The director’s voice continued, but it was unintelligible. He hadn’t heard Mark. Then it faded altogether. Mark clicked the replay button and put it on speaker, but it was no better. An attempt to replace the call failed.

“They’re jamming. The signal won’t be coming back.” Mark dropped the satphone onto a desk. “But maybe that’s enough.”

“What was it? What did he say?”

“I got two words, ‘beacon’ and ‘below.’”

“How can that possibly be enough?”

“How much do you remember about this place?”

“We’re on the dorm floor or the floor above it. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Were you ever in the basement?”

“Yes, I—oh.”

“Exactly. If he meant that they picked up a beacon from below where we are—”

“Let’s move.”

During the time they had been in this room, the station had literally been filled with hybrids supported by biomechanicals that were being purpose-built for this fight. On one level, what was unfolding was a war between programs, like a chess match between supercomputers, with the two of them on one side and the rest of the hybrids on the other. But that was not how it felt. On another level, a deeper one, they could sense the hate and the fear. They moved quickly because they knew that the others would not long play at this game. If the two were not dead in a few minutes, the building would certainly be blown up or immolated in waves of fire, or they would be drowned in a mass of hybrids, until even they were overwhelmed.

Mark was unable to access anything but the smallest fragments of memories of this place, just the little snatches and echoes that had remained in his human neurons. But other clues were here, among them the drywall along the back of the room, which was new construction.

As he felt the wall, trying to find a place between the studs where he could break through, he noticed notes, scraps of the TV station’s recent past taped to it—“Call mayor’s office re Starnes,” “Angels flyover is it too loud,” “212-463-what? Get # from Jimmy.”

On the desk that was pushed up against the wall, there was a cold cup from Starbucks and a half-eaten bran muffin. A plastic calorie counter sat beside a notepad with a list of numbers on it, and the clock on the desk beeped occasionally, warning that its backup battery was about to fail.

He found a hollow area and smashed the drywall with his fist.

“Jesus!” Gina said, turning from her vigil.

Ripping the plaster aside, he exposed the brick back wall that it had been built to cover.

“I’m remembering something,” he explained. “Back here.”