Edison shuddered, his mother’s voice shimmering through his head, her touch feathering across his shoulder again. She was right. Piero was nowhere to be found, no longer a weak signal on the periphery but a void altogether.

“Where is he?” he whispered aloud. “Piero . . . It’s like he’s vanished.”

“What?” Rosalyn joined him at the barrier again, both of her palms pressed against it. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t sense Piero. The others are right there but . . . I can’t . . . I can’t feel him anywhere. I saw something from him, a fragment of a memory maybe, just a smudge of lipstick on someone’s collar. Shit. It doesn’t make any sense. I can always feel them, just distantly. Always.”

She sounded incredulous. “How is that possible? Can’t you feel each other through the network?”

“Yes.” Edison scrunched his eyes shut and then opened them. “I don’t know. In engineering he completely lost it. I think he’s stopped trying to fight the Foxfire. You didn’t see it but . . . God, it was insane. M-Maybe she’s shielding him, shielding him and punishing us.”

Her eyes were huge and liquid, reflecting his own terrified turquoise stare. He didn’t know what to say to reassure her. He didn’t know what to say to reassure himself.

“Punishing you? Punishing you for what?” she wondered.

Edison didn’t look away from her, even if he wanted to shrivel up and hide from what he had to say. “For this,” he told her. “For you.”

24

Rayan was saying goodbye.

There were many things he still ached to do, but a goodbye seemed the best. The fire in the solar panel array had shocked him out of something, out of a deep and deceptive well of optimism that had kept his cruelest, darkest fears at bay. The salvaging crew arriving had been like a shaft of light piercing a leaden sky, but now he saw that beam of light for what it really was—a scouring flame. The lick of flames on startled skin before the real burning began.

All of his hard work lay before him. Not all of his work, but all of his work relevant to Foxfire. He had been the one to name it that, and it took. Oddly, he felt a pang of pride knowing even the alien consciousness inside him had also adopted the name.

Foxfire, then Mother.

It was from a phenomenon well known on Earth, bioluminescent fungus that grew on decaying wood. Sometimes the more whimsical called it fairy fire, but that didn’t seem right. No, Foxfire sounded appropriately volatile. Aggressive. This was no fantastical forest of dancing lights, but a slow descent into a separation of self, the ripping of the identity from the mind. His research had led him to find that this bioluminescence was the closest known thing to the molecular structure of what now infested the Brigantine and her crew.