A pause. “I think he must have short-circuited or something,” Rhea said. She flickered her gaze briefly to Ariadne’s. “He just . . . dropped.”

Ariadne gave a nod despite her confusion. But Rhea wanted her to stay quiet, so she would. Whatever secret Rhea kept was her own to tell. Or hers to keep.

They injected Cato with another hormone blocker and gave him an additional sedative. “Get comfortable,” Ariadne told the others as she hooked Cato up to the monitoring machine once more. “I’m going to map out a neuroimage of his programming. It’ll take a while.”

She started running diagnostics, squinting at her tablet. The room around her disappeared. She focused only on the code. The puzzle to be solved. She had no idea if anyone came in and out of the room, if the others spoke to her at all. She descended so completely into the abstract. It was easier than thinking about how she could so easily fry this man’s brain.

She guessed Cato was around thirty. As a Rigel, he’d have been sent into the field at sixteen. Years of death in the far reaches of the galaxy, and he’d found a way to come back to the Three Sisters. That said to her that he didn’t love the killing. That he wanted something more. Or, as she suspected, something had gone wrong.

Eventually, Ariadne looked up. Her eyes burned, her head throbbed from solving different equations and writing code in her head.

The others came to attention at Ariadne’s exaggerated stretching. Cato was still unconscious, the wires emerging from his head like the coiled branches of a karya tree.

“Everything okay?” Rhea asked.

Ariadne nodded. “I just gave him a reversal agent. He’ll be waking up in a few moments,” she said, gently binding Cato’s limbs once more. She’d left him untied during deprogramming, but Nyx and Eris held their weapons at the ready. Rhea kept one finger on the pilot’s skin.

No injection. It had skidded somewhere.

Rhea had touched him while he was strangling Ariadne.

And Cato had dropped.

Ariadne studied Rhea. Her mind was still in problem-solving mode, her memory sharpening. Rumors she’d found floating through the palace tore at the edges of her awareness. She’d read reports of DNA mapping to an unnamed person in the palace. Diagnostics. The Oracle took the lead on that project. Ariadne had planned to find out who it was before she left the palace. She’d wanted to tell Kyla . . .

That subject could have knocked a soldier out cold with one touch.

Is that your secret? Ariadne wanted to ask. Were you some experiment, made to be a weapon like Nyx?

Rhea caught her glance and swallowed. As if Rhea had read her mind—could she?—she mouthed, Later. Promise.

Ariadne nodded, despite her unease. She was used to keeping secrets.