Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as possible. “They cut out my node,” I said. “Treya was a translator, right? For years she accessed Allison Pearl as a secondary personality. She ran me like a junior mind, if you understand what I’m saying. And a lot of her own memories and personality got sourced out to the Network. We were all tangled up, me and Treya, but the node always made sure Treya was the controlling entity. But now the node’s gone and I’m dominant. She must have ceded a whole bunch of neural real estate to me over the last decade. Big mistake, from her point of view, though she could hardly have expected a tribe of insurgent Farmers to cut out her Network interface.”

“Excuse me,” Turk said slowly, “but who am I talking to again?”

“Allison. I’m Allison Pearl now.”

“Allison,” he said. “And Treya’s, what, dead?”

“The Network can still embody her if it wants to. She’s potential, but she’s not incarnate.” Technical terms, crudely translated.

Turk thought this over. “The future seems like a pretty fucked-up place sometimes.”

“If you can just take it on faith that I’m Allison now, maybe we can get on with the business of trying to save ourselves.”

“You know how to do that?”

“The point is, we’ll die unless we get somewhere safe before Vox crosses the Arch.”

“That might not be possible. You saw the sky before dawn? The Arch is at zenith, a straight line across the meridian. That means—”

“I know what it means.” It meant we were dangerously close to the crossing.

“So what’s safe, Allison Pearl, and how do we get there?”

The Farmers had eaten their breakfast and gathered their gear, and now they were ready to resume their march on Vox Core. A couple of men picked up the draw-poles of the cart, which had the effect of rolling us around like peas in a skillet. It made conversation awkward. But I told Turk what he needed to know. He was almost up to speed by the time we caught our first glimpse of the ruins of Vox Core.

3.