“Whoa!” I spread my hands, stepping between Benny and the path back just in case he had some wild idea about going off already. “There’s no need to kill anybody.”

“That’s what you said about that cop,” Benny said. “Back on Parnasse. You said there was no need to kill anybody, and guess what? That cop turned around and arrested us.”

“That cop was just a kid,” I said.

“Just a kid or not, he arrested us, and that’s how we ended up here!”

“And how are you gonna kill the Minister, Benny?” I demanded. “What, run at him with your tiny little scalpel? He’s still a Minister. And that woman with him is a Republican commando; she’s survived here for five years on her own. You’d be dead before you got within five feet of them.”

I thought Benny would take a swing at me. He’d done that a lot, in the early days, when we were both too raw with grief to stand each other. He hadn’t done it for ages, replacing the hot anger with a certain dull indifference. We all scarred differently, I supposed.

Instead, Benny said, “Fine. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Fine,” I repeated, rubbing at the raised scars on the side of my hand. My fingertip touched something wet as it did, and I glanced down to see that one of the cuts on my hand had opened back up, blood beading at the mouth of it.

I rubbed the skin of my hand, and felt nanomachines skitter beneath my skin.

Benny pressed his hands to the wall, his ear to the metal. “What are you looking for?” I asked.

“A gap.”

“In the wall?”

“In the defenses.” The fingertips of his braced hand trailed over the surface. “I don’t care how well-made it was, or how many redundancies, or if the AI has been repairing the defenses this whole time. It’s been a thousand years. There will be a gap in the defenses, probably more than one. We can get through that gap.”

He seemed to know what to look for. Unless part of finding the gap involved conjugating a verb tense, I was pretty much useless. I trailed after him and his flashlight as he followed the wall from room to room, rubbing the skin of my neck below where the throbbing pain was centered. The ache was a deep and frightening thing that seemed to go straight through into my bone. Maybe the Dreamer-bots wouldn’t kill me. Maybe they’d accidentally detonate the implant, and that would be the thing that killed me.

The thought brought a chill through all parts of me except the back of my skull, which felt achingly hot. I dropped my hand again and watched Benny as he touched and rapped on the wall, examined the machinery hidden in his handbrace, and paced methodically from room to room. He reminded me of one of my neighbors on Kystrom, a veterinarian. Doctor Marco had been a retired exobiologist who was always delighted to see something new. Brigid and I had brought any number of injured wildlife to his door, often with Brigid’s friend Liza trailing behind, too squeamish to touch the animal. Doctor Marco had always taken the wounded thing and examined it much like Benny examined the wall, fingers firm but cautious, feeling for gaps and broken places.