Even if she could, they’d find some other way to break her. Stronger sedatives. More waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Eventually they’d break her. They’d rip the back doors out of her mind. They’d be able to break into the mind of anyone running Nexus, steal their thoughts, turn them into human robots or assassins, reprogram them to vote or buy or do what their new masters wanted… All of it, the exact opposite of what they’d dreamt of in building Nexus 5.

And all because of her. Because she was weak. Because eventually she’d give them the codes. Because everyone breaks eventually.

Ilya wept in the darkness, wept for her solitude, wept for her parents, wept for fear that she’d soon betray everything she believed in.

She wept and wept and wept, until there was nothing else, until a sleep of exhaustion took her.

She woke to more darkness. And to panic.

Lub dub. Lub dub.

How long had she slept? What if they broke her today? What if the door opened a minute from now, and they took her, and this time she buckled when they waterboarded her?

What if they put her in the fMRI again and tried to read her mind while they questioned her, and her mental tricks weren’t enough to confuse it. Or what if they came in with more of those Nexus agents (traitors, really) ready to beat her down mentally?

Her heart pounded in the darkness.

Lub dub. Lub dub.

She knew what she needed to do. She’d known for sleep after sleep, interrogation after interrogation, since the first time she’d honestly truly thought she was going to die during a questioning, and found part of herself glad at the thought.

They wouldn’t let her die, of course. They’d keep her alive until she gave them what they wanted. That’s why she was strapped down like this, so she couldn’t find a way to end her life on her own.

But she had another tool. A tool in her mind.

She’d considered trying to use Nexus to erase the knowledge from her mind. But the memories were too widespread. She’d thought of the back doors too often since that day on the plane. The memories were too linked in to other experiences, other thoughts. To have a hope of scrambling them all, she’d have to risk disrupting large parts of herself. She might emerge a vegetable or worse. And if she didn’t get every trace of them? The new her would be even less able to resist interrogation.

No. There was only one way to be sure the ERD never got these codes.

How to do it? Nexus nodes that she could control suffused her brain. And with them, she could think of a dozen ways to end her life.