Michael shrugged, eager to dive into the code of the place—something he was now ten times better at than he’d been two days earlier. “This has to be the heart of the Mortality Doctrine,” he said, almost to himself, then addressed his friends. “It has to be. The Hive is the storage; the Ravine, the actual program. We need to destroy it, make sure no Tangent ever takes over a human again. Ever. Wipe it out, along with every last remaining trace of its source code. Then we go back to the Hive, reinsert people into their own minds and bodies, and release the Tangents back into the Sleep. Simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” Helga repeated.

Michael just nodded. “One step at a time. I seriously think the hardest part is over. The VNS were behind all of this—they were the real enemy. And we don’t have to worry about them anymore. We can finish this thing, with or without Kaine’s help.”

“Have you really thought this through?” Helga asked him, a motherly tone in her voice. “Like, say, for example, what happens to me and you?”

Michael looked at the ground. He’d never allowed himself to follow that line of thought, though it had hovered on the edges of his mind since the first day he’d awakened in Jackson Porter’s body. He supposed it was time to address it.

“Whatever has to happen will happen,” he said coldly. He pictured the face of Jackson Porter, so strongly that for a second he thought it was real, a glitch in the code. But then it was gone. And it had made him jealous, even though he’d lived the vast majority of his life with a different face.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Helga asked. “The Tangents I partnered with to use the Mortality Doctrine—”

“I know,” he said, cutting her off. “I…I just can’t talk about it right now. I can’t.”

Silence fell on the group, and finally, Bryson broke it.

“So,” he said with a single clap of his hands. “Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

Michael nodded, trying to clear the image of his face—Jackson’s face—from his thoughts. “Okay, yeah, you’re right. Let’s get started.”

“Get started with what, exactly?” Gabby asked. “I still don’t understand what you want us to do with a bunch of grass and trees and an old junk pile of brick and stone.”

Michael focused on Helga. “You know the Doctrine program to an extent, right? I mean, you guys figured it out, used it. Right?”

Her nod didn’t show a lot of confidence. “I wasn’t what you’d call an expert in that field. Others did more than I did. But yeah, I got a good taste of how it worked.”