Mistletoe watched the soundless video as a student stepped forward and extinguished his ID. He yelled something at the nearest Associate, his enraged mouth working silently, and received a swift crack on the side of the head with the blunted tip of a disruptor. The boy crumpled into a crooked line on the floor. Next to him, the red-haired girl who had given Mistletoe chocolate and directions presented her ID for inspection. A Security Associate passed his hand through the iridescent sphere and moved down the row.

Mistletoe felt the weight of her own disruptor wrapped around her forearm, dormant inside her sleeve. She fought the crazy urge to close her fist, arm the weapon, and burst through the office door, blasting away. Looking for me, guys?

Another group of Associates stepped into view and began dispersing along the perimeter of the room, taking positions in front of the professors’ offices, two men to a door.

Deirdre dismissed the image and pulled a bulging mud-colored duffel bag from behind the chair.

“I thought this might happen someday,” she said, whisking the orange jars and loose capsules from the rectangular wall slot into the bag.

“Nobody followed me here,” Mistletoe said.

Deirdre shouldered the bag, then grabbed the red chair by its rounded armrest and threw it aside with brisk authority. The newly exposed segment of wall was bare except for another indented palm print.

“It’s my fault for giving you the login. I took a stupid risk with experimental technology, and now we have to run.”

Mistletoe felt rooted to the spot by a cold, achy sickness that crept down her neck into her chest and stomach. That’s exactly what she was: experimental technology. Ivor had been right about the danger of being abruptly disconnected from Unison: horrible memories, deeply suppressed, were relived in acute detail.

“You don’t understand,” Mistletoe said. “He’s lost in there without me.”

Deirdre fit her hand into the indentation. A horizontal crack appeared in the back wall and widened to reveal the ESCU campus. The forest was brushed with long stripes of afternoon sunlight. Mistletoe squinted as a sunbeam scored a direct hit into Deirdre’s office.

“My priority right now is not being shot,” Deirdre said, hoisting one leg storklike through the rectangular opening in the wall and fluidly slipping the rest of her body out of the room. “Yours should be, too.”