His forearms had been resting on the back of the bench, but he pulled them away, running his nails nervously back and forth over the pleather cushion, scratching and scratching until his mother tsked him and slapped his hands.

What was he doing? Where was he? Where was Mamma?

Piero looked at his hands. Were they even his anymore? He could barely feel the bunches of cord in his hands, green and warm, fresh from the insides of the ship. Starboard observation sketched itself in around him, dark, lit with soft yellow filaments above the panoramic windows and the familiar blue growth that pulsed in harmony with his heartbeat. He felt it there and all around him and in the man trapped in a clear prison to his right.

The ship. The Brigantine. Somehow, Mother had lost control of him for an instant, but instead of reality he had slipped far, far into the past. Parts of him still existed then, but those parts and his whole belonged to the cluster. They had work to do. They had problems to solve. The salvager had inadvertently helped them, but now she and the as-yet-unclaimed Edison and Misato plotted against the collective. Wayward, naughty children. Of course, they would be subdued in time, but the cords in their hands, the comm network, took priority.

“I know you can hear me. Listen to me, you little shit, let me out of here right now. Let me out.”

It was a stroke of genius, the brig, the only compartment on the ship that a captain’s code could override from the outside. Two threats neutralized, two to go. He—they—felt almost giddy, on the verge of a breakthrough. The beautiful bright fungus covering the ceiling seemed to trill, flashing faster and faster, signaling their shared excitement. It was a sensation but also a verse that filled them, spurring, exciting, a fragment of something greater that kept Piero’s hands busy with the cords, twisting, snapping, breaking, breaking. Faster and faster . . .

Mother liked to make up rhymes for him, so he made up some of his own. The knife in the hand goes stab, stab, stab. The blood in the veins goes spill, spill, spill . . .

Piero had given Tuva the pills to save himself, and giving a pill or two wasn’t so hard. He wasn’t a killer, but Mother was changing him. Everything was different. Killing Tuva didn’t sit right with him, but choices had to be made. He wasn’t going back to Io. He wasn’t taking another shit job with shit money. Merc work hardly paid the bills with military-grade Servitors coming online. His contact at ISS had been clear—the package would be at CDAS, and it needed to be transferred to a vessel, any vessel, and studied. If Piero could just do that, just put the package into a controlled space and record the results, he would be set for life.