“So now Jordan’s seeing things as they are, and I’m seeing the fantasyland version?” Maggie raged. “Does that mean he sees you as a turd on legs?”

“No,” I said, “still a bland bureaucrat.”

Maggie banged the heel of her hand into the side of her head. “Get! Out! Of! There!” she ordered, then stopped and turned to Kappa again. “You have no right to play God this way. You’ve killed and experimented on innocent people!”

“And,” I added, “you took away our cell-phone service, which can really mess a brother and sister up in this day and age.”

“We serve Ishango,” he said plainly.

“Are you ready to come with us now, Rho?” the other guy asked with a creepily ingratiating smile, his bright blue eyes crinkling.

“Why? Why? Why do you keep coming after me? What do you want?”

“It is what Ishango wants. You are a valuable specimen.”

“For what?”

He motioned at the trail. Chat time was over. It looked like we were going to visit Ishango.

Maggie threw me a questioning look. I shrugged. We didn’t have much choice at this point, and by now I was curious to come face-to-interface with this wicked supercomputer. Maybe there was some way we could convince or compel it to stop destroying lives.

Or at least we could find out what the hell it wanted.

The suits prodded us along single file down the trail, with Maggie in front, then Kappa, then me, and the new suit in back. I calculated that I could take out the bad guys as the descent got steeper, but the risk to Maggie remained too great.

“Sorry about your friend Iota,” I called to Kappa. “He grew too attached to me, so I had to let him down. Way down.”

The chin-scar guy continued as if he’d heard nothing. Sentimental dude.

“So, blue eyes.” I turned back toward the other guy. “What’s your name? I was thinking Lambda or Mu. I’ve decided Mu.”

“It is Mu,” he said.

“You look like a Mu.” I continued down the path. “Muuuuuuuuuu!”

Maggie laughed from up front. “Jeez, Jordan.”

Kappa turned back toward me and glared. Was there an actual nerve to be touched?

“Kappa, man, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I continued breezily. “Where’d you get that scar on your chin? Did you put it somewhere you shouldn’t have?”

He whipped around and shoved me in the chest, and as I tripped and fell, I grabbed his jacket and pulled him down with me while angling my body to avoid the sharp rock edges.

“Get up,” Mu said. “Now.”

As I stood, I held up Kappa’s gun, which I’d grabbed on the way down, and pointed it at Mu, who instantly pressed his gun to Maggie’s temple. Figured.

She gasped, and I nearly went blind with fury as I jammed the heel of my shoe into Kappa’s throat to keep him down. “Let her go now.”

“There’s nowhere you can go to escape from Ishango,” Mu said blandly.