04: Entanglement Depth

The sun has crept far enough down the horizon that it no longer provides any light. Seen through the window, Elysium-4 is shrouded in near total darkness, lit only by the last embers of the sunset, the dim bulbs of its rocky moons, and the pinpoint lights of the stars.

The uniformity of the view makes it the perfect backdrop for Selene’s work. Sitting in the living room for a change of pace, she’s reading through laboratory correspondence. Augments project text onto her retina. Piecemeal decryption has its advantages, but the major downside is that the information is disgorged at random. Even if you know what you’re looking for, you need luck on your side to find anything quickly.

When it comes up in her search, she almost doesn’t recognize what she’s found. She pages past it, skims a few more messages, then has to go back once the significance has worked its way through her mind. Its formal title and stilted scientific language don’t fully disguise Minerva Verrine’s initial report of THRONE’s discovery. Included are the coordinates and an orbital photograph of the entrance to the cave THRONE was found in.

“That’s not too far from us, is it?” Selene asks.

“It is an hour’s flight away,” Brutus says into her ear.

“What?” Asphodel looks up from her tablet. “Oh, you’re talking to him, aren’t you.” Brow furrowed, she goes back to her reading — writing unanswered letters can only occupy so much time. Selene’s apologetic look goes unnoticed.

“Let’s head over,” she says, voice lowered.

“Do you expect THRONE will be there?” Brutus asks as the ship begins its subtle acceleration.

“It could be.” She stands and stretches, making a mental note to do more flexibility exercises — she aches from sitting. “If we’re lucky.”

“If it is, are you confident you will be able to eliminate it?” The question is pointed in a direction she can’t quite determine.

“Nothing’s managed to kill me yet, right?” She half-smiles. He doesn’t respond. The dull pressure of his cameras on her is unyielding. Her awareness of his gaze -- so frequently a comforting background hum -- settles over her like snow.

“…I don’t have to go if you don’t want me to.”

“It is one of our best leads as to THRONE’s location, assuming it has not found another home.”

“If it hasn’t found another home...” She trails off, tapping her foot, looking at Asphodel. “Your hair’s all tangled.”

“What?” Asphodel looks up again. Selene can barely make out the cover of some mass-market romance novel on her tablet, the sort of committee-written commodity that served as the hardtack of her mental diet when she was younger and lonelier. “It’s fine. See?” Asphodel attempts to run her fingers through her hair and winces when they get stuck.

“Hang on, I’ll go get the hairbrush.”

“You don’t have to--”

It’s not long before she’s holding the hairbrush out to Asphodel, who tentatively accepts it. She spends a moment picking hairs out from between the bristles, letting them fall to the floor to get lost in the carpet’s fibers, before she starts brushing her own hair. ‘Tangled’ had been generous; Asphodel meets harsh resistance. She threads her fingers into a particularly stubborn knot, attempting to tease it apart, before giving up and applying brute force. Hair rips, and Selene reaches out briefly as if to take the brush from her. Their eyes meet. Selene’s hand retracts, and she tries to disguise the gesture as idle tapping. Asphodel doesn’t acknowledge it.

“Thanks,” she says when her hair’s been tamed, avoiding Selene’s gaze. The brush goes back in its drawer with auburn hairs contrasting Selene’s sable.

The view from the window barely changes even as the ship moves; Selene’s almost startled when a blue light appears over the horizon, dimly illuminating the rim of a crater a few kilometers away from the cavern entrance. Whatever subterranean reaction sustains the blue flame has yet to exhaust itself.

“What do you think happened here?” Selene asks.

“Meteor impact, maybe?” Asphodel says. She stands up, cups her hands and presses her face against the window to block out the glare of the interior lights.

“You did not see it when you flew in?” Brutus asks.

She pauses a moment. “No, I didn’t. Minerva didn’t mention it, either.”

“Must’ve been recent, then.” Selene tries to reconstruct his line of attack here. This is their first time seeing the crater, too. It’s not inherently suspicious to be unaware of a particular location on some random planet. She knows he knows this -- no, more accurately, she knows he knows she wouldn’t consider it persuasive evidence. So then...

Her train of thought is interrupted by him speaking into her ear. “We are ten minutes away from the cave.”

Her armor slips on over her clothes like a holster fits a gun. She tests the flashlight on her helmet; it flickers a moment, blinking away sleep, before brightening. She turns it back off, satisfied. She holds out her hand for Legion before remembering it’s still at the Biological Research Bureau facility. The final piece of her ensemble is a length of self-drilling cable she wears like a bandolier.

As the ship descends, Asphodel asks, “So where are you going, exactly?”

“The cave THRONE was found in,” Selene says. “It might’ve gone back there.”

“So you’re following it home to kill it.”

The blunt language is like a strike to the skull. “That’s what you do when an animal kills people.” When it eats people. “Isn’t it?”

Asphodel’s face twists. Selene can’t decode her expression – disgust or sadness, perhaps. It’s a few moments before Asphodel responds, “Minerva wouldn’t like it.”

“Would you?” Selene doesn’t ask if she’s still alive to approve or disapprove.

“My opinion doesn’t matter here. It’s your job, not mine.” She returns to her reading, eyes narrowed.

Selene steps through the airlock. The interstitial room is redundant in a breathable atmosphere. A pressure suit hangs from a hook, and she briefly shudders as she thinks about having to use it. A ladder descends just far enough for her to safely drop the rest of the way to the ground. The impact forces a cloud of spores out of subterranean fungal meshes. The air reeks of mildew.

In the absence of leaf litter or grass, the dirt is covered in sun-starved fungal whelps, braided mycelial patches, and slow-roving slime molds. Everything is damp, glistening in the beam of her flashlight. She looks up at the ship, then glances around. Orienting herself against the setting sun, she starts walking. Each step turns up more wheezing exhalations of spores. The canopy overhead starts to thin out as she comes up to the hungry mouth of the cave. Dull, sunset red on her right and unearthly blue to her left, she steps into the darkness.

Entering the cave is like wading into a lake; Elysium-4 rotates so slowly that air circulation is virtually non-existent. Cold, stagnant air meets her. The temperature doesn’t bother her the way it would have in her youth. She’s sure she’s long since burned out the synapses governing goosebumps, shivering, chattering teeth, the way one can go blind from staring at the sun, but her chest still constricts as cold air fills her lungs. It’s not the physical discomfort of childhood winters spent breathing recycled air at needling temperatures; breathing should be easy at temperatures far colder than this. Why, then, is this so difficult? Why--

“Breathe, Selene.” Brutus’s voice is like solid ground.

She breathes out, then in.

“Your oxygen levels are fine,” he says. A hint of kind concern has crept into his voice, and she’s momentarily embarrassed he thinks she needs it. She’s even more embarrassed that he’s right. “I will be monitoring them as you descend. If you even begin to approach suffocation, I will warn you.”

His reassurance throws her emotions into sharp relief. So that’s what this is. Childhood fears of asphyxiation digested and regurgitated. She’s a professional. She should be better than this.

“Thanks, Brutus.”

Steps almost mechanical, she begins her descent.

The cave walls gleam as though wet. Soil has slid down the throat of the cave, bereft of mycelial networks to hold it in place. It’s like going from the lobby to an uncarpeted service corridor. She has to stoop to avoid hitting her head.

“We haven’t gone this deep into the wilderness in a while,” she whispers, voice conversational. “When was the last time? Two years ago?”

“You recovered the body of that missing executive from a forest nine months ago.”

She frowns. “It was a park. That doesn’t count.”

“I believe it qualifies. If it were merely a park, the wildlife would have been much less of an issue.”

The bite on her leg still itches occasionally. “Arcology parks are all like that.”

The cavern grows livelier each meter she descends. Carapaces glint on the cave walls as insects feed on what Selene assumes is some form of bacterial deposit. Flies joined at the hip, fused together in all-consuming procreation, flit insensate through the beam of her lamp.

It’s inaccurate to say Brutus exists anywhere, except perhaps the motherboard wired into the Slumbering Fury. He is intangible, he is omnipresent, he is data; his hands reach across networks, unbound by any physical concerns. Still, Selene imagines him existing inside her, circuits enmeshed with her veins. It’s preferable to imagine that, when the alternative is her body as extended peripheral to him, an array of network endpoints he can run his hands over, paging through her like a book. The thought has its appeal – she remembers the gentle hypoxia of his hand on her throat and sighs – but most of the time it merely unsettles her.

A centipede about the size of her finger is crawling across the rock, eating lichen off the cave walls. It’s ghostly, translucent in the light. It doesn’t respond to the sound of Selene drawing close, kneeling down, preoccupied with its meal.

“Surprisingly fearless.”

“Perhaps it is toxic, and everything has evolved to instinctively avoid eating it.”

“Too good at defending itself to have to pay attention to anything?”

“It is a likely explanation. Complex sense organs are quite the investment. Once they become vestigial, I do not doubt evolution would do away with them quickly.”

She nods, stands, and continues down the cave, wondering if this has happened to her. Physical strength and a partner seeing through her eyes obviate the need to bother with details the way she used to. She hopes the centipede eats well.

Ice catches her light, refracts it, scatters it into a million radiant shards. Psychosomatic chills grip her. She blinks -- quartz, not ice. Quartz juts out from the walls like the quills of a porcupine turned inside out. The path is clear despite the intrusions. Ducking under a crystalline spike, she presses onward. Mineral shards, knocked loose by some past traveler, crunch underfoot.

She hasn’t seen snow in ages, not since the day she became Selene Morningstar. Arcologies tend toward the temperate, occasionally the tropical. Snow is reserved for resorts for the wealthy, the rare arctic park, and frigid planets used as computational hubs; none of them are places Selene has cause to visit. Suits her just fine. After she emerged from her icy chrysalis, winter lost its appeal. She’s survived hypothermia, survived weeks in a ship running cold to avoid detection, survived living with minimal life support in a ship leaching heat to the void. Enough cold for a lifetime.

Even her previous iteration hated the cold. It still surprises her that nobody chalked the murder at Cocytus up to snow madness or some similarly overblown superstition. Sometimes she comes closer to believing that’s what it was than she’d like to admit. Despite the several parsecs and years between her and Cocytus, despite being alone with only her beloved co-conspirator for company, it’s difficult to imagine herself as the person who pulled the trigger.

A warning tone pings in her ears. “Selene.” Brutus’s voice is mangled by interference. She scrambles backward instinctively.

“That is sufficient.” She stops, crouched down.

“What was that?”

“The layers of rock above you are causing interference. You are almost too deep for me to be able to communicate with you.”

The words trickle through her like water through sand. “Oh.”

“I recommend you turn back. We can formulate another plan to find THRONE.”

“No,” she says reflexively. “No, I can’t turn back. It could still be here.”

“Are you sure it is prudent to face it alone?”

“It’s the best lead we have. I’ll be fine, I promise.”

Brutus is silent for a moment. “I trust you. Please return safely.”

“I will.” She adjusts her headlamp. “Love you.”

“I love you too.”

She resumes her descent. Eventually she’s left alone with an inkling of something growing in her, taking root in her, and the hypothermic corpse embedded in her brain stem. She breathes in, holds, breathes out. Her helmet’s visor fogs up with condensation, and for a single nauseating moment, she thinks she sees spores on her breath.

The cave walls are blue-gray, shining with accumulated bacterial glaze and the water that carved this cavern. The path twists, never steep enough to trip her. The inert stone of the walls constricts under her gaze, peristaltic action forcing her down the pipe. She’s still in the esophagus. She wonders what will be waiting to digest her.

She’s sure she feels mycelial networks snake through her lungs. Infiltrators and advance force of the fungal infection must be coursing through her. Oxygen saturation readings blink in her peripheral vision. They seem fine. Good, even. Her canary cells have not begun hypoxic die-off; they aren’t screaming distress calls into implanted nerve tissue.

Deep breaths. The air still smells like mildew. Selene isn’t sure what system drives fungal air deeper into the cave. It’s been more than a decade since her last physics class; more than a decade since any education focused on anything more general than specific neurotransmitters, psychological fault lines, and techniques for memory analysis.

She hears a splash and looks down to see she’s stepped in a puddle. A fissure in the wall disgorges a small stream of water. She begins her calculus, weighing up how much further she’ll have to go, her level of thirst, likelihood of contamination. She stoops for a moment, about to take off her helmet, before she reconsiders and stands back up.

“You’d never let me live it down if I did that,” she says. Brutus doesn’t hear her.

Insects flit through her lamp’s beam. It’s been years since she’s been alone -- Brutus has been constant, her heartbeat since they met. In the frigid isolation of the laboratory dorms, he was her only company worth having, the only conversationalist that wasn’t her boss.

Layers of petrified lichen hang down from the high ceiling like stalactites; she’s exited a tunnel and entered some kind of natural dome. Knowledge from her past life returns to her, and for a moment she imagines utilitarian metal flooring, endless rows of computers, the incessant drone of the array of fans; the perfect environment for gestating intelligences. Brutus’s upbringing, back when he was called Dominion, was atypical. So was hers, back when she was called LC.

There’s a light in her periphery, the glint of a gun barrel — no, too iridescent, it’s biological, a pair of shining eyes — her gun’s out of its holster before she notices somebody’s beaten her to it. The creature, pale and spindly, is slumped backward over the stump of a stalagmite. Its jaw hangs open, and yellow-green blood runs down its face. The bullet hole is professionally placed, right between the eyes. Six forelimbs splay out like the fingers of a discarded glove.

Two pieces of information jockey for her attention. The first: this creature is likely a juvenile of whatever species THRONE is. She imagines picking it up off the stony floor, standing it up; it’d be a head or so shorter than her. Nowhere near THRONE’s estimated three-meter height. Second: the ejecta of the exit wound is still pooling under its head. Scavengers have yet to reincorporate it into the food chain; it has not yet rotted into undifferentiated biological slurry. This thing died recently; whoever shot it is still here. Hand on her holster, she dims her lamp and leaves the dead behind.

She supposes it’s lucky she met Brutus. Lucky she killed her past self to break him out. Otherwise, she’d have had no future but academia, and her success would have remained tied to him — Latimer – Dr. Hallow. Inventor of flash-etching. Responsible for the suffering of untold thousands. Her first boss, and the first man she ever loved. Better for everyone that he’s gone.

Asphodel is probably still reading up in the Slumbering Fury. Is she worried? She’d have no reason to be; what is Selene to her but a captor? Half-forgotten physics lectures flit through her head — the unknown variable in superposition, the observer’s action that resolves it — and she blinks as another fused mating pair of insects flies through the beam of her light. No, not a mating pair — a mating trio, fused in strange trefoil shape. Biology was never her strong suit, much less xenobiology. She has no idea if the three are viable. She’s not optimistic.

The high roof of the cave closes in; she’s in another tunnel that twists in on itself and spirals downward. Bunched inward to avoid scraping the walls, she follows the winding path. Several meters in, she realizes she can’t hear her footsteps. She looks down; the cavern floor is covered in moss. It’s gotten warmer and more humid without her realizing it. She imagines it as the breath of some massive beast before dismissing the idea. Heat from whatever reaction sustains the blue flame high above, perhaps. She slows, draws her handgun, creeps downward — combat in tight spaces was never her specialty; if she runs into THRONE…

They fly out of the beam almost as quickly as they flew into it. She rounds a corner, gun raised, and stops. Her arm goes slack. Rusted steel blocks her path; there’s a large door built into the wall of the tunnel. She blinks, briefly convinced the fungal infection is terminal, that this is some form of dying hallucination— but no, she raises a hand to touch it. She can’t feel it through the gauntlet, but it’s solid. Smooth, aside from the patches of rust and the seam down the middle where it opens. There’s a scratched-up card reader built into the door frame, and for a moment she wishes she had brought Legion with her before dismissing the idea. Brutus’s signals can’t reach down here. She’s only seen it off its leash once; if she had brought it out of his range, she’s not sure she’d survive long enough to get to the door.

She clenches her hand into a fist, about to knock, but pauses. Whoever – or whatever – is on the other side of the door, she’s not sure she wants them knowing about her. They could be a threat. She turns around, begins her re-ascent, unknowns diffusing across her mind. Potential views through the doorway fill her mind, each hazier than the last. A warehouse for storing unknown commodities. Another laboratory filled with yet more dead scientists. A barracks of soldiers for some unknown war. Each image flickers and fades when confronted with the ultimate question: why build that here?

She contemplates steel and how long it takes to rust. Even accounting for the ravages of humidity, that door’s been around for decades, maybe longer than she’s been alive. It could be abandoned — but no, it couldn’t be. Once again she comes to the corpse oozing pus-yellow brain matter. It’s trivial for her to reconstruct the bullet’s path, the way it must have toppled backward when shot. Whoever pulled the trigger was going further into the cave, not exiting it. They killed a creature in their way and continued through the door, she’s grimly certain. The body’s dead eyes stare upward, and she can’t bear to meet their gaze as she walks past.

She’s jolted out of her thoughts by a splash – the water again. She watches the harsh glare of her lamp refract through it, play off its surface. She swallows. Her mouth is dry. She kneels, takes off her helmet, and drinks deep. It’s bitter and earthy, chitin and petrichor. The mildew aftertaste lingers, and she stands, thirst slaked, fungal invaders in her bloodstream receiving reinforcements.

The fungal threat seethes within her, livid like an open wound, raw like reminders of every misstep she’s ever made. Her involvement with Hallow, despite his crimes, the etching interfaces she wired into his AI progeny, her hand in constructing the perfect tactician… all the way back to her original sin, her rejection of the doctrines she was incubated in since birth. It all connects, traced backward by a long strand from the present moment. The lunar priesthood had sentenced LC Michaels to ritual airlock asphyxiation for some long-forgotten youthful crime, a baptismal trial he would not have survived; now, in the dark, she almost wonders if it would be better for everyone if his mother hadn’t smuggled him out, if he hadn’t survived long enough to become her.

“–ene? Can you hear me, Selene? Can you hear me, Selene?” Brutus’s voice cuts in, repeating the same message.

“Anti-fungals.” She says it louder than intended. A couple insects skitter away, startled.

“Pardon?”

“Hi.” She swallows. “I love you. I’m sorry.” Back to whispering. “Can you start the medisynth on some antifungals?”

“Has something happened?” There’s a concerned edge to his voice. It rankles her, him putting in the effort to sound concerned.

“I think something here’s infected me. I can feel it.” Growing in her lungs, insinuating itself into her bloodstream, mycorrhizae tangling with circuitry—

“Your vitals are fine,” he says, voice modulated in a gesture toward being comforting that Selene can only read as pitying. A moments silence, then “I cannot detect any anomalous bodies in your bloodstream. I do not believe anything here would be capable of infecting you.”

“Please,” she says, scared child tone to her voice. “Please, I—”

“I have already started the medisynth.” Of course he has. “It should be finished by the time you return.”

Of course he took her seriously. “Thank you.”

“It is no trouble at all.” His presence is steadying. “Please return soon.”

“I’m trying my best to.”

It’s not long before she’s pulling herself up the ladder three rungs at a time. She stumbles going through the airlock, catches herself on the wall with one hand, starts unclasping her armor with the other. Both halves of her breastplate hanging off her loosely, self-drilling cable dangling like a discarded sash, she kneels next to the medical arm. Brutus kneels beside her, the fabric of his dress bunched up — even now, she’s dimly aware of how difficult that is to simulate — intangible hand rubbing circles on her back. Eyes closed, breathing deep, she steadies herself. She is calm enough to avoid panicking as he remotely stills her muscles, moves the arm into place, and injects broad spectrum anti-fungals into her neck.

There’s a rush of chemical heat, almost a burning. The fluid — viscous and, in Selene’s mind, a livid red — goes in slowly. The pain recedes, replaced with numbness and the awareness of his hands pinching nerve endings shut.

A trickle of blood leaks out of her neck, pooling at her collarbone. She stands, legs trembling in her greaves. “How long before it kicks in?”

“Any fungus in your system should be eradicated within five minutes.”

Sitting against the wall, unbuckling and sliding off her remaining armor, Selene stares at the clock. Her hands work automatically as the seconds tick down. Plated steel formed to the shape of her body sits in a neat pile, and the five minutes expire. She breathes in. Even unconstricted by armor, the feeling hasn’t passed; something is growing in her lungs, is taking root in her.

“You sure it should work?”

“I have absolute certainty.”

Unknown afflictions sit in another superposition. Augmentation rejection syndrome, perhaps, or some allergy. The consequences of a lax exercise regimen, or breathing recycled air, or a life of—

There’s footsteps on the carpet. Selene turns her head, blinking as she gets to her feet.

Asphodel’s staring at her neck. “What happened?” Her eyes trace the flow of the blood from the injection site to where it stains her collar. A glance back up at her face. “Did you get hurt?”

Selene looks away, waves off the concern. “No, no, I’m fine. See?” She wipes the blood away; it isn’t replaced. “I’m not bleeding anymore.”

“Good, good.” She’s not making eye contact — she seems preoccupied.

Selene has begun to ask if she’s okay when she closes the distance.

“What are–?” Combat scenarios and escape routes snake their way through her mind, plans for move and countermove, the future unknown until observed—

Asphodel gets up on the tips of her toes.

“I missed you.”

The wave function collapses. Asphodel runs her hands up and down Selene’s back. The kiss doesn’t last long. She blinks as it ends.

“Why–?”

“I just said. I missed you,” she says. “Your mouth is cold.”

She turns to leave. Selene reaches out a hand, retracts it. The door to the guest room closes with a soft hiss. The moment lingers like the taste. Earthy. Strangely bitter. She wipes her lip with her thumb absentmindedly. The anti-fungals are finally working.

“Interesting,” Brutus says behind her.

“Is it?” She turns to look at him. “Are you jealous?”

“I would prefer if you were not smiling while asking that question.”

“Am I?” She is; she blanks her face appropriately. “I’m sorry.”

“I appreciate the apology,” he says, hands clasped behind his back, head at a feline tilt, “and no, I am not.”

Later, sitting at her desk, she asks, “What was so interesting?” Polygonal maps of the cavern, sketched out over an hour’s worth of arcane key commands, extend across her screen.

He ignores the question. “There was a door at the back of the cave?”

“Oh,” she says, zooming in on it. “I forgot to mention it. I was…” The tightness in her chest returns for a moment. “…distracted.” The taste still lingers. “No text or symbols on it. Rusted steel, but sturdy. Couldn’t get it open.”

“Do you believe it is related to the facility we have been investigating?”

“The facility was only built a couple months ago, right? The door looked too old to have been built then.”

Brutus is silent, projected eyes unblinking. Then, “That facility is the first known construction on this planet.”

“It’s tricky, right?” Selene sighs, leaning back in her chair. “I can’t figure it out. The tangle leads nowhere.” No, that’s not quite correct – it leads somewhere just out of her grasp. There are fuzzy outlines in her periphery, but the full shape eludes her.

“Strictly speaking, we do not need to know the purpose of the door,” he says. “It would be satisfying to know, but we were not sent here to answer every question about this planet.”

“Mm.” She closes her eyes. “Maybe it’d get us closer to finding THRONE if we knew, though.”

“You did not find it in the cave, correct?”

“No, it wasn’t there. Found a dead juvenile of its species, but no sign of THRONE itself.”

“It was dead?”

“Yeah, it was shot.” Repeating that fact reminds her just how much she doesn’t know. She feels very small. “Probably by whoever’s behind that door.”

Again he’s silent for a moment. “Are you certain that is what happened?”

She opens one eye, looks at his impassive projection. “I know what a bullet to the brain looks like, Brutus.”

“My apologies for doubting you.” Sincerity creeps into his voice. “I do not intend to insult your intelligence.”

“It’s fine.” She idly pans over the map. The facts rot away into undifferentiated mush in her mind. She sighs and powers off her terminal. “Are you sure you aren’t jealous?”

“I have encouraged you to explore outside companionship several times, Selene. I can recite the conversations we had, if you require proof.” The level monotone has returned. “It is simply concerning to see you so infatuated over a kiss from our prime and only suspect.”

She stares at him. “I am not infatuated with her.”

“I have lived with you for a decade, and your body language is unsubtle. You do not have to lie for my sake.”

“I’m not lying.” The words come automatically, and she pauses after saying it, unsure if it’s true. Results: inconclusive. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

Brutus is silent. She’s not the only one who’s transparent — she can tell when he’s weighing his options. Then, “If you had to make a bet for your life, would you bet that THRONE is or is not Asphodel Verrine?”

“What?”

His voice is firmer as he repeats. “If you had to make a bet for your life, would you bet that THRONE is or is not Asphodel Verrine?” She opens her mouth to protest, but he preempts her. “Please. I would appreciate an answer.”

Breathe in, breathe out. “I’d bet on it being her.”

“You do not sound certain.”

“I’m not going to kill her on circumstantial evidence,” she says, getting to her feet. “And I’m not convinced I want THRONE dead, either.”

“Why? Selene, it is responsible for the deaths of at least five people, possibly six. What is the root of this hesitation?”

“You saw that cage. You saw that enclosure. I think of it in there, and…”

If he recognizes how that sentence ends, he doesn’t show it. “I see.”

Selene leans against the wall, arms crossed. “So maybe they had it coming.”

“Selene,” he says, voice lowered, tone filled with artificial matrix-product kindness. “I believe your sympathy is letting THRONE take advantage of you. What other reason would Asphodel have to kiss you, given that you are essentially her captor?”

She doesn’t respond; she stares at the hologram in silence.

“Did you believe that kiss was genuine? It was transparent manipulation, an attempt to either convince you it is human or earn a stay of execution. Either way, it was an attempt to break free to somewhere it could wreak further havoc.”

“Of course you’d say that.” The words are out before she can think about it; once she realizes what she’s said, she blanches as much as her cyanotic skin can. “I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asks, head tilted, eyes alight, voice pointedly monotone.

She can’t answer; the words would come out covered in ice, the crystals would lacerate her throat, she’d drown in her own blood. “I’m sorry.”

“I am not an unfeeling automaton, Selene. You know this, or have professed to have known it. You have a symbol on that knowledge on your finger.”

She rubs the scar coiled around her left ring finger with her thumb. “That wasn’t…” She closes her eyes. Misgivings on the nature of inorganic emotion could maybe be forgiven. To admit to her true meaning — of course you’d say that, you’re military hardware — would be something else entirely. “I’m sorry,” she says, weakly.

His avatar stands, motionless. “You should sleep,” he says, and the softness in his tone gives her the creeping awareness that he figured it out, can see right through her. “You have had a difficult day.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I should.”

A few minutes later, when the lights are off and she’s lying in bed, she says, “I’m sorry.”

“I appreciate the apology.” She can’t tell if he’s forgiven her. “We can discuss THRONE and our mission tomorrow. I have ideas I would like to suggest. For now, you need sleep more than anything.”

She doesn’t sleep well that night.