She detaches the touchboard and monitor and pulls them to her lap, then sits down and opens the container. With another key sequence, she has one of the bees pick up a shard of mirror, then extend its legs to hold another so that, looking forward, Ify can see the back of her neck reflected at her. She pulls her braids over her shoulder and sees the back of her neck crusted with red and black, the collar of her bodysuit stuck to her skin. After taking a moment to still her hands, she takes another shard of mirror in her hands and reaches behind her to slowly, steadily peel away the polyurethane so that the protrusion of her vertebrae beneath her skin shows. The flesh there feels cool, chilled by this exposure to the air. Somewhere beneath that epidermis, at a point Ify remembers with her body, is her Augment. A ball of metal the size of a pea. Dull gray and nonfunctional since the EMP but possibly her only route out of here.

She takes several deep breaths, then inputs a series of commands that sends a second bee to the back of her neck, where it aims its thorax. A moment later, a hot needle of pain shoots into that spot at the base of her neck, the bee shooting a thin laser beam slicing open the flesh while sizzling away the blood and cauterizing the wound. Without anesthetic, the hurt threatens to overwhelm Ify’s brain. Tears pool in her eyes. Her teeth clench. But she forces her fingers to program the third and final bee, first to pierce the mesh covering of the bottle of alcohol and plunge its legs into it, then to pick up the loose end of the Terminal’s plug and fit it into the tiny orb sitting in a swathe of tissue just above Ify’s spine, a buffer put there during her initial implant surgery. Fighting tears, she tries to bring the bee to press the wire to the orb and connect her to the Terminal, but it keeps meeting resistance. Over and over, it pushes, then backs away, then pushes, monotonous and insistent. In the mirror, through a fog-inducing ache, Ify sees the problem. The Augment is still buried beneath folds of skin. The incision isn’t large enough.

Her breath quickens, then she closes her eyes. Just as she reopens them, she hears it. The faint footfalls of faraway boot steps.

Soldiers.