Igby smiles, slightly patronizingly, and opens a program on the computer using a handheld piece of plastic hardware that controls a cursor on the screen. I’m pretty sure they used to call it a mouse. I have to hold back a laugh at this. The console begins to whir and bleep as the program powers up.

“Sounds like it’s about to take off,” I say.

“I’ve made a lot of modifications,” Igby says, “but it still struggles to handle what I need it for. Pod and Samira will be back soon—they’ll have the processor I need to speed things up. When that happens, we’ll know exactly where Malachai and Woods are.”

I’m about to ask who Samira is when I notice a small metal box with four thin wires coming from it sitting beside the PC’s tower and reach for it. “What’s this?” I ask.

Igby grabs my wrist and holds it firmly. “Do not touch that,” he says slowly. “We cannot let it see us.”

“What? Can’t let it see us? What does that mean?”

“It was the only way,” Igby says, and turns back to the screen, where lines of unintelligible code scroll from the top down.

“Only way to what?”

Igby takes a deep breath. “We caught one of the hosts. One of those torch-eyed fucks. Pander killed him and we took one of his eyes. I hooked this old PC up to it, and we keep it inside that box so that it can’t see where we are and tell the rest of the hosts.”

“That’s … genius,” I say. “I mean, it’s brutal, but it’s genius.”

“I wrote a program that can decode some of the information we get from the eye. It takes ages and the machine can only handle it for a few minutes at a time. We found out that Happy is behind the Smilers, that it has uploaded itself into the world’s leaders, that—until recently—it couldn’t order others to hurt humans.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I saw that firsthand. I watched one of the hosts command an Alt soldier to shoot another Alt soldier. It’s not good.”

“Not good at all,” Igby agrees. “It won’t be long before they can inflict harm upon humans themselves.”

The thought sends a shiver down my spine. I try not to dwell on it. “What else did you find out?”

Igby continues, “That they were keeping you in the Block and using you like batteries. When we found that out we started planning a way to get you out. It took a long time, but we did it. I’m just sorry we couldn’t get there in time to save Malachai and Woods.”

“When will we know what happened to them?” I ask.