She knows, even as she’s cleaning her room, that she’s avoiding her device. The Bonder sits like an accusation on her desk. It’s even connected to a projector so she won’t have to actually live through the recorded moments. If she closes her eyes, she can still imagine, in her entire body, the suffering that Peter remembers. Whether or not the memory was false, it still rattles her bones.

For several minutes, she stands in the center of her now-pristine workroom, staring at the device. Finally, before the urge leaves her, she rushes to her desk and inputs the set of keys on her tablet to fire up the Bonder.

It hums, then prepares to send the data to the projector when, suddenly, sparks pop out of it. The projector shuts down and the Bonder goes dark. Ify frowns, then tries to turn the projector back on, but nothing changes. She disconnects the Bonder, and nothing she does will bring it back to life. She turns the thing over in her hands, and, before she knows it, she’s got her tools out to repair it. Her desk is festooned with all shapes of pins and chips and pliers and scalpels, pruning shears and tiny torches. And above it all hovers a small group of nanobots to help hold parts of the metal open while she works.

By the time she looks back up, the false light from the Colony’s lighting system has started to spill through her windows. Wisps of smoke still curl from the device. Her rotation starts in two hours. She’s close—she can taste it like the beginnings of blood on her tongue from chewing through her cheek.

Finally, she’s got it. She lets out a sigh. The next instant, her fingers blaze over the table to put the thing back together.

With her Bonder reassembled, she takes a moment. Then she plugs it into her tablet to read its data and perform a system diagnosis.

Her tablet registers the device. Victory.

Its internal data unfurls down the system monitor. The scroll continues, down and down and down, until it stops. The cursor blinks, then starts to move in the opposite direction, gobbling line after line of code.

It’s erasing its own data, eating its own organs. Frantic, Ify inputs recovery protocols, trying to revert the Bonder to an earlier version of itself and regain what was lost. But nothing. The massacre continues.

She pulls the cord out and forces closed both the tablet and the Bonder. But the damage is done. Almost all of that data, gone.

What just happened?

CHAPTER

16