There were only two Uptaken in Vox Core, and I was one of them. The other, of course, was Isaac Dvali. I had been following his progress. Isaac’s skull had been successfully reconstructed, and lately he had learned to walk a few paces and pronounce a few tentative words. But he was far too fragile to risk on an expedition to the Antarctic hinterland.

“Do I have a choice in this?”

“Of course you do. At this point, I’m simply asking you to consider it.”

In fact I knew I would have to accept. Doing this for Oscar would buttress his belief in my possible conversion to Voxish principles. And it was necessary for Oscar to believe in that possibility, if Allison’s plan was to have any chance of succeeding.

If there still was a plan. If we hadn’t already surrendered to our own lies.

*   *   *

The truth was that I had no home in the world but Vox. And Vox, as Oscar insisted, was eager to adopt me, if I was in a mood to accept it.

I tried to behave like a man for whom that offer held some attraction.

Maybe, on some level, it did. Now that I knew it better, Vox had ceased to be a frightening abstraction. I had learned how to dress so that I wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and I understood at least the most basic social customs. I continued to study the books I had been given, trying to pry comprehensible stories out of the legalistic prose. I knew that Vox had originated as a planned polity in the global ocean of a planet called Ester, a Middle World in the chain of habitable planets. I had learned to name the founders of Vox’s limbic democracy and to enumerate its five hundred years of wars and alliances, victories and defeats. I could recite a little of the vast collage of theory and speculation that constituted the Voxish Prophecies. (Some of us who had disappeared into Equatoria’s temporal Arch ten thousand years ago were named in those prophecies, eerily enough. Our second coming had been calculated to the day and hour.)

In other words I had begun to create a Voxish identity for myself in every way I could, short of having a node installed at the base of my neck.

Meanwhile Allison was moving in the opposite direction, away from her past and deeper into her impersona. The price she paid was social isolation and a chronic, brittle loneliness. And that served a purpose, too. She wanted her overseers to believe she was losing touch with reality.