We can feel the flood leaking past the boundaries of its body, clawing for new connections. Somewhere under all of that, it knows the feeling of a cell. It does what any convict would, faced with fresh chains and a journey back into the dark: it goes hunting for a way out. Something—anything—so long as it has a chance of seeing open air again. It scrabbles at us, looking for some way past the odd shores around our mind, some way into the depths that hold our thoughts.

It finds the connection we offer it.

We told you: you don’t take Hail or Salt or Bor. They belong to us.

You take us.

We feel the networks shift, odd shapes coiling through the air toward us. We feel it latch, feel it settle into the contours and valleys of something else’s mind. We feel it search for eyes and arms and reactor controls, but there’s nothing it can reach. We feel it test the limits of its horizon, and find them all too close together. Too much like another cell.

We feel it try to pull away, but it’s too late to realise its mistake.

The disembodied Spirit makes no sound as it dies inside us, drowned as the flood flows into a sandbox made for one. Outside, we can hear the Cluster, almost feel the fire that swirls around us. Their calculations turn with us at the axis, a tiny moment of calm in the middle of the storm. We climb the body of the observer and set our feet on either side of the massive wound we’ve carved. Hollow fingers claw at us, Mirai and Decatur and things we can’t see, rearing up from the shadows. They seize and shiver, but corrupted swarm-logic drives them closer, hurls their bodies at us. The lightning finds them first.

We don’t look back. We drive a fist through the observer’s ruined skull. We’re expecting steel and mirrored circuitry, but all we find is glass. Growth that could be veins and grey tissue, so fine it turns to dust between our fingers. Behind its eyes, we find the source. Both of them. Two little beads that settle in our palm, almost perfectly clear. Two prisoners.

We close our grip, pile hydraulics on around them, but they resist, even as the force bends our bones around them.

It doesn’t matter.

We stand tall in the sudden quiet, look back through the propellant-haze.

We can feel glassy feelers test the skin of our palm, looking for some way in, and we don’t resist. Their bodies root themselves to us, but we have their minds in a cage.

We are the wardens now.

Hail’s voice rises into hearing. “Rook! Get away!”