Waking is like an earthquake: For a moment, I'm still with Sven as everything starts to shake and crumble. The ceiling falls in chunks around us, but still he doesn't let me go.

And then as suddenly as it all started, it stops. I lay in eerie silence and blackness, until I realize the dark is just my eyelids. They snap open, and I find myself alone in a new room I've never seen before.

"Hello?" I call.

Only the echo of my voice answers.

Then, out of the darkness: "Hello, Ronnie."

"Carlos?" I sit up; this time, instead of a table, I rest on a hospital-style bed, and I wonder what else happened in this lab. Did they experiment on subjects who cared about comfort? Humans?

I bring a hand to my head and immediately pull it away with a hiss. The flap of skin still hangs off my temple, fused parts exposed and all.

"Carlos, where is everyone?"

"In the hospital."

I shoot off the bed, my bare feet skidding on the floor. "Hospital?! What happened?"

Hospital implies a human emergency. Is Davis okay?

"It's down the hall to your right when you exit," Carlos offers.

I'm out the door before he finishes.

"Three rooms down!" he calls after me.

I scramble down the hall, clawing at doors even though I know they're not the right one. All I feel is that urgent itch under my skin, the rising lump in my throat, the inability to breathe making me dizzy.

"Davis!" I call, smashing open the door that Carlos indicated. "Dav—!"

I stop at the scene that greets me. Blood, everywhere. Puddled on the floor, streaked on the faces of white cabinets. Smear marks lead straight to a bed in the center of the room, and I barge through the semicircle of androids clustered around it.

Ayo, her forehead glistening with sweat, lays asleep under a thin sheet. As I watch, she mumbles something incoherent, and her head lolls toward me, revealing bloodied nostrils. A thin strip of white flashes between her eyelids.

I swing around, scanning for Davis, then Darwin, Maven, anyone. "What happened?" When no one answers, I raise my voice. "Where is Davis?"

My blurry eyes finally make out Darwin, a head taller than the rest. I make for him like a tornado, shoving him so hard in the chest that he actually has to take a step back.

"Where is he?" I growl, hating how watery it comes out. "What did you do to her? To him? Tell me where he is!"

I can't see. The room spins uncontrollably. I pound on Darwin's chest until Maven rips me away by the shoulder, and I stumble backward, panting. She narrows her eyes at me, stepping in front of Darwin and squaring off.

But I glare over her shoulder at him, and he stares back, something missing from his eyes as he regards me. For the first time, I see him as a machine and not a monster, calculating as his gaze flicks up, down, right, left, assessing the lines of my face and the tear tracks glistening in them.

"Stop." He holds out a hand, and Maven falls away, giving him a look that clearly asks why.

"She collapsed," he says, his voice surprisingly quiet. "Hit her nose on the desk on the way down. Hasn't woken since."

I glance back at the bed, at Ayo's restless sleep.

"Fever. Chills. She has some kind of bug."

"Davis?" I repeat, turning back to him.

His eyes scan Ayo over my shoulder for a moment, and then he sighs. He jerks his head toward the door, and I follow him out, keeping a safe distance.

"Is that why my head is still open?" I ask as we step into the hall. "Did you get what you need? Is Davis okay?"

My mind leaps from one thought to the next, imagining the worst case scenario for each. What if Davis is sick, too? He's so weak already from lack of food; his immune system must be shot. He's in no condition to fight an infection. I shudder as I remember Ayo coughing, none of us thinking anything of it.

"We'll see," Darwin says, and I don't know which question he's answering. Maybe all of them. I crane my neck to stare up at him, hating how tall he is. It feels too much like walking beside Sven.

I stop in my tracks, the vision from my slumber rising to the surface of my consciousness again. I remember what Maven said. We don't dream. Those images came from somewhere. The conversation with Sven can't be Darwin's—I was clearly me, dwarfed by him, weak and at his mercy as he forced himself on me.

But the rest....

"Coming?"

My head snaps up. Darwin has halted, too, waiting for me to catch up.

"Don't do it," I blurt.

He squints, taking a step closer. "Do what?"

"I know what you're planning." My voice sinks lower, like the walls might overhear.

He stiffens, eyes closing off, and starts to turn away, but I reach out and snatch his arm.

"Don't do it," I repeat.

For a moment we stand like that, my fingers digging into his skin as I plead with a man who has learned better than to listen to anyone. My stomach curls in on itself as I realize the utter hopelessness of my request.

"It's what he wants," I whisper. "This is all just one giant chessboard to him."

After another second, Darwin rips himself easily out of my grasp. "I know how to play."

I watch as he walks away, my toes teetering on the verge of following. I stick my hands in my back pockets and take a deep, shaky breath. "You know, computers still haven't solved chess. And they probably never will, either."

He shrugs. "Then it sounds like it's anyone's game."

My shoulders sag as he rounds a corner, and I scurry to catch up. We stop in front of yet another door, and Darwin takes a step back.

"I'll leave you to it," he says, bowing his head. The steely glint behind his eyes gives me no illusions about the gesture.

Alone, knowing Davis might be suffering on the other side of the door, I throw it open and step inside. Bent over a keyboard, he snaps to attention at the sudden intrusion, the slight displacement of air fanning a lock of dark hair across his forehead.

My skin prickles under his gaze as his eyes flick from mine to my temple, and then to my half-open mouth, where they linger for a touch too long before he meets my stare again.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

I let the door swing shut behind me. Okay, not the greeting I was hoping for, but probably the greeting I deserve.

"Are you okay?" I return.

"Fine." He sniffs, meeting resistance, like he's been crying. I venture closer, moving slowly as if he might spook and run at any second.

"Are you sure? Ayo's...sick."

"I'm fine."

I resent the feeling of walking on eggshells as I approach and perch myself carefully on the chair next to his desk. He doesn't look away from the screen, but his fingers are motionless on the keys, his eyes staring at the same spot.

"Look," I try, gesturing at myself. "I'm alive. Still me."

His lips pull into a sardonic smile, eyes crinkling but not with the good humor I always remember. "Congratulations, Ronnie, you were right."

My jaw drops. "I'm not asking for a pat on the back, I just thought—"

"That everything was fine and dandy because you survived?"

We stare at each other. Every word I can think of dies before it reaches my tongue. I've never felt a need to understand emotions, but now it rises in me like a craving. I need to know what's behind the hard edge in his voice, because it's not Davis. It's not the man I've known for over two years, with his stupid Adele jokes and charisma to match the gods.

"God dammit, did you ever stop to think about what this means to me? I'm decomp—"

His voice breaks, and he pushes the keyboard away to put his head in his hands.

"I'm decompiling the bitcode of what makes you, you," he whispers. "Can you even imagine doing this to someone that you—someone—someone like you?"

I don't have an answer. Someone like me? Someone incapable of basic humanity, someone incapable of comprehending his emotional state as his shoulders rise and fall much too rapidly? His breaths fill the silence as it stretches, and then they go deathly quiet.

"This isn't the way I wanted to get to know what's inside your head, Ronnie."

I stare at my hands, suddenly fighting tears of a different kind. He's finally seeing it. That, at my core, I'm nothing more than a piece of code that can be downloaded onto a flash drive, decompiled, analyzed, and replicated. I understand now, because as he says it, my old fears tug at me again—that he'll finally find the robotic part of me and realize that I'm not what he needs me to be.

I'm not human.

"Do you get it now?" I ask, words thick as they fight for space in the closing tunnel of my throat. "Do you see how this can never work? Do you see how I'm not like you?"

He finally raises his head, eyes mournful and rimmed with red. "All I see is how much I love you."

Everything stops. My heart, my lungs, the world. It all narrows down into those three words, magnified and multiplied and echoing like a shout into the ether of eternity.

I don't realize I've stood until the scrape of my chair across the linoleum jars me back to reality. My brain won't let me hear him say it. The words already belong to someone else—Sven—because only Sven has ever loved me, and only Sven ever will—and no matter how hard I try to fight that notion, it stands firm like a monument in my sea of thoughts.

"Look, I'm sorry." Davis sighs, running his hands over his face. "If you're not ready to hear it. I'm sorry if you're not ready to say it back. I'm just...sorry."

I shake my head, a tiny, jerky motion. "You can't," I whisper.

"How long have we known each other, Ronnie?"

I blink back at him. Not "how long have we worked together?" How long have we known each other?

"I...." I don't know. I always thought he was something he wasn't. Smooth, womanizing, maybe a little sleazy. He isn't any of those things.

Before I can confess it, though, the tri-toned notification chime of the computer draws our attention. He glances at the screen, then away, then back again. I see his double-take clear as day, his face slackening into something beyond belief.

"What is it?"

Earth-shattering admissions forgotten, I dash to his side, scanning the monitor and expecting to see giant flashing error symbols or some kind of malware eating the computer alive, but it's just code, only extraordinary in its elegance.

"Davis, what is it?"

"It's mine."

"What's yours?"

"The code." His voice is both weak and panicky. "The—it's my...it's my code."

He squeezes his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose hard.

"I wrote this."

"How? When?" I see vaguely familiar lines and loops and logic paths, but it's not Carlos. I've seen enough of that code base to know.

"My Master's," he breathes. "This was my thesis. The foundation of it, I mean"—he waves a hand at it—"obviously it's been modified, but I...."

He deflates, curling into himself, the lines etched into his face by months of hunger deepening before my eyes. Then he laughs once, a harsh, derisive sound. "Guess this explains a lot of things."

He rises, sending his chair rolling back across the floor, and brushes past me.

"Davis, wait—"

"I can't, Ronnie," he says. "The fucking timing"—another hollow laugh—"couldn't have been more perfect."

"Davis! What do you mean?" I snap, but he doesn't answer, only sways on the spot, staring up at the ceiling like a drunkard.

Suddenly his teetering turns to tipping, and I rush forward as he begins to fall backwards. I grunt as he lands in my arms, which give way under his weight. He lands with a thump, his fall barely softened.

"Davis? Hey! Wake up. Davis! Come on!"

No response. I pat his cheek, but he only mumbles the same incoherent nonsense as Ayo.

"No," I whisper, removing my hand to touch it to my own face and feeling it burn against my skin. He's too hot—and not in the way the women at the office always whispered about. Overheated. Feverish.

"Help!" I scream at the closed door, wondering if Darwin stayed nearby in case the decompilation finished. "Somebody, please! I need help in here!"