A medic-bot and an attendant nurse saw to Welga in a spare office, where she could simultaneously make her report. Sunlight filled the room via a conduit that terminated in the ceiling. The nurse handed a notepad and a tether to Welga. The cuff at the end of the tether fit over her wrist and transmitted directly to her subcutaneous network interface. The cable snaked into the wall behind her recliner.

Welga found the video feeds from the start of the refinery attack. The recordings came from multiple swarms and angles. Based on the firing patterns, at least two camouflaged androids had attacked out front. Scanning the interior feeds, she found a view of Connor and herself. Welga followed their passage through the warehouse: the protester firing wildly, the explosion, their bodies flung like rag dolls… and then, nothing. Her body lay there for two minutes and twenty-two seconds—the same amount Por Qué gave her—then crawled to Connor’s prone form.

What the hell? Where’s the Machinehood creature who talked to me? Had she hallucinated those dark brown eyes? No, not with the details of the horrible, charred flesh vivid in her memory. The metal gleaming underneath. Olafson had said the Machinehood could hack secure comms. They must have hacked the microdrones. Or the stellas that routed communication. Or the storage facilities that held the world’s data. But how could they access those devices without being detected? Did they have people on the inside working them? Machine rights protesters often rigged bots to conduct attacks, but this pointed to far more sophisticated techniques. The web of global data and communications was vast, and the sheer numbers involved made Welga’s thoughts spin. Where would they start to look for the weak links? How would they fight an enemy that could listen to their secure communications in the field?

She made a note in her report about the conflict between the recording and her memories, describing her recollection as best as she could. Everything had happened so fast, and she’d been hazy with pain during the encounter with the Machinehood operative. She could clearly recall their appearance. The reek of smoke and the acrid chemical taste in her throat. But positioning, timing, sounds… not so much.

Once upon a time, people had no other option than to trust their fallible brains, but she’d never had to, not even in the Maghreb. They’d carried hardware to record their experiences while in the blackout zones. Everywhere else, the stellas made local storage superfluous, and only the most paranoid used it. If the Machinehood had a way to access data servers or interrupt network communications, the JIA might need to resort to the same methods they’d used to deal with the al-Muwahhidun.