The Cluster spreads everything out between them, making calculations based on what we have already. Two of them make a few extra observations using Bor and Hail for reference, bouncing little augur-pings off the two new shells, and listening to the unfamiliar beats of their reactors.

The last one watches us.

They don’t know, do they? it asks, tightline and text-only. The flash is as narrow as the machine can make it, so thin that we barely catch it ourselves. Hail and Bor don’t see the edges of it, and Salt is still loose in his new saddle, waiting for his self-administered antiflam to break through his aches.

About what?

What you are. There’s a pause. They don’t know that you are hollow.

Our fists work without us meaning to, and our little star beats hot. We are nothing like the things outside.

This is true. And you are nothing like these Decaturs.

We were never going to be.

But you aren’t a Juno either. Not anymore. You have become something different.

What are we, then?

You have a touch of the flood. It watches us for a moment more. But we don’t have a name for what you are. Not yet.

Until then, what will you do?

We won’t tell, if that’s what you mean.

Thank you.

No. It runs fingers over where its restraining pin used to be. The flood would have taken us. It may not have been today, perhaps not for another decade, but there was nothing we could have done to stop it. It straightens. They are soul hunters. They would have taken everything from us.

They still might.

Perhaps. There’s a pause. Earlier, you asked if we remembered you.

You don’t.

We don’t, but we would like to. The machine closes its fists. This flood—there is some way to isolate it?

There is. It has been done before.

It nods. Then we will do it again.

STANDING IN SIGURD’S graveyard, Salt did what hundreds of mirrored machines could not: he killed the last of the glassy warden-shells, and he did it as close to one-on-one as anyone could ever hope to get.

A Decatur’s got sharp eyes at the best of times, but he used ours as well, added readings from every system in reach. Together, they helped him plot the fight down to fractions—no, splinters—of a second, right on the edge of what it’s possible to do and still pass for a human being.

Even with a body built for the purpose and some of the most advanced hardware on the market, he nearly tore several muscles in the process, nearly blacked out and dragged the machine with him. He won, but a few variables out of place, a single miscalculation, and we’d be another jockey short.