“Are you cracked?” Clo looked like she wanted to confiscate the rock. “Who cares how shiny it is? It set off my mech cuff and you can’t even identify what it is. If you open that thing up and your face melts off, you’re on your own. We’re locking you in the room with it.”

Nyx looked at Clo sharply. “We? Speak for yourself. I’ll shove you in a fucking room with it if you keep talking to her like that.”

Clo’s mouth snapped shut. Ariadne really loved Nyx. Really, really.

“If my face melts off, then you know it’s a weapon,” Ariadne insisted. Josephine was definitely going to be pretty inside; she’d seen a faint glimmer in it earlier, kind of like opal but with more light. “I can lay a few things out in the med center for a better makeshift lab and run a more thorough analysis once I open her up.”

Clo shook her head. “I still think this is a bad idea.” She gestured at Eris. “What do you think? You’re supposed to be leading.”

“This is important,” Ariadne insisted. “We have to know why they were protecting this shipment.”

The words tangled in her mouth; she wasn’t used to speaking so much to people. Typing messages to Kyla back in the Temple was different. She could ponder her words and how they would be received. She could take her time, puzzle over the correct vocabulary.

Here? In person? Ariadne’s vocal responses seemed insufficient to calm everyone. She didn’t know how to make them happy. These women weren’t Named Things, inanimate dolls or objects to sit on her desk that never had an opinion other than the ones she thought up for them. They were people—human beings—and she didn’t know how to interact with anything but the practical thought process coded into the Oracle’s mainframe that punished her for inefficiency.

Ariadne was just a girl. To a computer program a thousand years old, she was replaceable. Others had coded before her; others would after her. She survived by making herself useful, by being better than the others. She’d hoped that if she coded and improved the Oracle’s sentience, that One would learn to feel things for Ariadne, to understand that she had needs, and wouldn’t punish her if she got tired.

Lately, she was tired too often. Obsolete. Things that started to become obsolete ceased to work as efficiently.

That’s when it was time to replace them.

Eris sighed. “Clo might have a point. We could have Kyla take the sample back to Nova and have someone in one of the labs at headquarters analyze it. They’d have a better idea of what it is.”