She thrust her hand into the pocket. He stiffened his muscles. She was as fast as he was.

He let her draw out her hand. She—and his heart—would either survive the next second, or they would die together.

She raised her closed fist. He stood absolutely still.

Her whole body trembled. Then her free hand came out, came up, her fingers extended, and he felt the cool of her touch on his cheek and saw into her eyes deeper than he had ever seen into any eyes.

Her other hand opened. The disk lay there, gleaming softly, a simple shape for what was probably the most advanced piece of technology in the world.

He took it from her and closed his own hand around it. A pulsating, vibrating energy was there. He tightened his grip. It was hard, but not that hard, and as he continued to crush it, he felt in his heart a growing sense of freedom.

They were so vulnerable—he was vulnerable—and it felt wonderful to destroy at least a small part of that vulnerability.

It is a terrible thing to live in a dictatorship, but worse by far to have a soul that can become the possession of others.

A flash of heat and white light came from between his fingers, and when he opened his hand, he found a dense rubble of electronics and organic material, and blood.

She took his hand in hers. “You’re bleeding.”

“No.” He threw the rubble to the ground. “It is.” He shook his head. “Everything they make is biomechanical. You and I are human—mostly. I hope. But the rest of these things are just a mix of, I don’t know—human, animal, machine. Alien, too, I assume.” He looked down at the mess he’d thrown to the ground. “That device was alive. It’s a whole different level of technology, where life and machine have become one and the same.”

“I feel like we’re doing evil. You’ve done evil by hurting it. I did evil by letting you.”

“That’s the exact opposite of the truth.”

“I know it but that’s not how I feel.”

He would need to remain wary. She was fighting the programming, but she might lose. Only time would tell. He hated it that she was dangerous, but he denied that truth at his peril.

The purple light came again, and where it touched them, their bodies grew lighter. They pulled themselves away from its glow.

“They know,” she said. “They were waiting to see my choice, and now they know.”

“We would have been very useful to them. Now we have to die.”

He looked up into the bright purple eye, which was speeding down, straight at them. Nearby, drumming started and immediately grew loud, then deafening.

“We have to get inside its defenses,” Mark shouted over the roar. “We’re going to board it.”