I try to sit up but I’m restrained. “Try again?”

  “They’re working on a different sequence of nanites for a new serum. It took a few trials and errors to get my sequencing, but I didn’t have anyone to pull into the ether with me, so it was much different than the side effects you’re experiencing.”

  His concerned expression is gone, but I’m still rattled by what he’s saying, and half confused.

  “Side effects?” I say. “These are hardly side effects if everything I’m experiencing is real. Luke, you have to do something. Undo the restraints. Take me to One. I think she can help.”

  Luke stares down at me but he doesn’t say anything immediately. “We’ve already been to see One. Think of the ether as a universe within a universe. If it happens in the ether, it’s as real as real can possibly get. They often don’t even distinguish between the physical and the ethereal. It’s jarring at times, but you get used to it.”

  I hold fast to my desire to see One. “We have, but we haven’t, not yet. Not really. Luke, you can’t let them do this to everyone in Central. You can’t. Not even Matthew deserves this.”

  Luke’s face is right next to mine. I can feel his warm breath on my cheek. It’s like he’s trying to stare through me. I sense he’s about to back away and I’m afraid he’s going to leave. I don’t want him to. I don’t want to be alone. I press my lips against his as firmly and fiercely as I can.

  His hands shift, gripping my wrists. I’m afraid he’s going to reject me until I feel the straps loosening. When he undoes the ankle straps, my first instinct is to flee, but before I do he’s touching my cheek. Then I feel his hands cradle the side of my head and his fingers slipping through my hair.

  His smile warms me as much as his touch as he kisses me. My heart is beating like a drum in my chest and I’m terrified of what may happen next.

  I’ve seen pictures of families, couples, lovers, in the book, but this isn’t something I’ve ever experienced. This isn’t something I even understand.

  “Connect with me,” I say as I pull him to me. I don’t know why I say it, but I sense this is what needs to happen.

  His lips still on mine, he tries to undo the clasp on the back of my jumper so he can unzip and remove it. His fingers fumble. This isn’t something he’s done before either. I try to help him, but I wince in pain as soon as I try to bend my arm back.

  The bullet, I remember, the surgery.

  I cover my face. There are tears on my cheeks.

  “What’s wrong? Do you want me to stop?” he says.

  I shake my head, but I don’t really know what I want or don’t want.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice is different. He’s hurt I can tell. He takes my arm. “Look at me.”

  I take my hands from my face and he sees my tears. He wipes them away with his index finger. His touch is soft, gentle.

  There is hurt in his eyes, desire too. He sits back, but I don’t let him move away.

  I put my arms around him, my lips touched to his. “If you ever felt anything real for me, push them away. Feel only me in this moment. I need to know that it’s only you here with me. I need to know this is something you want and not something they want you to do.”

  “It’s… It’s…” He grips the side of his head. “Get out of my head!”

  I slap him as hard as I can. If he can’t feel deeply enough for me, I want him to feel something even deeper. Anger. Rage. Anything.

  I know the instant I’m truly alone with him. His eyes change, losing an inner glow I hadn’t noticed before but the absence of which is as clear as daylight.

  It’s what I’ve been waiting for or what I tell myself I’ve been waiting for. But I also tell myself one more kiss, just one more kiss.

  The kiss doesn’t deepen our connection. Instead, it affirms that Luke wasn’t entirely Luke before. I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. I don’t know why. Of course, this isn’t something Luke wanted. It is something they wanted. Another experiment, a test perhaps?

  I press down on my abdomen and look away. The tears are back. I can’t control them. I don’t know why I need him to feel the same way I do, but I do.

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” I say quietly.

  “I’m not.” He grabs my shoulders and twists me around to face him. I try to push him away, but he grabs my hands.

  “Don’t,” I say, biting my lip.

  “Whatever this is, it’s not the right time. I need you to know that this wasn’t them, not entirely.”

  “I know that.”

  “No, you don’t.” He lets go of my hands. “Until you’ve had a billion voices in your head, you can’t possibly know. I was me, but I wasn’t. My thoughts were my own, but they weren’t.”

  “But it’s just you and me now,” I say, taking his hand in mine.

  Yes, I hear in my mind and reflexively I whisper his name in my thoughts. That acknowledgement opens our connection and suddenly I am as deeply in his mind as he is in mine. It’s as if someone has supercharged my synapses, such that thoughts could whistle and whip their way across my mind without the struggle I’d come to experience as thought itself.

  You’ve been here all along. It’s a statement because I already know the answer.

  Since you opened yourself to me. This—you and me—it was never an experiment. We are a curiosity to them. They want to study our interactions to understand us, but they never intended this.

  I touch his cheek tenderly with my fingertips. The side of his face is bright red and hot where I struck him. Idiom called me a curiosity too. Is that what they call us?

  He pulls away from me, scowling. I feel him shifting through my mind. He’s looking for traces of Idiom, but there’s nothing to find—or at least nothing he can find.

  He places his hand over mine. His kiss intensifies our connection. As he presses against me, I wince in pain. It’s not him; it’s my shoulder.

  Can I see? he asks.

  I nod. He undoes the clasp on the back of my jumper and pulls down on the zipper. I pull the fabric down and carefully slip my shoulder out of it. What do they want from us? Why did you lead them to Central?

  He runs his fingers over the edge of my bandage and then peels the bandage back. In the mirror, I can see flashing and fusing, like flesh and muscle are being knit together by tiny creatures I can’t see. Nanites, I realize.

  His throat tightens as he swallows. It’s not Central they want, not really. Something they saw when we coalesced lead them here, not us specifically.

  These are his words, but I see something else entirely in his mind. I see the assimilation of everyone in Central. I don’t know why, but a name enters my thoughts: Relic.

  He presses the bandage over the wound and pulls my jumper back over my shoulder. Relic?

  There’s an empty space in my mind. I don’t know.

  He believes me. It has nothing to do with my words and everything to do with his rifling through my innermost thoughts. He’s so forceful, I feel nauseous, like I’ve just fallen from a great height into a bottomless well. My face flushes and I swoon.

  His hands move along my back to steady me. He’s half cradling me. He kisses my closed eyes, and on a soft spot next to my cheek and ear, and then my lips. It makes my palpitating heart seem to tremble as I tingle all over with a strange, electrifying excitement. I want him to keep kissing me and I want him to know it.

  But there’s something else suddenly. A need to ask Luke to show me Central and the city below as it was. I don’t even know if such a thing is possible.

  Luke nods, his broad smile suddenly fading as our eyes meet. “It is possible,” he says aloud. “Something I’ve seen, part of their planning, but I need a sequenced pair of holodexes to show you.”

  He read my thoughts again. I don’t feel like kissing him now. All I can do is stare at him. “How can we get those?” I ask, frowning.

  His eyebrows pinch toward each other. “It’s better if I show you.”

  My thoughts swim with images. Too many at once for me to fully understand. There’s a chamber in the center of the ship. A control room of sorts where we’ll find what we need. He’s worried though about something that occupies the room. The core.

  “There’s something else I need to show you too, but not now. We have to hurry. Once they deploy, Central and the secrets below us are lost.”

  Chapter 7

  Node: 010

  Taking my hand, Luke helps me to my feet. He starts to pull me behind him and then stops. His eyes wash over me, as if I’m something so fragile I’m going to break before his eyes.

  “What is it?” I ask. “Luke, we have to go.”

  “It’s so quiet, too quiet, Cedes,” he says softly. “At first it was overwhelming. I couldn’t think, eat or sleep. All I could do was try to hold onto myself. You can’t imagine the magnitude of such a multitude. They are countless. It took days to assimilate, but when I finally became one of them…”

  As his voice trails off, it’s me who must hold him up. “Luke, stay with me. I need you.”

  I tumble with him over to the slumber table. My hip slams into the side table, knocking a metal tray noisily onto the floor. A moment later, I’m scrambling after a syringe that had been on the tray.

  The needle I remember. It’s the one Luke injected me with. As I’m kneeling on the floor, holding the needle and staring up at Luke, a few things come together. I don’t know how I didn’t figure this out before. Luke as much as told me about the serum and the nanites it contained, but I didn’t put it all together. This is what he injected into me. This is what is supposed to connect me to the collective. This is what is still inside me—and inside him.

  I squeeze the needle, not knowing what to expect. I expect some bit of liquid at the least, a drop perhaps to spill onto the floor. There’s nothing to be squeezed from the needle, however, even as I squeeze harder.

  Or is there?

  A tiny droplet on the end of the needle.

  I touch the tiny silver droplet to my finger and raise the finger to my eye to get a closer look.

  It’s like a drop of quicksilver. It even seems to quiver.

  Then it’s not quivering. It’s moving. A tiny ball of silver uncurling itself and transforming. At first it seems like a tiny bit of thread. There are tiny legs under its body though, so it’s more like a thousand-legged bug. A bug that’s trying to stand on the tip of my finger.

  But it’s not standing, it’s jumping.

  It’s on my face. I claw at it to get it off me, but it disappears into the corner of my eye.

  Luke doesn’t say anything when I look up at him. Upset, I slap the needle onto the tray and put the tray onto the side table, accidentally pushing a button on a side panel. A mechanical hand comes out of the wall. It’s holding a syringe in its steel fingers.

  Luke picks up the needle. “It must be the next batch of the serum. This should be a closer match for your sequencing. It should connect you to the collective or at least get you closer.”

  “Don’t you even…” I shake my head. “Not now or ever.”

  He averts his eyes. “What if we’re making a mistake? You’ve never felt their will. The collective is strong, everything. What if my humanity—our humanity—is what they need?”

  I swivel around, until I’m staring so closely into his soft brown eyes I can see the flecks of gold within them. “Don’t do this. Not now.”

  “Am I scaring you, Cedes?” The mechanical tone of his voice terrifies me.

  “Yes, you are,” I whisper. “I need the Luke I once knew back. The Luke who would do anything for me, for Central.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t make it work that way. I feel their absence as intensely as ever I felt their presence.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine what you are feeling,” I say softly, but even as I say this I realize it’s not true. He and I, we’re connected. I should feel everything he’s feeling and yet I don’t. “Luke, what have you done? Connect with me… Stay with me…”

  “It’s the Nascents,” he says, more to himself than to me. “Our time to reclaim what’s ours.”

  I’m afraid of his increasingly vacant stare. “No, no it isn’t. You can’t lead them into Central. You have to stop them.”

  Before he can do anything I don’t want him to do, I wrap my arms around him and press my face so tightly to his chest I can feel his heartbeat against my cheek. It’s my turn to kiss him. I brush my lips against his cheek, the soft place beside his ear, his lips.

  I yearn to know his thoughts, to feel what he feels. I want him to feel the same way.

  He bends his head and kisses me tentatively at first, slowly, and then more fully.

  Cedes...

  …Luke.

  I’m swept away when we finally connect. It’s as if an inner eye has opened. I can see him with this inner eye and he can see me. I know what he’s thinking, what he’s sensing, what he’s feeling, just as he knows, senses and feels me. If this is what it’s like to completely connect to one, I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to connect to billions.

  Chapter 8

  Node: 010

  I watch Luke’s face as we hurry down a narrow hall deep within the heart of the Cogent airship. We spent the last half hour working our way here, moving along criss-crossing corridors, taking lifts to this section of the ship or that. Eventually, the bustle of flying, hovering, rolling, walking machines moving to and fro gave way to paths that are mostly empty.

  Consciously, I make sure to stay inside his mind. We have to stay connected. It’s not something that’s easy to do. I don’t understand how the machine’s technology works but I know it works. I also know that his thoughts and emotions stay with me only as long as I stay with him.

  When we reach the outer doors of the core room, I feel his trepidation. Entering this room, intending what we intend, is a betrayal. Before I take his hand gently and pull him to me, I make sure there are no machines anywhere nearby.

  Luke, we have to do this.

  Cedes, are you sure? What if we’re making a mistake?

  You said this is where we must go. I haven’t told him the reason I need access to the records that will answer my questions, but he hasn’t asked either.

  We’re in the right place, but you must understand the danger. If we’re discovered we won’t just get a needle this time.

  “We can do this,” I say. I was so focused that I barely thought about what we would do once we reached the core. “I need to see Central as it was. I don’t know why, but I do.”

  Getting here undetected was only part of Luke’s plan. We must now get inside and convince the controllers that we’re following the will of the collective. We must pick up the activation devices that we’re going to need later and then we must make our way through the core and up to the control room.

  Luke touches his right hand to the outer door and it opens. I follow a step behind him. A pair of vertical wings is between us and the inner door to the core room.

  We continue, single file. I try to think of nothing as we approach the machines, as if that will keep them from seeing what I really am.

  I dare not turn my head as I pass them, but I let my eyes skirt to the side. The wings are even more frightening up close.

  The inner door opens automatically at our approach. The room we enter is cylindrical, with a path that gradually circles its way up and around the core like a spiral staircase in one of the broken buildings in the city below. The core itself is a swirling mass of quicksilver that extends from floor to ceiling.

  I take my cues from Luke, retrieving a holodex from a wall panel a few seconds after he does and continuing along the circular path toward the top of the core. The machines around me are humanoid. Sometimes, I must step to the right or left to avoid them. They move silently, using their holodexes to perform unknowable tasks.

  I stop as Luke stops. I stand staring at the back of his head. I dare not turn or look around to see what’s happening. The danger in entering the core room isn’t discovery. Well, it is and it isn’t, but the greater danger is our proximity to the nucleus—the glowing, swirling mass of quicksilver. Luke warned me about its security protocols, about what could happen if we’re detected.

  Tension is making me clench my teeth. I try to unclench them as Luke continues on.

  I step to the left again. A machine whirs past me. I don’t mean to look at it but I do. It’s one of the controllers Luke warned me about and it’s even more human-looking than I thought it’d be. The only difference between it and me is its silver metallic skin and the way its head pivots on its neck.

  I correct my steps to get back in sync with Luke. Too much movement. They’re going to catch me.

  Another blank-faced controller passes. This one red silver and I can’t help but wonder what meaning is behind the color coding. Was I wrong? Should I have gone back to One instead?

  The midlevels are crowded. Luke and I are practically shoulder to shoulder with the machines as we file through.

  I wanted to get the holodexes and run. Luke said we mustn’t, that we must move through the core room with purpose or we will stand out as different. The flow of traffic is mostly up and so that continues to be our course. Our destination is located on top of the core room.

  I flush emotion from my face and thoughts. I try to be as expressionless as the controllers. Luke is afraid, however. I feel his fear as if it is my own, except there’s a widening gulf between us.

  Stay with me.

  Tears spark behind my eyes and I do my best to blink them back.

  Luke, don’t you dare disconnect…

  I can’t see what’s going on but I need to, and so I push into his thoughts as forcefully as I can.

  Then it’s as if I’m staring out through his eyes, only what he sees isn’t in front of him. It’s inside his mind. A hundred-headed serpent made of quicksilver and it’s writhing, striking, while Luke moves through a frantic dance. He’s jumping, twisting, diving, as he tries to avoid the snake’s heads and their snapping jaws.