“Do you really know what’s impossible anymore?” Shriek asked. “Are you in a position to have an opinion that means anything anymore? You will still die there, on the floor, Finch, if you don’t believe in me.” Felt an immense pressure in his skull. A kind of pulse. “That’s me,” Shriek said. “Me, trying to get out.” His eyes burned with a deep and abiding fire. “I was still regenerating. Healing. But I altered the memory bulb. I encoded it with a copy of me. When you ate it, I entered your brain. If my body had lived, if the real me had lived, I would have eventually become less than an echo. A stray thought. An impulse for tea instead of coffee. Unexpected sadness or joy. You would have carried me, decaying, for the rest of your life. But that didn’t happen. They’ve killed me and I’m all that’s left. Now it’s my mission.”

Tea not coffee. The strange surge of energy during the shoot-out. Sadness or joy. Emotions not his own. Not Crossley’s, either.

“There is no mission now.”

“You’re wrong, Finch. Very wrong.”

Finch, disgusted: “Like Wyte and Otto. I’ll die and you’ll come out of me. Like a fucking parasite.”

Shriek frowned. “No. Not like Wyte and Otto. Not like that at all. Otto ate Wyte from the inside out. I’m just a passenger, gone soon enough. If you help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Manifest in the real world. Become flesh and blood. Complete the mission while there’s still time.”

“But you’re just a … an imitation.”

“It’s not the best way. It’s just the only way now.”

“My mind’s playing tricks on me.”

“Listen to me, Finch. It was Bliss who found me in this cavern. Who brought me to the rebels. I wasn’t even human anymore. I wasn’t, in any sane sense, alive. I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it. If I could come back from a hibernation of so many years, then maybe you’ll understand why a copy of me might be able to reenter the world.”

Bliss again. On the walls of Zamilon. Finding Duncan Shriek. Bending the ear of the Lady in Blue.

“When I wake up, you’ll just be a memory of a dream.”

“You’re not hearing me. You won’t wake up. Your body is shutting down.”

“Then take over. It’s a weak enough machine,” Finch said with self-contempt. “How can I stop you?”

Shriek waved his hand. They stood on the battlements of Zamilon. No one there but them. Cold and windy. Out in the desert: shadows gathering.

“I can’t force you. It would take too much time. We don’t have that kind of time. You’d die first. And right now the Lady in Blue is holding off the invaders at Zamilon. She’s waiting for a miracle. I’m that miracle.”

“And if I said no? If I said no, you’d just fade away and this would all be over?”