“It’s a reach. Do we have any indication the person Fortuna can wrestle control from the Titan?”

“Arachne, Axehead, Fume Hood, and Dauntless seem to have some slivers of their old selves still intact.”

“And we’re asking them to give up what they have, using them as currency.”

“Please. Thank you,” Antares said, her voice bearing the telltale distortion as a recording of an ongoing transmission.

“Defiant.” The word sounded firm, authoritative, but it was followed by silence.

“Dragon?”

“You and Dauntless didn’t get along,” Dragon noted.

“The kindest way of putting it. I was an ass.”

“Do you think he would agree? To give up his very being to contribute?”

Defiant steered a careful course around the cluster of Titans, mindful of the Simurgh’s plotted course, as she tried to stay away from Dauntless and the attacks the Titan made with the spear of light. He watched Dauntless, studying the Titan, trying to gauge. He thought of the recording he’d seen of the Titan turning to look at the boy. What had his name been? Addison?

There had been humanity in that moment.

Defiant was plugged into the Marduk. Its sensors were his eyes, its air intake his lungs, its considerable power source his heart. Sensors tracked the movement of air along the Marduk’s exterior, and he felt it much as he would feel the wind over his own skin, where his present body still had conventional skin.

It came to him in data, each block of data represented by a three-dimensional arrangement of numbers and letters. A part of his brain that he had modified with Dragon’s help read that data, processed it.

While he was plugged in, he was the Marduk. It had been his go-to ship in the months immediately following Gold Morning, and it was his backup ship now, while the Uther was replaced by several of Dragon’s A.I. The landscapes of then and now were not so different.

Dark, laid bare to the worst vagaries of weather, buildings ruined. In the weeks after Gold Morning it had been abrupt temperature shifts, the heavy amounts of dust in the atmosphere bringing surprising darkness and periods of cold, before summer came through with an intensity that suggested it was trying to make up for the days it had missed.

Now that wasteland was occupied by monsters. Some of them were monsters he’d helped bring to this battlefield. A handful more were friends, or… as close to friends as he ever got.

Sleeper’s storm was creeping forward. Dragon was, it seemed, splitting her attention between a conversation with Saint and a conversation with him.