“Glenn is gone,” Park’s uncle had said. “I thought I should tell you.”

Park waited, but he said nothing more. A kind of cold anger scraped up her spine. “What do you mean?” she heard herself ask.

“He’s gone,” her uncle repeated. “The rioters . . . they recognized him as the bot with the gun. They caught him while he was out and tore him apart. They didn’t even leave a data cache behind.”

The room ought to sway, Park thought. Her knees should buckle—she thought she would have to put out a hand to steady herself. But she was already sitting down. She said dully, “No chance of recovery?”

“No,” he answered. “I looked. They delivered the parts to me in a box, but I couldn’t even sell it for scrap. I looked around the area where it happened—but there was nothing.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

The corners of his mouth turned down: a reproachful look, like a child who felt he’d been wrongly scolded by an adult. “It was him, Grace. There’s no doubt.”

“I see,” Park said, her voice oddly formal and brisk, even to herself. She could barely hear anything through the thudding of the blood in her head; her ears were ringing, as if someone had shot a gun. As if they were combatants, she a shell-shocked soldier, unable to speak over the rush of noise around them or rally herself in crisis. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I’m—” He hesitated. “I’m sorry. I knew it would be hard for you.”

“It’s not,” Park said. “Thank you. It’s not.”

She pulled away from the memory then, repulsed by her own lie. Stunned by herself, her inhuman coldness. The presence clamored for more, but Park slid away from the scene. She was aware that she was dreaming—but even in sleep, she did not want to relive that moment.

What happened next happened fast, like a flash from a camera. A feeling suddenly pulsed into Park’s brain, as quickly as a static shock. It felt as if someone had turned on a light, illuminating parts of her mind that she hadn’t known were dark. Park felt a headache kick up in her physical body, but did not feel it in the dream: she inhabited the two things at once, sensation and not-sensation, disconnected pain and disembodied strength.

The light in her mind grew and grew. Then sounds came to her, distant and incomprehensible. Gradually her mind made sense of them, of the scene that was piecing itself together in front of her. It was as if she was looking at the world through fractaled eyes, as if she was everywhere and nowhere at once, looking at distant shapes from a hundred different directions. Her brain struggled to process the shapes into one cohesive picture, thrashing against having to unify so many different perspectives. But eventually she understood what she was seeing. She was looking at Fulbreech. And Natalya.