Sweat makes rivulets of the gore and soot on her face. Her heart races. Rushing, she reaches behind her, digs her fingertips into the wound, and peels the skin back, biting her scream into a muffled groan as the bee holding the cord pushes and pushes, then slips the cord’s end over the Augment. Ify lets go, and her bloody hands fall to the carpet as sharp, heavy breaths rack her body. The Terminal monitor is a blur before her until, with her wrists, she wipes the tears from her eyes.

It all comes down to this. The idea that struck Ify during her journey up the stairs: reprogram her Augment to operate independently of any external device or power source. Turn it into a weapon. Turn it into her Accent.

She closes her eyes and whispers. It sounds like a prayer—a part of her mind knows this—but it’s a series of equations that begins the algorithm she learned as a child in a camp full of war orphans. An algorithm she’d taught herself while she tinkered with the tiny orb that she had fit into her ear and inadvertently used to upend her entire life. An algorithm that, when programmed into this tiny device, would allow her to hack into nearly any database anywhere. The algorithm she thought she could forget, along with the rest of her past in this country, when she assimilated into life in Alabast.

Her mind empties as she communes with the numbers.

The quick boot steps are getting closer. Doors sliding or slamming closed. Furniture overturned, rooms searched. They’re only a few floors away now.

The ache at the back of her neck keeps intruding on her awareness, but she dives deeper and deeper into memory to find a little girl in her bed at night while the rest of the camp is asleep, the covers pulled over her to make a tent over her sitting form while a thin Maglite illuminates the little hemisphere held aloft by a spindly-legged contraption she’d put together weeks prior, her tablet, its screen cracked, connected by a closed network to the half-orb, and her fingers typing in a key sequence that spills out into a self-replicating command sequence on her tablet, growing more elaborate with each iteration.

Without realizing, Ify’s fingers move over the Terminal’s touchboard. Squares light up beneath each touch of her fingertips. A window opens on the monitor indicating console settings for an external device detected. Her Augment.

She opens and calls up the command window, and before her unfurls the programming language of the Augment.

It’s a wonder of programming code. The product of some of the top minds in Alabast, what some have called the signal achievement of the last several hundred years, this thing that allows humans to walk back and forth over the line dividing them from computers.

And she starts changing it.