“He is not responding to my attempts to communicate, but he is clearly trying to flush me out. He is searching for me. He is searching for both of us.”

Okay, now she was afraid. “What the hell would he want with me?”

“He wants both of us. He wants us both dead.”

“Ampersand,” she said, taking him by the forearm, trying to guide him to the ground. “You’re not okay; you need to relax for a second. Are we in immediate danger?”

His swaying worsened, and at first, she thought it was the beginning of another breakdown until she realized that she was swaying, too, and it was the ground that was making them do it.

It was an earthquake. A real one.

“We have to get outside!” she said, grabbing him by the forearm, but he didn’t move. The luminescence in his eyes had dimmed to almost black. She had lived through a few earthquakes before, all minor affairs that didn’t result in anything more than a short, quiet wobbling of various bric-a-brac and a ceiling fan waving back and forth. This was different, as if the earth had turned to water, and the ripples under her feet were challenging her to stay upright.

The next wave nearly knocked her off her feet, and Ampersand collapsed onto the ground, his head jerking and his limbs seizing. Not knowing what else to do, she fell to her knees and tried to soothe him, tried to get his head and his arms to stop making that jerking movement.

After about a minute, the shaking in the ground had calmed, but Ampersand’s seizing had not, and Cora was standing on the precipice of a full-blown panic. She looked around frantically, as though there might be a key on the floor somewhere that would open the box containing the solution to this puzzle. All she saw was the second chamber, dark as ink. She bolted up, grabbed one of his light drones out of the air, and dashed into the second chamber.

This one was smaller, darker without the leaking light from the setting sun that spilled into the main chamber. Unlike the smooth, bare emptiness of the first chamber, this one was cluttered, the walls papered with what almost looked like giant honeycombs. So he did have material objects; it wasn’t that he only needed the machines in his body and the computer in his head; he had other tools, he just kept them well away from human eyes.

It must be storage, she figured, but how it might be categorized, let alone used, was totally beyond her. It looked like a giant wolf spider had built a series of tunnels stacked on top of each other, dozens of them, but not of a material that looked like a spider’s web, more like the thin outer layer of the human epidermis.