My Avon expert’s probably got more info on the delegation than she’s posted in the forums, but my curiosity on that front will have to wait. I can picture Kumiko in her own den to the south of this sector, hunched over her screens. She’s a more reliable source of information than most, especially when it comes to the Fury on Avon, but I never quite trusted her enough to tell her I was after Towers. I don’t know who Kumiko served under on Avon, and since Towers’s role in the Fury epidemic there isn’t exactly public knowledge, I can’t be sure where Kumiko’s loyalties would fall.

The text boxes I’m waiting on pop up, and I start my search as Mae cracks open a stim can and sets it down beside me. I set my parameters quickly—I’m creating a series of backdoor user profiles, so that I can send in a bomb scare for the Daedalus gala to get the police looking their way without being able to figure out who alerted them. Behind me, Mae and Sofia are talking quietly about the Daedalus—I can hear the surprise in Mae’s voice. Even she, queen of the hypernet rumors, has heard nothing about any drama planned for the gala.

Now that my program has introduced me to Mae’s system, it starts bringing up my regular windows one by one. My Towers subprogram springs to life, though there’s nothing in there to report, as usual. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think she’s left Corinth. I first found her when she evacuated Avon—allegedly for a quiet retirement. At the time I didn’t buy that she’d just pack up and settle down after all that, after years of looking the other way, then doing LaRoux’s cleanup for him. So I set a program to look for oddities in travel patterns—people who check in for a hyperspace jump but don’t check out on the other end, passenger manifests that end up one person short, that sort of thing.

That’s the easiest way to work out what you should investigate. Don’t comb through terabytes of data until your eyes cross. Just look for the exceptions, data points behaving the way they shouldn’t, and track those. They’ll be the interesting ones. And right around the time Towers resigned her post, an ident number popped up on the grid supposedly belonging to a war orphan on the next transport leaving Avon. The alleged orphan, a regular citizen of Avon with absolutely no resources to her name, vanished from the transport headed for the orphanage and proceeded to defy every expectation and probability by bouncing from planet to planet and changing her ID more often than most people change their clothes. This was someone who wanted to throw the hounds off the scent, and the only thing on Avon worth that kind of secrecy was what LaRoux put there.

So for the last year, I’ve been Antje Towers’s personal bloodhound, and I never let her rest. She’s somewhere on my planet, and even when I’m sleeping, my bots and subprograms are searching for her. As hard as it is for me living off the grid, I’m making it absolute hell for her. The longer she runs, the more tired she’s going to get, and the more sloppy her evasions will become. Eventually she’s going to slip up. And I’ll be there when she does.

With a soft chime, the screen flashes me a dialogue box asking me if I want to send my message. I realize I’ve been sitting there with the anonymous scare threat typed up for a full ten minutes, and it’s not until Sofia drifts over from her conversation with Mae that I shake off my fog. Usually the police are the last people either of us would want to call, but we don’t have any other choice left to us. I glance at Sofia, who’s reading over the message—she takes a breath and nods at me, and with a flick of my fingers, I send our alert winging out into the hypernet to do its work.

I let my breath out and lean back into the chair, abruptly feeling every ounce of tension and exhaustion catching up with me. We’ve passed the torch, and even if the cops don’t know the real reason they’re being sent to investigate the situation onboard the Daedalus, their presence will throw enough attention on the gala that LaRoux can’t dare do anything to stop them.

Sofia exhales beside me, and I don’t have to look at her to know her face will show that same release. “What do we do now?”

“Now we wait.” I draw my shoulders back, wincing as the movement causes a series of pops along my upper spine. “And sleep, while we’ve got somewhere safe to rest.”

For the first time in all our existence, we are conflicted. We have always been one entity, infinite selves all linked, every thought shared. But those of us who have existed in the thin spots, who have touched the minds and hearts of these beings who carry such passion inside themselves…we are different now.

Difference, in an existence of utter harmony and completion, is destroying us.

Some wish to banish the individuals, to close our world to them forever and deny their ships and their data streams and become, once more, one self.

But there are those of us who are not so certain. Those of us who have seen, who have been, however briefly, something else…

Something…unique.

“YOU’RE SURE I CAN’T GET you anything else?” Mae’s sliding dishes into the washer slot while we sit at the kitchen counter, eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea. It’s been an hour, and though Gideon hasn’t picked up any increased chatter from law enforcement regarding the gala, he seems confident that it’s just taking time to trickle through the appropriate channels.

“Nah, thanks, Mae.” Gideon’s chowing down on his sandwich, more relaxed than I’ve seen him since he woke to find people breaking into his den.

I resist the urge to reach up under the sweater Mae gave me and scratch at the bandage on my shoulder. Gideon borrowed Mae’s first-aid kit, and with a little anesthetic spray, one quick slice, and a second spray of NuSkin, he got rid of LRI’s disabled tracker. The gash in my shoulder where he dug it out feels like it was never there. Better safe than sorry, he said, and he’s right.

I’m finding it harder to settle. This room, this woman—they’re so unlike what I’m used to that it’s a struggle to know exactly how to fit in. I’m at home in squalor and in riches—whether it’s the slums of Corinth or the swamps of Avon, or a penthouse apartment in the richest district of this sector, I’ve learned those worlds. I know how to navigate them. But this…this is just somebody’s mom, which is already unfamiliar to me, in a room that could be a set from one of those “average Joe” sitcom shows.

I nibble at my sandwich and let my eyes scan the room as Mae and Gideon chat, though my mind’s automatically parsing everything they say. If I seem to be focused on something else, they’ll feel a bit less like I’m listening in, and I can learn more about them. They’ve clearly known each other for years, and the length of that bond causes a little, aching ping of envy somewhere inside me. I don’t think they see each other in person all that often, judging by a comment of Mae’s about Gideon’s height, and his exclamations when she fetches a picture of her kids—Mattie and Liv, fraternal twins. But despite all this evidence of a long time apart, they pick up with an ease of conversation like they speak every day.

Maybe they do. I’m remembering the dozens of windows Gideon had open at any given time, many of which were text chats with usernames I didn’t recognize.

“Whoops, that’s the kids’ school,” Mae exclaims, straightening up and lifting a hand to the earpiece she wears. “I’m gonna go take this, you guys finish eating.”