I was never arrested for my crime. The fire was self-evidently an act of arson, but there were no witnesses. The subsequent investigation uncovered a cache of highly controlled substances in the warehouse, chemical compounds imported from the Middle East and marked for delivery to a longevity-drug ring operating out of New Mexico. By the time my father was remanded for trial I was on the road; by the time he was sentenced I was an ordinary seaman in the recently revived U.S. Merchant Marine, doing deck duty on a freighter bound for Venezuela. My father was found guilty on three counts including conspiracy to distribute, and he ultimately served five years of a ten-year sentence. I learned all that from the newscasts. I had no further contact with my family.

If Allison was correct, those things had happened not to me but to someone else—to the original and authentic Turk Findley, the long-extinct template from which I had been reconstructed.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I even wanted it to be true.

But if I wasn’t the man who had started that fire, if I wasn’t the man whose life had been shaped by it, if I wasn’t the man who had carried his burden of guilt from an old world to a new one, if I wasn’t the man who had second-guessed every opportunity and repented every pleasure, if I wasn’t the man who had allowed a shamefaced sense of obligation to take him deep into the oil lands of Equatoria—if I wasn’t that man, what was I?

*   *   *

Allison brought a med kit to the forward compartment and performed the surgery in view of the sky. Without moving my head I could see clouds the color of steel wool roiling against the aircraft’s leading edge. “Stay still,” she warned me.

She cut deep and fast. The blood covered her hands and clotted in my hair, and even after she packed the wound with gels, the pain was sickening. But she killed the limbic implant and extracted every part of it she could safely reach.

Our aircraft homed in on Vox, fighting turbulence so severe I could feel the deck bucking under me. According to its built-in protocols, it had been trying to contact Vox Core for landing instructions. I asked Allison whether there had been any response.

“Briefly,” she said.

“Someone’s alive down there?”

“Isaac,” she said.

The clouds opened and we could see Vox Core a few hundred feet below us. There had been visible damage—the exposed surfaces of walls and towers looked eroded, almost melted—but most of the city was intact. Our aircraft banked unsteadily toward the nearest tower and landed on an open bay, along with a gust of toxic air.

Allison helped me to the hatch as soon as the air outside was clean enough to breathe.