He didn’t know how she planned to do it, but her intention had been made clear. She wanted to eliminate all the Tangents, including him when he was of no use anymore, severing the connection of the Mortality Doctrine. He’d be dead—the true death—and she could Lift back to the Wake and tell everyone that the VNS had saved the world and only they could prevent it from sinking into chaos again. As he flew, streaking up and down the curved, brightly lit walls of the Hive, he imagined the feigned look of pain on her face as she broke the news. Lives lost, but so many more saved.

He screamed in frustration, and the sound of his yell was swallowed by whatever substance surrounded him. Everything about the place was odd, different from what he was used to. It was programming on such a complex scale, it was beyond anything he’d ever dealt with before.

He flew in circles and found nothing.

Until.

There.

There.

A mere wink in his peripheral vision, like a fly buzzing by. A spark of darkness. Michael stopped his flight, turned toward whatever had captured his attention. It was far away, on the other side of the Hive from where he hovered. He threw all of his will into being there, and this time it wasn’t like flight. It was teleportation. In an instant he was there.

There to witness the beginning of the end.

A pod stood empty. Surrounded on four sides by glowing, living pods of orange light. In the entire structure of the Hive, he’d never seen anything similar. He’d never seen an empty pod. And he knew it had just happened—that had been the dark blur of movement in the corner of his eye. Although he still didn’t understand how she was doing it, Agent Weber had just eliminated the first victim in her grand plan.

The true death.

Michael understood what it meant, and his chest ached. The human who’d been taken, and the Tangent who’d done the possessing—they were both dead now. Gone. Forever. Even without a full grasp of the coding or the Mortality Doctrine, he knew this was so.

As he stared at the vacant slot, thinking all of these troubling thoughts, the next pod over began to dissolve. Like black specks of disease or hungry insects, darkness spread across the surface of the orange light. In a matter of seconds, the entire thing was gone, replaced by emptiness. Though he might’ve imagined it, Michael thought he heard a faint scream, as if from far away, right before the last bit of orange light blinked out of existence.

He floated there, watching, trembling, as another one died, eaten by darkness. The swarm of blackness consumed it like an army of ants. Not a second passed before it began on the very next one, eating away.