I fumbled for my arm in the half-light. There was a scabbed up cut over my forearm where a manikin had scratched it while we fled. I got my fingernails on either side of the cut and dug them beneath the scab. The scab peeled off, taking fresh flesh with it, and blood welled up in its place. Not enough. I got my nail into the slit in my skin, and pried it open. Then I sat back and watched blood well up and curve over my arm—watched the cut close up on its own, and seal as if sutured from the inside.

The nanomachines weren’t killing me.

They were repairing me.

In the dreams, the AI had asked about the implant. There’s something in your skull. And I’d told it—I’d told it that the implant wasn’t supposed to be there—

It had been some time, I realized, since I’d had any pain in the base of my skull.

I raised one hand, fingers trembling, to hover over the back of my neck. When I touched my skin I’d feel it there, I told myself, heart pounding. When I touched my skin I’d feel the swollen lump I’d felt earlier, or if that was gone, I would feel the implant as small and hard as a pea nestled right up next to my skull. The headaches being gone didn’t mean anything. The implant was certainly still there.

Carefully, expecting pain, I laid my fingertips over the back of my spine. The skin was cool and flat, no fever, no swelling. I ran my fingers up and down my nape and felt nothing but smooth flat skin, taut to my spine. I pressed my fingertips down hard and felt nothing but my own muscle and bone.

The implant was gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE:

Benny

I followed the wall surrounding Lab 17 until I found Benny, kneeling at a corner of the wall, inspecting the fragile covering. It was possible, I realized abstractly, that I might not have found Benny. That he could’ve gone a different way, and I might have wandered alongside the wall for ages without running into him. But I hadn’t even doubted that I would. There had been no room in my mind for anything other than what had filled it—Lieutenant Gupta’s trap and Indigo’s crimes and the smooth skin at the nape of my neck.

“Oh,” said Benny, lowering his flashlight and the scalpel I saw he had been using to scrape along the edges of the wall, “it’s you.”

“Benny,” I said, because in all the noise in my head, the one word I could remember was his name.

“What happened? Were you followed?”

He was shining his flashlight past me, into the dark, like there might be someone there. The idea was impossible. They were gone; Tamara and Indigo had severed their connections to me and left.

And the ship itself had severed my connection to the Senator. “I’m okay,” I told him. “We parted. Parted for good.”