She almost shuddered at the recollection. In spite of being on experimental zips, faster than anything on the market, she’d moved too slowly to prevent Briella Jackson’s death. Plenty of bots could outrun humans, but they didn’t have agendas of their own. None of the theories about the Machinehood scared her as much as that one truth: the fastest humans couldn’t stop them.

After dinner, her father disappeared into a bedroom to remotely supervise bots on various home-care visits. Luis had long since ended his call with them, having his own work to do. When the clock crossed nine in the morning in India, Welga called Nithya via an encrypted channel. Her sister-in-law answered immediately. Nithya’s dark hair lay in a tidy braid. A red dot decorated the center of her forehead.

“Hi, Welga. How are you? You look tired.”

“So do you.” Welga smiled to take the sting from the statement. “I’m bored, mostly. Ready to be off the bed-hammock-sofa routine. And the zillions of pills and drugs.”

“What do they have you on?”

“Skin and organ juvers. Microbials. Immunity boosters. I don’t know what else—medical stuff. Nothing fun. I can send you the list if you want.”

“No, I don’t think any of those is likely to affect your problem. I’m seeing a parallel between the behavior of muscle cells on zips to juvers, but not the ones for major organs. There’s a particular protein expression that can cause synaptic failure that I’m suspicious of. I need your full sequence to model RNA behavior and its interaction with the zips you take before I can trace the mechanism. Right now, I can’t be sure if it’s muscular or a failure of your central nervous system.”

“I’ll authorize you for access to my full genetic information. You think something’s going screwy in my brain?”

“Maybe. I’m not an expert in this area, so I’m making a lot of guesses. They might all be wrong.”

“And if you are right, then what?”

“It depends on the details. Some types of damage are reversible. Others, you’d have to stop taking zips and hope that daily activity doesn’t worsen the problem.”

“The genetic problem that Mama had—would that have anything to do with mine? We share that part of our DNA.”

Nithya’s expression turned thoughtful. “No, I don’t think they’re related. What your mother had is well understood now, and it changed the way flow is designed to work.” She bit her lip. “But Welga, to play it safe, you should stop using zips until we know what’s going on.”

Welga snorted. “Not likely. They’re cutting my R-and-R time because they’re so shorthanded right now. I’m heading back to San Francisco for a new assignment.”

“Can they do that? Isn’t that illegal?”