“But how did you get out? How did you grow new bodies?”

As if the question were too silly to answer, there was general laughter. He realized that they would never tell him, and perhaps he knew the reason why: He was not intelligent enough to understand.

They lifted him then, in steel-strong hands, and carried him easily through the absolute dark, and he did scream now, because the helplessness and the blindness and the fear overwhelmed him, and his cries pealed out again and again, as his mind lost itself in terror.

But then, between breaths, a realization arrived that comes to most dying men, when they know that their lives are truly over. He stopped his cries and ceased to struggle against the strength of his creatures. In a moment, he would touch the mystery of oblivion, and that was absolute.

He rode in their arms, his body slack, thinking that he had not come here on his own, not at all. The attack on Bryan’s men had been intended to lure him here. At least, that must have been part of it. In addition, they had manipulated him into demanding that one of his beloved children kill the other.

It was diabolical.

They did not hurry. As they went along a new corridor, they carried him roughly, dragging him for a time by his legs, letting his head bounce along the concrete floor. He knew that they did this because they were enjoying his suffering.

From the race of felines, he had given them an interest in suffering. As a cat will worry a mouse, their instinct was to worry a captive. He’d thought it would be a useful trait for soldiers who must sometimes torture for information.

They came to a stop, and he found himself thrown to the floor, pain rushing through his shoulder and back. But then he heard a new sound, a vast sighing, as if of an unknown wind.

“What is it?”

There was a chuckle, the voice of a child. “It’s an air intake.”

“To whom am I speaking? Will you tell me?”

“My identifier doesn’t matter to you.”

Of course, why would they have names? They were networked. They had only the six personalities he and Emma had designed. The network identifiers were their individuality.

A moment later, he found his arms pinned and he felt fast and terrible agony splashing across his face and drilling into his head, pain greater than he had imagined possible, and he was momentarily mad with it, abandoned to it, completely drowned in it.

But it lessened a little, and he found that he was seeing great flashes in his head and feeling a coldness deep in his skull, and he thought that his eyes had been cut out.

He gagged, vomiting and gasping, the pain like a single, great knife twisting into the center of his brain.