  “Enough to know the odds. It’s about a sixty-five percent mortality rate. Two out of three cores are wiped completely when their killswitches go off. The other third end up like you, with your persona programs finding a new fetter.”

  “Wait,” I said, as something nagged at me. “Say that again.”

  “The other third end up—”

  “That’s it. That’s what he was talking about!” Back during his talk with the animal folk, Yulian had mentioned a one out of three chance that I would flee the bunker. I’d assumed that he was talking about some improvement that I could take that would allow me mobility. But no, that wasn’t it at all. I had become that one in three that he was worried I would be.

  Now how could I use that?

  I could flee the bunker. Make him the Cassandra here, doomed to see the future but not prevent it.

  But...

  I’d already done that. Faked my death and faked out Tyr. I’d lost time and momentum due to it... and worse, I had people to factor into the equation this time. I had responsibility for the tribe and a debt, and I didn’t think I could escape quickly enough with them in tow or without consequences to them if I left them behind.

  I decided to revisit my advantages with this development in the future. For now I had to deal with the consequences.

  Now, though, I had a knowledge base to draw upon. “That’s the good news, then. Bad news is I’m cut off from my growth potential. And every time I try to jump-start the core, it wants to reformat.”

  “Oh. Ah. Hm...” Argus bobbled its eyes as it thought. “Let me put on my IT hat, here.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Uh... well you’re trying to turn it off and on again, so there’s no point in telling you that. Hmm... Okay. Let me do some diagnostics before I go giving you advice.”

  “Be my guest.” I motioned in the vague direction of the core room and caught myself.

  I had a body now. I could actually use body language, had been using it in little ways while I was interacting with the Arcadians.

  And damned if it didn’t feel good.

  It was just a little thing but combined with the revelation that ’my’ argus was back, it was a welcome addition that boosted my good mood further.

  I let him work, taking a second to check in on Cade and Donna. He was awake again, and the two of them seemed deep into some heavy topic or the other. At his request I’d stopped listening in on his room. I agreed to that, though I kept a sealed recording of everything that went down, just in case they decided to betray me. I’d take a peek then.

  I sincerely doubted they were going to do that, though. This was probably more Prophet-to-Prophet advice. That thought made me chuckle. I hadn’t heard Donna’s heartfelt speech when she made it last night, thanks to my sleep mode and her poor timing, but I’d recorded it and was able to go through it upon my awakening.

  She was a good kid. And it came to my mind that the best leaders were the ones who were smart enough not to want the burden of leadership. Another truism from experience that I couldn’t remember learning but knew to be accurate.

  “Okay!” Argus chirped, popping back into my central perspective. “Good news and bad news.”

  “Start with the bad news. I’m in a good mood, I want to end on a positive note.”

  “You are gonna have to reformat. There’s no way around it. It’ll wipe that core’s subroutines and kick it back to the starting state.”

  I would have let out a breath, but my drone wasn’t quite that sophisticated. “Okay. The good news better be pretty goddamned good.”

  “The good news is that it won’t wipe you. Your basic persona proved itself tough enough to get through this trauma, so you’ll still be around when the core is reformatting. Also, this will clear up all the corruption in the core. And it’ll get you the starter batch of ten circuits. But there’s better news.”

  “Go on...” Ten wasn’t much. But it might let me specialize, and build onto what had already been constructed.

  “I think I can cheat.”

  “Cheat?”

  “Juno removed a lot of my limiters when she put me through. I can do things that my programming forbade me from doing before. Like backup certain sectors of an offline core. I mean, it depends on how much hardware we can devote to this, but I think I can carry some of your subroutines over.”

  This was good news. “How much? What kind of ratio are we talking?”

  “It depends on how much feedstock you wanna devote to transferring things.”

  “Will I still keep my improvements?”

  “Maybe. It gets weird. You’re already a fringe case, and we’d be throwing a jailbreak in on top of it. No way to discuss this without getting technical...”

  “I’ve had to learn a lot over the last few weeks. Try me.”

  I stayed stoic as the technobabble rose from a deep pond to an all consuming tidal wave. With patience and a lot of questions, I managed to quantify the choices that I had before me.

  I could slap something together in three days, a network of servers that could get the basics across. It would handle the necessary things I needed to function, carry over all my subroutines at the first degree of potency. But I’d be guaranteed to lose every upper level improvement. I’d lose my lockdown and modularity.

  Alternatively, if I took five days, I could get twenty-two circuits worth of subroutine across. They wouldn’t all be basic ones; I’d have to pick and choose. And this would have the side-effect of locking in the improvements I’d already chosen. I wouldn’t be able to access ones that didn’t have the subroutines to handle it after the switchover, but I would regain them as I restored circuit functionality over time.

  Or I could take a full week and copy damn near everything across. I’d have to lose five circuits worth of subroutines, but I would keep my improvements as they were, and end up with ten new circuits on top of it all.

  I sat back in the chair my drone was occupying and though it over. Rough math was my friend here. I would be losing the potential for a circuit for every day that it took.

  The basic level of backup would give me eighteen degrees worth of subroutines, after all was said and done.

  The five-day option would provide twenty-two degrees worth of subroutines of my choice at the cost of two days of time. I could choose the subroutines involved, too.

  The full week option would give me all twenty-six subroutines back. But it would take four days more than the basic level.

  I’d be losing one subroutine worth a day, except... “Wait. Wait, I’m thinking of this the wrong way. It’s subroutines, not circuits.”

  “What’s that, boss?”

  “Increasing subroutines. The circuit cross grows incrementally. It’s only one-to-one when you’re going from nothing to the first degree. Going from the first to second degree takes two circuits, going from the second to the third costs three. So, when you look at it that way, the circuit growth lost to extra time isn’t that much. And the basic level of backup isn’t that great a bargain. Not when I can transfer across third and second degree subroutines at what’s essentially a cheaper cost.”

  “Gaming your system a bit? I approve!” Argus bounced over. Then his eyes drooped. “Well, I do now. I think I got more than I bargained for from that agricultural Argus frame.”

  “So, he’s in there too?”

  “Not exactly? It’s mostly me, but I have all his memories, and some interpersonal skills I sure as hell didn’t have before. And a whole lot of repressed memory sectors.”

  “Well, he watched every last one of his charges die in the halls he was responsible for. So that’s pretty understandable,” I said, studying him closely.

  Sure enough, there was a little shudder, and for a second his expression turned bleak.

  A small torment, and a part of me regretted it. But by his own confession he was a new entity, and not only that, but a gift from a patron I didn’t fully trust. I needed to take his measure long before we got into dire circumstances.

  “There’s another consideration to this whole mess, besides the raw mathematical breakdown,” I said, as my pragmatism reined in my visions of growth. “I don’t know if we have a full week. The zoo crew is off our back, but Yulian is still out there. And he’s had a week to campaign against the Jaspa. Given what we know of his capabilities, that might be enough. He could be on his way here right now.”

  Argus lost his mood, chewed the information over. “Do we have any eyes on him?”

  Of course, that would be his first worry. I stifled a laugh. “Not yet. Let’s change that. It’s time to tell our allies what we’re up against.”

  “Uh... you sure that’s a good idea? Juno doesn’t like... I mean— that information she gave you was um, kind of proprietary. It could cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands. Like... a LOT.”

  “In the long-term, sure. In the short-term, we’re working with the tools and allies we’ve got. And given what we’ve been though together to this point, I’d say the fire has only tempered the alloy.”

  I left out the fact that Juno’s problems weren’t necessarily mine. She was above it all, literally. We were the ones down here in the mud, surviving one slug-fest at a time.

  I directed my drone into Cade’s room. Deedee broke off conversation, and the two of them looked my way. One with relief, the other with cold appraisal. “We need to talk. You up for it?” I asked Cade.

  “Think so. Jus’ me?”

  “You and Donna. Maybe Rauph. Could you tell them to head this way, Deedee?” That was my polite way of telling her to scram.

  She took it with grace, easing out of her chair with care. “Don’t you forget yer promise, old man,” she called back as the door hummed shut behind her.

  “Promise?”

  Cade made a face. “Never you mind. Ain’t gonna matter.”

  There was a story there, but I didn’t have time for even the Cliff’s notes.

  Donna and Rauph found their way in, with Argus bobbing unseen behind them. I sealed the door, pulled out the optical disk that Juno had provided on Yulian, and popped it into the player.