Yuri licked his lips, then raised his eyes, a determined glint in them. “You will think of this as very foolish, but I am always having this great feeling of certainty I must stay—a certainty it is necessary that I am here, as though there is some purpose I would be neglecting if I left.”

“What purpose?”

He shrugged his large shoulders. “I cannot say. ‘Purpose’ is the only way I can describe this sense as though I have a task here. Even so much as a contemplation of departure gives me great unease. I feel it, such wrongness, such a certainty that leaving would be a grave error. And when I try to reason it out, this wrong feeling gets worse—as though some terrible weight is pressing in on my temples.” He gestured vaguely to his head. “And I am aware this must seem quite crazy to you.”

Tom leaned back against the wall. “No. No, man. It’s not crazy. Hey, come on, I know how it is. Like, I know where I’d have been without this place. There was nothing before.” He didn’t talk about this stuff, not even with Vik, and even now Tom had to drop his voice to a near whisper. “Literally, just . . . nothing. I don’t know where I’d have gone if I hadn’t been recruited. I probably would’ve ended up, I dunno, in prison or something.” He shrugged off the thought. “But, Yuri, this doesn’t have to be make or break for you. You’re not like me. You’re better. You can do so much, and people like you. People care about you. You could really do something in this world.”

Yuri raised his eyes to his. “You are too hard on yourself, Thomas.”

Tom was thrown a moment by his words, and he fell silent.

“I hate to interrupt the touching moment.” Blackburn’s voice floated from the darkness below them as his footsteps scuffed their way up the stairs. Tom and Yuri both jumped, but then Blackburn rounded the turn in the stairs below them, and said very clearly to Yuri, “We are talking about Zorten Two for the next five minutes.”

Yuri took his cue immediately, and his face grew cloudy like he was zoning out—just as Blackburn programmed him to do when he heard anything programming related.

Blackburn jabbed his thumb down the stairs. “Stairwell is clear. That means we’re going to have a talk.”

“Look, the roof—”

“The incident on the roof is exactly what I’ve come to expect of you, Raines,” Blackburn said briskly as they headed down the stairs. “No, I’m here to talk about the neural processor you saw tampering with the drones—the person behind the breaches. I planned to use the climb to talk about this if you’d kept pace with me—like you were supposed to.”