He leaned over the edge of the box to look down. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny lights, glowing and pulsing within a murky soup of darkness. And they all swirled together, creating an enormous orb. It was the Hive—tiny compared to the real thing. He’d only seen it from its true perspective, so large that those round sides appeared as walls.

True perspective, he thought. He was in the Sleep, for crying out loud. What did that even mean? It was all a world of code, nothing but letters and numbers and symbols.

Taking a deep breath, he put all his weight onto the stand and flipped himself into the lighted abyss. Just like Agent Weber, he shrank and fell.

4

Everything was a rush of sound and movement, spinning around him like a wild merry-go-round. Then the world righted, slamming into his consciousness like a brick onto wet mortar, and abruptly he stopped moving, his vision corrected, his mind calmed. He floated in a dark nothingness, several hundred feet from a familiar sight: the wall of the Hive, now as grand as the first time he’d seen it. The pods pulsed like heartbeats, a soft, comforting thump of sound along with each one.

There was no sign of Weber, or of Kaine and his army of Tangents. They were either done fighting or on the other side of the Hive.

But Weber. Where had she gone?

With a thought he vaulted himself through the purple air, stopping within a few feet of the glowing pods. He looked up and down, to the sides. From so close, he could barely even see the curve of the structure—which he now understood better than ever, after seeing Weber’s glass case perspective. He didn’t know what to do. If only that pool of code that Kaine had introduced him to would magically appear nearby. Somehow he had to dig into the information to see what Weber had planned.

Time had to be running out.

Michael flew forward, squeezing between two of the oval pods to enter the Hive’s inner area. A world of orange light surrounded him now, a little fainter from the far side. Still no sign of Weber. He sent himself forward, throughout the massive chamber of the Hive, scanning its walls of pods for any sign of Agent Weber.