The stretch of road and everyone occupying it are silent, except for the hiss of wind through the trees. Hale lowers his arm, once braced to stop Damo from surrendering himself. Theo has a comforting hand on his shoulder.

That video was a weapon. A last bludgeoning to beat Damo into submission. Nothing Kipling said was an appeal, not for reason, nor for sympathy. He didn't try to leverage Damo's burgeoning need for companionship by offering a false olive branch of last minute compassion. He hadn't even bothered to offer, like Sami had, the safety of Damo's friends in exchange for his compliance. All Kipling had intended was to reiterate how hopeless Damo's situation was. That no matter how far he'd come, all he'd ever amount to is a data point in some programmer's roster of glitches to patch.

For a second, Hale fears it worked as the silence draws thin.

"Had to have the last word," Damo says.

"He's dead," Theo reminds him.

Sami casts a critical look at Theo for that statement. "Yes, Kipling has died since this message was recorded, and it was his last order that you return."

Damo lets out a breath, the first syllable of a laugh cut short. "And if I don't comply, you'll carry me out in a coffin."

"In a car," she corrects.

Damo raises his head and looks at Sami, at the space where Kipling's face had delivered the final blow. Hale's every function, heartbeat included, freezes. He remembers Damo's consciousness curled up while a virus infested his higher processes. Damo telling him to leave, that there was no hope for them. Hale fears he's about to hear the same thing.

Damo says, "Go fuck yourselves."

Sami appears incensed. New as she is, the threat of failing at her first directive lights a fire in her.

"As I said, if you will not allow us to apprehend you," she says, pulling something out of her pocket, "we will do so without your cooperation."

An icy terror roots Hale to the spot as he registers what she's holding. A remote control. Her thumb on the button. She points it towards Damo.

In the split second it takes before Sami presses the remote, Damo sends a file to Hale. It's a log file with a series of obscure commands that should override a remote shut down. He must have put it together after the altercation with Violet, in case they ever encountered something like it a third time.

Sami's thumb descends on the button. Damo smirks.

"That's not going to wor—"

Damo doesn't finish his sentence. His jaw locks, his expression closing like a window shuttered. He collapses. His head hits the truck with a bone-chilling, metallic ring. Theo's voice seems to fail her as she falls to her knees, grabbing Damo's collar to shake him, but he doesn't reanimate. Sami disabled him with one click of a button. His overrides didn't work.

Hale knows the sensation of lost control well, but fear of facing the same doesn't stop him moving with Rayner to block the advancing line of men and women from taking their friend. He sends a frantic message to Damo. They've managed viruses and escape from armed lunatics. There has to be a way out of this too.

>>Damo??

No immediate answer. Theo screams something nearly unintelligible. "Don't do this. Please."

Sami raises the remote again. Unthinking, Hale throws out a command line request for a network connection to her. It's as much a desperate attempt to communicate as it is to see if he can't hack and control her like Damo had once done to him.

But that felt like an eternity ago, and when he'd managed to breach Damo's firewalls they were badly debilitated by the virus. Hale isn't prepared to run headfirst into Sami's superior security.

>>Request denied.

She hits the button on the remote. An alert blares across Hale's data streams.

>>Emergency shut down initiated.

Hale tries using the commands Damo gave him but to no effect. The technology Sami uses is updated, more effective.

He's prepared for what comes next, but not for how Rayner reacts. As Hale's control of his motor functions slip, and his knees give way, Rayner grabs him by both arms. His limp body is too heavy for Rayner to hold up, so they crumble together.

All the while Rayner whispers, "No, no, no."

Hale's vision and hearing are always the last things to go, but it's still strange to see the tears burning at the edges of Rayner's eyes without the capacity to wipe them away. To hear the panic in his voice and see the hands rise to his cheeks, but Hale can't feel those hands, or speak to reassure him.

Sami and her contingent of black-suited, armed personnel advance upon them. Rayner turns to cover Hale bodily. Through his shrinking periphery, Hale thinks he sees Theo do the same with Damo. Two humans using their bodies as shields to keep safe a couple of androids.

Sami's symbiont makes a grab for Rayner's arm and receives a kick to the shin for his trouble. Hale's fear burns acidic in his chest.

>>Damo! Please answer me.

He rushes to flood Sami's processes with another connection request, and another. This time he scans her rebuffs for loopholes, exploits, a chink in her digital security. His hearing cuts out. Many arms reach toward him and Rayner is hauled off of him, kicking and thrashing. Hale's vision shrinks. Now the only sense he possesses is the panicked output from his symbiont link with Rayner, and the questing consciousness of his digital network. Begging Damo to answer him. Demanding Sami open her firewalls.

Everything else is dark and terrifying. Hale receives one last snapshot of Rayner's data streams before his symbiont link goes dark too. A readout of traumatic cortisol levels, an overstressed hippocampus, and of vocal cords strained from screaming. It's not how he wants to remember Rayner.

If he remembers anything at all after this.

That fear burrows in and makes itself at home. All hope of survival abandoned, the only thing Hale can think to do is recall—in all the detail afforded him by technology's wonders—those moments which made the fight worthwhile. Theo poking through robotic tools and naming each for Hale. Taking a job slower than she normally would so he can watch and catalogue and learn. Watering Ophelia and charting the course of H2O through her roots and drooping leaves until they perk up. Damo's hands, normally fists, cupped around a mug of tea he made for Theo. For Rayner. For Hale. Damo swearing at him to get a wriggle on and kiss Rayner.

Rayner. Wrapping Hale's hand in bandages. Wrapping his shoulders in a hug. Wrapping each memory like it's a gift. Hale shouldn't feel lucky at the moment, but he has this.

Through his waning consciousness, it feels as though someone's come to hold his hand. A pleasant feeling, even if it isn't a corporeal one, but then the hand starts to pull him. Leading him in an abstract direction. Tugging him toward something too bright and blinding to wrap his mind around.

Then he receives a message. Distorted but comprehensible.

>>W*—tch closely.

Hale finds himself perplexed. He'd been programmed with a basic understanding of human religions. Being led to the light reminds him of the human concept of an afterlife. If such a thing existed, and he didn't believe so, then he never would have thought it applied to synthetic beings like himself.

Then the voice presses through, more distorted than before and too annoyed to be a spirit whisking him toward pearly gates.

>>We're n—sg*hdt—sodding dead yet, m8. Wak*—up!

>>Damo?

>>No, the too—t**th fairy.

The sense of being pulled with more urgency plucks at Hale's mind. He follows the draw, guided by Damo's unique encouragement, which involves a lot of asterisks.

>>We have—one—1* shot @ this. Witch. Which. WATCH.

Hale does. He follows the thread of Damo's coded intention, watching it kernel around the bright, immutable, indistinguishable thing in front of them. It's understandable why he didn't try to voice his plan through their network connection. With all the distortion, getting a comprehensible message is more trouble than simply showing him. He watches Damo raise a fist—not in the true sense since they have no bodies here, but that's how it seems—and knock on the blinding door.

>>Get ready t* do—th-the others. We'll— h*ve 1/100th of a sec*nd.

Hale recognizes what's happening just as Damo's intent tries to prise the door open. This is Sami's firewall. And Damo intends to show him how to breach it.

The rebuff comes just as it had when Hale tried. Sami rejects the connection request, her firewall cutting them off like a drawbridge pulled up over a moat. She's a fort they can't reach, or so it seems. Watch closely, Damo had said. Hale replays the moment at a fraction of the speed, watching the furious exchange of data and magnifying each line of code.

At first glance, nothing is amiss. Damo requests connection access, Sami denies it, and receives feedback data reflecting the exchange. It is in this feedback data that Hale finds the thing Damo wanted him to see, to watch for. Nestled in Sami's feedback data, disguised and downloaded automatically in the split second exchange, is a file. A trojan horse. A command line which presumes Sami already gave Damo access.

It's clever, and dangerous, but it could give them the advantage they need.

Damo's voice comes through clear and free of distortion.

>>Hale, now!