The blue and purple and amber city expanded in the centrifuge of my mind. Sections disaggregated into clusters of fragments, layers I’d built from the afterimages of flashing reflections, slid apart into their smallest components – the building blocks of imprinted recollection now free to drift forever.

The dismantled city expanded as it shrank into the distance far above me, until it looked like the remnant cloud of an exploded supernova, and then that too became a dot and went away.

I had been tipped backward from a precipice of hard consciousness and now fell, aware enough that this was the thing that had happened to the one with the neck holes, though I no longer remembered her name. Slipping the cord, they had called it. It was not blackness as I had guessed it would be. Hardly so. It was bright, sour acid green or yellow, with lighter areas, spread out like strands of yarn pulled wide, weblike and soft. Then, as sparks that drift upward from a dying fire, an unexpected sprinkling of reflections appeared.

In the twilight of my thereness, I reached for one and considered the glimmers within it. An Instrument Maker, eyes laid brightly upon a gift she’d made for someone she would never meet.

Either my grasp faltered or there was nothing more to hold onto after that. I perceived acceleration until I no longer did. I was warm and then I was neither warm nor cold. Neither fearful nor hopeful. I became aware of a consciousness held within a single human mind, coursing toward the Oblivion Fray, unraveling.

There was a person who had once explained the thing that happens now, but I can’t remember what it was.112

110 Yeah, I ran the simulation too. Bad news: we die.

111 Wow, are you sure we don’t have a war general as a prior, because you’re really acing the strategy portion of the test – You’re just gonna run out the thread aren’t you?

112 The Universe takes you back.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Naecia sprinted along the docks pushing a dolly that carried the Switch Drive, a length of stolen cable, Izairis, and Patton. The suit made the task easy, but distance was against them. The souvenir that Patton had taken from the showroom on the other side of Aszerat wasn’t just a “cool ashtray” as he’d first assumed by its shape, but a key fob for a Galax Cruiser parked in the Red Quadrant in berth number five-hundred and eighty. They’d just passed number sixty.

“I’m getting some connection still from the Odiat’s nav,” said Izairis, scrolling through her hand pad. “Spotty.”

“Where’s Ben?” asked Patton, twisting around from his place at the dolly’s bow. “Can you see him?”

Naecia clicked along, panting lightly, her spiracles snapping open and shut to the rhythm.

Izairis messed with the pad. “Uh.”

“What?”