The buzzing was humming down my arms through my veins, crawling up through my skin, little splinter pricks from the inside out.

“Can you remember that?” I asked Benny, over the roar of machinery. “The answer to every question, no matter what you see or hear, is No.”

He turned just before the first of the machines could claw free of my skin. I don’t know what he saw, but his eyes went round with horror. And then he charged at me, body striking mine, driving me down to the floor.

My concentration was shot; the stinging inside-out needle-pricks receded, but the humming stayed in my skull. Benny landed on top of me, pinning me down, and his face was twisted into a snarl of hate.

He could hate me all he wanted, as long as he was alive to do it. “I just want to help,” I told him.

“That’s your fucking problem,” Benny said. “You can’t help everyone. You have to pick a goddamn side.”

And then he grabbed me by the hair with one hand, pulling my head back, and slashed my throat with the other.

CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX:

Sean Wren, Unkillable Machine Man

I’d spent a few days in the company of Lieutenant Gupta and the Indigo Minister. My reflexes should have been better than they were. Benny telegraphed every movement; I knew enough now to recognize that, and to know it early enough that I could’ve stopped it. But my arms didn’t move to defend me, as if my body did not believe he would do what he did. It was only after the little scalpel went through my throat, like it must have gone through Quint’s, that I could move my hands up to clutch at my neck. I felt air bubble up through my hands, and my next breath came in thick and wet.

The last thing I saw of Benny was him walking away, fingers trailing along the wall, before he moved into the next room and was gone out of sight.

I woke up on a hard floor, something sticky beneath my cheek. I was absolutely certain in the moments after I returned to dim consciousness that I was still in the Dreamer, that I’d woken up after another dream gone wrong, and that I was, if it was the last thing I ever did, going to find the AI and destroy its every last circuit.

My next breath disturbed the fluid in my lungs and I started coughing, and coughed and coughed for a long time, liquid coming up my throat and stopping the passage of air. I gasped and drowned on the dry floor until at last I’d coughed out the worst of the wetness and could manage to take a few sore damp breaths that got actual air into my lungs.

There was a terrifyingly large puddle of blood on the floor beneath me, visible in the light of my flashlight. I touched my throat and found it sticky, damp—and a thin line of vibrant pain bisecting my skin, neatly and tightly sealed up as if sutured from the inside.