I pull down two pairs of safety goggles from the shelf behind me and hand one of them to Carter. He takes it with surprise. “You want my help?”

“Of course. Two sets of hands are better than one.”

“What, are you going to run a full health-and-safety briefing next?” he says, but he grimaces, as if ashamed of his own defensive words.

“If you don’t want to lose an eye, you gotta take precautions. Haven’t you learned anything at Profectus?” I nudge him in the side to show I’m joking.

Cautiously, he smiles at me. He’s surprisingly helpful too. He leaves me to work, and instead spends a suspicious amount of time studying my tool kit. But then, when I need the right tool, he’s already got it out and ready for me. Maybe he’s not as useless as I once assumed.

“I always liked this kind of stuff, but Dad was much more the ‘just get a new one’ than a ‘let’s fix it’ type.”

“Yeah, he strikes me that way. I hadn’t even realized that your mom wasn’t around. You were sometimes so mean about my dad…”

Carter shrugs. “Defense mechanism? But also, obviously Dad didn’t want it to become common knowledge that Mom had gone. Or maybe he wanted her out of the picture—somewhere nice and easy to control. Turns out, if you’re a psychopath in business, you’re that way at home too.”

“I’m really sorry you had to deal with that.”

Again, he shrugs. “Better for me to find out now, I suppose.”

“Aren’t you worried this might mean you lose both your parents?”

Carter stops what he’s doing (messing around by stripping some wires, ready for me to solder) and stares at me. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

I cringe. “Oh. Sorry.”

“You don’t think the update can be reversed that far back?”

I think back to the dead eyes, the placidly cheerful actions of updated people inside the Lake Baku dome. They’ve been living like that for years—over a decade. Is it possible to come back from that? What would it be like if you hadn’t had to use your mind—your real mind—in years?

If it isn’t possible…it will be agony. To have found Dad again, but then not be able to get him back properly…

But I can’t look into Carter’s face and tell him that I don’t know if his mom will ever be back to normal. Mostly because it would mean me having to confront that same fact about my dad. I’d rather not think about it just now, and try to concentrate on saving the world instead.

“So tell me the story of what happened exactly?”