I shut the door softly behind me, a smile hooked in the corner of my mouth. “You kept your prescription glasses too? I have to admit, waking up at Orientation and being able to see without contacts felt like a superpower.”

He chuckles, brown skin wrinkling at the sides of his face. “I kept the scar but ditched the glasses.” He lifts them off his face and holds them out to me. “See for yourself.”

I place them over my eyes and stumble back in surprise. “Whoa,” I say, hands trying to catch my balance.

The glasses are like an industrial magnifying glass, but with computerized settings inside. Every object I look at seems to set off some kind of scanner. I can see numbers and letters and equations—things I absolutely do not understand but clearly make sense to Ahmet. I pass them back carefully.

“That was… an experience.” I blink, trying to encourage my sight to return to normal.

Ahmet pushes them back up the bridge of his nose. “I can’t leave room for error.” He picks up a piece of metal, eyeing it carefully. It’s shaped like a very small box, but with strange circuit boards covering every surface.

“What are you making?” I ask curiously, looking across his sloppily drawn notes and fine-tuned designs. Like Gil, Ahmet has pieces of metal strewn about his room. Except Ahmet isn’t creating art—he’s inventing weapons that might one day help us stop the Residents.

“It’s something I’ve been working on for a very long time,” he admits, holding a finger to the side of the metal. I can’t see any changes at all, but the way he’s concentrating makes me think that somewhere inside is a microscopic piece that’s shifting into place.

“What does it do?” I ask.

“Nothing yet, exactly. But the hope is that one day it will shut off a Resident’s consciousness momentarily. It’ll work a little like a computer virus. Scramble their programming.”

“You’re going to blue-screen-of-death the Residents?”

He pauses, humming thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose. But I’m limited in what I can make. And it’s no good disarming a Resident if they’re going to wake up a few minutes later and call the entire Legion Guard for backup.”

“It could still come in handy if there’s an emergency,” I offer.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But if I can include another element, to scramble not just their programming but their memories, too…” He smiles. “Well, then we might have something worth giving a name.”

I get why Annika thinks engineers are the key to winning the war. Casters and veilers are talented, but engineers?

They can redesign the whole world.

But if they can change parts of Infinity, does that mean they can undo parts of it too?