Kline touched the power switch for his Royce Industries sports coupe, slowly exhaling through his nose as the H-cell wound down, savoring the manufactured, throaty rumble the vehicle made as it shuddered softly, reminding the occupants that it had plenty of power under its sleek hood. It was an interesting commentary on the human race, he mused—the way people liked to feel the power of their vehicles even if the rumbles and shakes were simulated. What made people think a car should sound like that, feel like that? Old movies with big petrol-guzzling sports cars? Kline shook his head. That couldn’t be it; he’d hardly watched ten movies in his life and . . .

“This is it?” Rachel asked from the passenger seat. Her words cut through his reverie; he’d almost forgotten she was in the vehicle with him.

“Yes.” Kline looked out the windscreen at the unassuming little adobe ranch house. It was well-maintained with nicely manicured landscaping, but hardly where you’d expect to find one of the most powerful people on the North American continent. He looked at Rachel and gave her silky, navy business suit a once over. “You’ve a bit of lint on your left shoulder.” He bared his teeth at her. “Anything?”

“Pearly white.” Rachel frowned, the corners of her red-painted lips turning down rather unattractively. “She’s that fussy?”

“No sense exposing our bellies.” He looked at her again, saw how she rubbed her palm on the seat’s upholstery and tried reassuring her, “Just follow my lead. Don’t speak unless she addresses you directly, and stick to the script we talked about.”

“Right.” She looked at him, eyes a little wide, a little nervous. “Wouldn’t mind a hit off that vape of yours.”

“Sorry. Quit.” Kline touched the button on his door, and it whirred open. Cicadas hummed in the air, and the heat was instantly oppressive. “That’s Texas for you.”

“I thought they only buzzed in the summer.” Rachel turned in a slow circle, shielding her eyes from the glare as though she could see the bugs in the mesquites.

“Some genius working for some corp genned up a new breed. They’re buzzing all year now.”

“Huh.” Rachel walked around the car, the gravel crunching under her narrow-toed dress heels. Kline nodded, straightened his suit jacket, and started toward the porch, following the flagstone path between pots alternately planted with flowers and succulents. They’d just stepped into the shade when the extra-wide front door swung open, and a synth wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a bolo tie gestured for them to come inside. His hands and face were sheathed in shiny gray material, and not an orifice was apparent on his smooth head.

“This way,” a pleasant Texan drawl sounded from the thing’s head. “She’s waitin’ in the parlor.” Kline stepped through the door, paused for Rachel to catch up, and followed the synth’s directions down a short hall into a sitting room. He immediately saw her, the disturbingly beautiful, elderly WBD matriarch—the oldest, largest, most influential shareholder on the board—Mrs. Gentry. She wore attire similar to the synth’s: faded jeans, a button-up, long-sleeved baby blue shirt with pearl inlay snaps, and boots that shone like the sun’s reflection on Diamatex.

She sat on a floral-patterned sofa, her boots up on a similarly patterned stool, and she gestured past the oak coffee table to another sofa. “Sit.” Her face didn’t betray her mood, strangely smooth and wrinkleless as it was. Her eyes, piercing and blue, stared shrewdly beneath her platinum brows, and, just as he had the first and only other time he’d met her, Kline found his mind warring with itself as it tried to decide if he should be fearful, horny, or horrified, by the woman’s bizarre appearance.

He hurried to the proffered floral-print couch, trying not to look at Mrs. Gentry’s slender figure or just barely exposed cleavage, knowing it was a trap, a way to distract his mind—and it was working just as she’d planned. He felt Rachel clumsily shifting around the coffee table behind him and tried to calm himself, as an example for her, as he sat down, sinking into the old, spongy cushion.

“Right, then,” Mrs. Gentry said, “Billy will make us some coffee, and in the meantime, let’s get down to brass tacks.” Her voice was languid, smooth, and far too pleasant for Kline’s taste. Suddenly his carefully crafted lines of bullshit began to feel like suicide.

“Uh, sure, ma’am.” He fidgeted, sitting up straighter, pulling at the lapels of his suit jacket.

“So, you’ve tracked down the device? Project Angel, or whatever you lab boys are calling it?”

“Not exactly, but we have a good line on it. Quite a few irons in the fire, so to speak.”

“Mr. Kline.” She sat up straight, taking her boots off the footstool, then leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. She flicked her long, platinum hair behind her shoulder and, staring right into Kline’s soul, continued, “Do you know how irritating it is to see an entire page in my monthly budget report that I can’t explain? I see a hundred people’s names. I see a facility in the middle of the desert. I see fluttercraft, cars, and server farms. I see operatives, including several new ones—hello, Ms. Dowdell. I see airfare, hotel fees, energy bills. Shall I go on? Mr. Kline, where is this little project of yours, and when will I start to see a return on the enormous mountain of bits I’ve been dumping into it?”

“May I speak plainly, ma’am?” Kline cleared his throat, but before he could continue, his rhetorical question was answered.

“You damn well better speak plainly, boy.” It was Mrs. Gentry’s turn to lean forward, uncrossing her legs, setting her boots squarely onto the Saltillo tiles. Something about those pale blue eyes screamed danger on a primal level to Kline.

“Right. Of course. The project isn’t mine; I’d just like to make that clear. There are those back in Phoenix above me who are quite closely tied to . . .”

“Don’t waste my time.”

Kline felt Rachel stir uncomfortably next to him, and he tried to gather his rapidly spiraling thoughts, his brain liquifying in a stupefying panic. Goddammit! Why’d he quit nicotine this week? “Right . . .”

“I know I’m right, boy.”

How bad a sign was it that she was calling him “boy?” He shook his head, trying to banish the babbling thoughts, and tried again, “We are making great advances with the tech developed in the project. Though we’ve lost the most . . . powerful prototype, the one for which the project was named, we’ve begun manufacturing slightly more limited versions. They’re limited for a reason, mind you, not because we can’t recreate the Angel alpha. We’ve found that it was too close to sapience, skirted the line on the true-AI regulations a bit too closely.”

“Do you think I haven’t read every report on your project? You boys were trying to make a ‘limited’ AI that became a whole lot less limited when it bonded with its host. Isn’t that right?”

“Right . . . roughly. The alpha was too much for several hosts. We got it to bond fairly well with subject T546 . . .”

“Godric.”

“Yes. Well, he went rogue, killed himself rather spectacularly, and . . .”

“Why are you giving me a history lesson?” She hadn’t moved in a while, staring at him, hands crossed coolly between her knees, but her lack of expression was unnerving Kline, which added to his seeming inability to stop babbling.

“The point I’m trying to get to, ma’am, is that the project is going well. We’ve made several prototypes with certain hard-coded limitations in place. They’re far more effective than a standard PAI, even a top-of-the-line model.”

“Mmhmm. Where’s my prototype?”

“We have some leads, as I said . . .”

“Rachel. You tell me. What are your leads?”

Rachel cleared her throat and shifted on the sofa, her left elbow brushing Kline’s knee. He hoped she’d be able to rescue the disastrous briefing. “Recently, we’ve intercepted a message from the prototype’s host to one of her acquaintances. We have complete ownership of the recipient’s PAI and have blocked the message from her attention. Meanwhile, we’ve spoofed a response to Juliet, um, the host. We think this is a promising avenue, but we’re trying not to rush things; we don’t want to spook her. She and the prototype have proven to be rather clever and resourceful in the past . . .”

“That’s good. Thank you, Rachel. Now, Kline, what other avenues are you exploring?”

“We have a lead on activity similar to what we found while reviewing the post-mortem of the collapse of Grave Industries. After we bought them out, we spent a great deal of server time trying to recreate some deleted data . . .”

“Another history lesson, Kline?” A new edge had entered Mrs. Gentry’s voice.

“Right. The long story short is that we’ve found some interesting footage and database entries. With those for comparisons, some of our deep-net scanners have turned up similar anomalies in Seattle recently. Rachel and I are headed there after we’re done here, ma’am.”

Mrs. Gentry stood up and walked around behind him, resting her hands on the couch back, one on either side of his head. She leaned forward and softly asked, “Why aren’t you using the girl’s sister, Kline?”

“We don’t believe they’re very close, and we also worry that a threat to her sister might enrage her—drive her further from us or perhaps push her into a retaliatory act.” Kline felt sweat start to bead on his neck and forehead, and he involuntarily shivered as he felt Mrs. Gentry’s breath on the fine hairs at the nape of his neck.

“You’re afraid of her.” Her voice was a whisper.

“I worry about the company, ma’am; you saw what she did to Grave.”

“You’re comparing us to that piddling company?” She didn’t sound pleased, but she didn’t sound terribly angry. She stood up, pushed away from the couch, and walked toward the far doorway. “Send me a report when you get to Seattle. Keep me in the loop about the fake messages you’re sending via the friend.” With those words echoing in Kline’s mind, the most powerful woman he’d likely ever meet left the room.

Kline almost lost control of his bladder as the synth, having come in from another doorway behind him, asked, “Coffee?”

“Jesus H . . .”

“No, thank you.” Rachel elbowed Kline in the ribs. “Come on. We should get back on the road.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, then stood up, frowning and scowling at the synth the entire time. It didn’t seem to notice or care about his hostility, pleasantly showing them out the front door. Neither he nor Rachel said a word until they’d slammed shut the doors to his sports coupe. They sat there, the stifling heat of the interior like a cleansing sauna after the weirdly chilling experience with Mrs. Gentry.

“Seattle, hmm? Was that bullshit?” Rachel finally asked, then she pointed at the ignition button. “Start it; I’m going to stain this blouse with my sweat.”

“Uh-huh.” Kline touched the button, the ignition rumbled to life, the air started flowing, and his AUI populated with the vehicle’s many readouts. “I wasn’t bullshitting. You think I wanna die?”

“You think she’d kill you?” Rachel snorted. Kline decided he had a lot of work to do, exposing her to the hard truth of the risky position she’d taken on with his team. If word got out about “Project Angel,” that strangely sexy old woman they just met would clean house, and many heads would, quite literally, roll.

“Definitely.” He turned on the autopilot, allowing it to navigate the car toward the Dallas Megacity. “Listen, I was going to explain this later, but yeah, we got a report out of Seattle—some of the same weird shit we unearthed about Grave and their GARD department. I’m not sure Juliet and Angel are involved, but there might be some kind of connection. It’s the best lead we’ve got right now, anyway.” With that, he closed his eyes, reclined his seat, and tried to unwind the jumbled knots of his nerves.

As he tuned out Rachel’s follow-up questions, his left hand fidgeted with the little storage compartment in his door and found his Nikko-Vape. With a frown of defeat, he slipped it between his lips.

#

Rutger Tanaka opened his eyes and blinked at the bright lights. He was disoriented, his mind felt detached from his body, and he had that strange feeling a person sometimes gets when they wake up in a hotel room or at a relative’s, and the walls don’t match up with their bedroom. This was even worse because as he attempted to turn his head left and right, it didn’t move, and he continued to stare at the white ceiling. When he tried to sit up, throw the covers off, or slide his legs over the side of the bed, his body didn’t respond. “What’s happening?” he subvocalized.

Worse than the lack of response from his body, his PAI was silent, ignoring his query. Rutger noisily cleared the phlegm from his dry throat and tried his question aloud, “What’s happening?” His voice was a croak, but it worked. An amber light began to flash somewhere to his right, and then he heard a door latch click and the sound of someone approaching.

“Sir?” a feminine voice asked, and sure enough, a pale Asian woman leaned into his view, her lower face obscured by a surgical mask.

“Where am I?” he croaked.

“You’re in a private recovery room at New Atlas Trauma Center. Don’t be alarmed if you cannot move; you’ve been immobilized for your safety.”

“Why?” He cleared his throat noisily after the word, hoping to remove some of the rasp. Rutger wanted to tell the imbecile that she better get a lot more verbose with her answers, but he figured he wasn’t in a position to make threats—not yet.

“I’ve alerted Ms. Boyle that you’ve woken. She left explicit instructions that only she was to explain your situation.” The masked woman straightened up and began to back out of Rutger’s field of view.

“What happened?” Rutger asked, ignoring her words.

“Ms. Boyle will be here imminently, sir. She was on her way to get coffee when you woke . . .”

The door clicked again, and a familiar voice barked, “Get out.” A moment later, a pale, orange-haired young woman with hundreds of tiny freckles on her nose and cheeks leaned over him, offering a toothy grin. “You cheated death again, old bastard.”

“Frida?” He remembered her—his assistant, secretary, driver, confidant. Memories began to flash through his mind. He saw his office, seventy floors up in the Berkoff Building, a corner suite with plenty of views. He saw Frida sitting at her desk by the door, smiling, saying something about another fat security contract.

“It’s me, Rutger. Jesus, you almost did yourself in this time. Those nanites were almost out of gas, almost let your brain die. How’d you go and get your heart and lung pulverized?”

“Why can’t I move?”

“We had to replace seven organs, old man. It turns out the human body doesn’t like having the blood flow turned off. That’s seven organs, not counting most of your intestines. Do you want to know how many synth muscles they had to replace? Your insurance company is really regretting that trauma package they sold you!” She chortled noisily, shaking her head, her ginger curls bouncing. “Your employer wouldn’t share the footage. Wanna tell me what happened?

“I . . .” Rutger closed his eyes, tried to think back, tried to recall something, anything, to give him a clue about his current state. He fruitlessly tried to access his PAIs memory banks. “Where’s my damn PAI?” he rasped.

“Your employer took it before they dumped your ‘body’ here. I think they thought you were dead.”

“I’m not.”

“No, sir, you are not. Good as new in a few days, better even. You’ll be amazed at the specs for your new heart and lungs. Let alone your new kidney, liver . . .”

“Who hired me?”

“You don’t remember? Levkin. He used a shell company, but you messaged me during the job. Said you saw him down there in that weird clinic . . .”

Rutger’s eyes closed, and more memories fell into place—the girl, her caretaker, Levkin visiting them, and lots of scientists. His team! He’d placed a unit in a fake house upstairs, another stationed near the causeway . . .

“My team?”

“Most died. Hawkins, Lee, Barns, Applebaum—they all lived. I’ve put them on paid leave until you recover.”

As she spoke, more memories flashed through Rutger’s mind’s eye. He was in the secret clinic, and the elevator opened . . . a guy with a gun . . . He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the memory, and then he saw her, that pretty blonde tech in the blue overalls, the one with the shiny orange eyes. What had she done? He saw her leaning against a wall . . . a knife! She’d had a vibroblade and her damn arm—faster than it should’ve been! Rutger’s eyes shot open, and he asked, voice grating over a throat raw as hamburger, “Where’s my sword?”