“I’m afraid of what might happen if this information falls into anyone else’s hands, including the Ayk—”

Leo’s father’s voice suddenly cut off, his image frozen on the screen. Crayt didn’t even bother to turn around.

“You could not sleep?”

Leo took two steps inside, hands shoved in his pockets, the one holding his inhaler and a Coalition patch that used to emblazon his shirt, the other still heavy with the chunk of rock he’d pried from Skits’s treads. “I was looking for Skits.” It wasn’t a lie. He had been looking for her. But he’d been more interested in his missing chip. The one the Aykari allegedly wanted no part of. “She was supposed to be watching over us, but she got . . . distracted.”

“Yes. I am afraid your robot has a programming anomaly.”

“She’s not my robot,” Leo said. “And it’s not an anomaly. That’s just how she is. Baz calls it her personality.”

“You do not need to explain. Number One here has traditional Aykari programming, fully obedient, but I gave Number Nine an adaptive matrix,” Crayt said. “Designed to more accurately mimic an Aykari’s complex mental and emotional responses to its environment. Why is it that the more we attempt to create something in our image, the more flawed it becomes?”

“Maybe we need a better blueprint,” Leo guessed. He pointed at his father’s frozen face on the screen, the uncharacteristically bearded chin, furrowed brow, pleading eyes. “I thought you said you didn’t care.”

“I thought so too, but I could not help myself. A lifetime as a scientist has produced an insatiable curiosity in me.”

“And?”

“And . . . curiosity is a dangerous thing.”

“I meant what did you find,” Leo said.

“I know what you meant,” Crayt replied.

The Aykari spun back around in his seat to face the monitors again. Leo watched his father vanish as Crayt began to quickly swipe through digital files, rows of numbers and blocks of text Leo wouldn’t have been able to understand even if they were in his native language. “I have only taken a glance at what your father has provided here—there is a great deal, all of it fascinating—but even that first pass is enough to verify what you said is true: the Djarik are on the brink of unleashing a new order of destruction upon their enemies.”

“You mean us,” Leo said, taking a step farther into the room. “We’re their enemies.”

“I do not see any patches on your clothes.”

Leo’s fingers brushed against the Coalition emblem still tucked into his pocket. Just a scrap of fabric now. Crayt had a point, though: Leo didn’t feel like he was part of some great partnership of planets hoping to realize some far-flung notion of galactic peace and prosperity anymore. If anything he felt foolish for once believing he was.

He pointed at the screen that now displayed a chaotic array of complicated formulas. “What does all that mean?” He couldn’t tell if he was looking at physics or chemistry or just pure math. It would probably take a genius relative to their kind to decode.