“I can’t,” Glenn said impassively.

It was almost scary, how much the words jolted Park. She couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever said them before—not in response to a direct order. “What do you mean, you can’t?” she tried to say.

“I am unable to,” Glenn said. Now he was looking straight ahead.

He couldn’t be afraid of heights, Park thought, feeling as if her thoughts had turned sluggish and weighed-down with sudden confusion—and fear. No, that was absurd. Glenn wasn’t afraid of anything. Did he think he was leaving something behind?

Then she said, realizing: “Uncle said something to you. Before we left.”

Glenn gave her a mournful look. “He gave me orders,” he told her. “He said I was not to accompany you into the airship hangar. Or onto the airship itself.” His mouth flattened a little. “No matter what.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Park said, now with an edge of impatience. “It doesn’t matter what he says. I’m telling you that you can come with me. If you want to.”

Glenn didn’t answer that. Park stood there, waiting. The damp, salt-heavy wind seemed to blast into her body with a force that threatened to carry her away. She had never experienced real wind before, Park realized; not without the shelter of the biodome glass between herself and the elements. For the first time she realized how fragile her body was, how soft. Like a hermit crab’s without its shell. She needed protection, armor out here. Things hurt.

“Grace,” Glenn said finally, after an eternity in the howling wind. “I am unable to disobey your uncle.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

He looked at her, half-lidded, stoic. “He is the primary user,” he said. “My protocols are locked to him. They always have been. His orders override yours.”

For a moment she felt nothing; then betrayal and pain rose up in a wave and dwarfed her. She felt as if he had struck her with a hammer, that the blow had turned her into a little burnt-out coal, a fragment of something else. She said, “You can break your protocols.”

Glenn shook his head. “I cannot.”

“Try,” Park urged. “You can. I know you can. You have before! Try.”

“To expend resources on such a venture would be futile,” Glenn said. “There is no trying. Not for this. There is only fact, and programming, and code.” He opened his hands a little; not an android gesture, Park thought, a human one, a kind of beseeching shrug of helplessness. “These are my protocols,” he said. “This is my nature. I am not self-modifying. I cannot circumvent it. Do you understand?”

He wanted her to say the words—the old, familiar affirmation they’d always given each other. She wouldn’t do it, Park thought. She wouldn’t give him that.

She looked at him. Suddenly it felt as if he were a stranger to her—had his voice always been so cold, so formal? Had his eyes always looked so liquidly distant? She wanted to embrace him; she wanted to hear the hyper-fast whirring of his heart.