In keeping with the JIA’s theory that the Machinehood was a cover for al-Muwahhidun in the Maghreb, their destination on the nineteenth—the day of the deadline—was a materials refinery. The caliph liked to target infrastructure rather than people. The USA had only a few major factories that produced the raw bases for pill printers, and they’d found one on the outskirts of Livermore, California. The vast majority of them were located in China, India, and central Africa. Several had already suffered damage from undetectable assailants. No swarm had caught sight of the attackers, and they’d left no physical traces—at least none that those countries had shared with the world. The locations targeted in the past two days added support to the al-Muwahhidun being the true Machinehood operatives. All could be accessed from North Africa via land routes.

America had developed a paranoid itch over the lack of action on its soil. Welga shared the feeling. For the attack on Jackson, she’d been in the right place at the right time—in Chennai, on the other side of the planet. Since then, she’d been able to participate only as a spectator, and she’d never enjoyed that role.

Come and get us, assholes. What are you scared of?

The lack of action left Welga twitchy at a different level from her synaptic problems, which persisted and, if she were honest with herself, had worsened. A half-zip would now reliably stop her tremors. Nithya’s words about addictive behavior haunted her.

“Third time’s the charm,” Ammanuel muttered as they drove toward Livermore.

“It better be,” Welga said. “After today… who knows what they’ll do next?”

They frowned. “You don’t think they’ve done enough? Take out the critical factories at the start of the supply chain, and the pills will stop, at least temporarily. Maybe that’s their plan—wait for people to start getting sick and then attack before we can finish rebuilding.”

“It would work, too,” Welga said grimly, “but attack how? Frontal assaults on major governments are unlikely to work unless the world ends up in a pandemic like we haven’t seen in decades, but then they’re risking themselves.”

“Are they? Bots and WAIs can’t die from infections.”

Welga bit her tongue before she contradicted Ammanuel. They didn’t know about the al-Muwahhidun theory, and she couldn’t enlighten them in a car full of public microcameras.

“Who’d keep up their infrastructure?” she asked instead. “Unless the SAIs are building a massive number of these androids, they’ll need people to maintain electrical power, computing centers, and stellas. Software doesn’t have arms and legs, and bots aren’t general-purpose enough. I have a hard time believing they could hide an entire population of their kind somewhere on Earth.”

Ammanuel opened their mouth. Paused. Narrowed their eyes. “There’s one region where we don’t have visibility.”