“Sonia?” Takashi squeaked.

Sonia’s steel gray eyes narrowed in anger. Martin Truax’s features struggled to eclipse her own: tan skin with a hint of manicured stubble rippling over her pale, smooth face.

“Adam?” Her voice was Martin’s authoritative bark. “Tell me what you see!”

He looked away as Martin’s broad shoulders filled out the suit. Ambrose tried to crawl, but his hands were too heavy to move. He looked down and screamed: they were pinned to the dirt with oversized U cuff links, golden spikes stuck right through his palms.

Somewhere far away Sonia screamed, “Shimmer out, Takashi!”

He felt their abrupt exit as a tiny scraping in his nasal passage.

Sonia Carter is currently fleshbound.

Takashi Nakamura is currently fleshbound.

Ambrose was alone. His hands were suddenly free. He scrambled to his feet. One of Takashi’s green dragons was sitting on the granite bench, wings folded carefully against its scale-covered sides.

Ambrose backed away. His brain was throbbing, his vision shaky. His Profile felt distant and unimportant, a hazy memory.

“Oh, no…”

The dragon’s elongated lizard head was topped with the sandy waves of his father’s hair. It turned to him and grinned, revealing row upon row of perfectly modified white teeth. Pinned to the tip of each wing, a U cuff link sparkled.

When the dragon spoke, it sounded like his father’s voice overlapping a thousand times.

“Daddy’s very upset with you, Ambrose.”

He slapped his palms together and shimmered out.

The Roman stadium receded as if it had been a picture dangled in front of his face and abruptly snatched away. The mirror that split his mind between real-time perceptions and his Profile shattered, leaving a second of frantic confusion in its place. Then he understood that he was Ambrose Truax, that he was encased in a hollow trunk of wires far beneath the streets of subcanopy ESC, and that he was in agonizing pain.

He blinked the world back.

His wounded palms sent stinging hot tracers up his arms.

Externalized data streams spiraled around him. He heard the heavy, rasping gulps of a person desperate for air and then realized that person was himself. His hands were paralyzed, suspended at his sides. He had a stomach-churning flashback to the Unison cuff links. What had just happened? His father had been everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

Not his father, he reminded himself. Not anymore.

“Get me out!” he called. He heard footsteps shuffling closer. They sounded lopsided, like one leg was heavily favored. Did one of the brothers have a limp? The wires of the trunk parted. Ivor poked his head inside and flashed that infuriating thin-lipped smile.

“Productive visit, I hope.”

“Let me out.”

The old man stooped to enter the enclosed space, then rose to his full height to disengage Ambrose’s palms from the signal core.

“This might tingle.”

Ambrose clenched his teeth as Ivor slid a long wire out from under the bandage on his right hand, then his left. Tears flooded his eyes. Ivor unwrapped each tender palm and slapped on a cool, foul-smelling muck before wrapping them with fresh bandages. The pain faded to a dull ache. Ambrose wiggled his fingers. Ivor turned and left the wire trunk without a word. Ambrose followed him.