She shook her head. Her eyes dropped to the floor. “I wanted to find Uncle Nate. That was my real reason for sneaking around. He’d been gone for several days and didn’t even come back when Mom was just lying there…burning up and turning into this…shell. He missed her last days, last hours. Even if he’d changed, pulling back from us, I couldn’t understand him not coming back for Mom and me. Not then. Not when I had no one else.” Her voice wavered. Tear-bright eyes lifted to my face. “I thought if I could just send him a message, he’d come. Even if Mom was gone, I thought he’d come back for me. I knew he would.”
Pressure banded in hard ribbons around my chest. He’d come back, all right. He’d come back to betray her, terrify her, abandon her to strangers, and tell her she was dead.
“Oh, sweetheart…” Everything in me burned to close the distance between us. “I’m aching to reach for you. Please let me, Tess.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. Suddenly, she moved. She came straight into my open arms, and I wrapped her in a tight hug.
“I’m sorry. You must’ve been so scared. So alone.” Eight years old, on her own in the Overseer’s house, not knowing if there was anyone left in the galaxy to love or protect her. It broke my heart.
Tess exhaled with a shudder, softening against me. “I thought maybe I could find some information in the Overseer’s office. Figure out where Uncle Nate went. I snuck in two days after Mom died and snooped around, looking for something that might help me send him a message. I didn’t find anything, and then I heard him coming—the Overseer, talking with someone else.”
Tess put some distance between us again but without the wary stiffness from before. “I wasnotsupposed to be in his office unless summoned. I panicked and hid under the desk. He came in with a scientist. I never saw what the man looked like. Didn’t recognize his voice. I heard them talking about a fancy new AI—what it did and how to inject it.”
“What did they say?” I asked, wishing she hadn’t left my arms so fast. But that was Tess. She had two feet and she stood on them.
She held out her left hand, palm up. “To inject it into the center of the hand. It would spread out, merging with everything from wrist to fingertips. The scientist loaded it with programming based on a bazillion different variables that would be able to ‘speak’ to any modern electronic lock. If I can get my hand within a few centimeters of the control panel, the AI can interface with it and tell it to open up.”
I asked the first question that popped into my head. “Why did you stay on Hourglass Mile?”
“The locking mechanism was out of reach when I was in my cell, and the mine exits were always crawling with guards, although they didn’t really care what went on in the tunnels. Fights. Sex. Murders.” She grimaced. “And even if I somehow managed, I wasn’t leaving without Jax.”
Right. Jax. He was already broken enough. Losing Tess would’ve finished him.
“How long does it take to interface?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think it’s ever taken more than thirty seconds to trigger a lock.” She looked at her left hand as though an alien had sprouted from it and was waving tentacles in her face. “That sounds fast, but those have been some of the longest half minutes of my life.”
I’d bet. Then again, betting had never gone well for me. “And the door just opens?”
She nodded, looking uneasy again.
Tess needed to understand that I was the last person she should feel uncomfortable with, especially concerning her body. I lifted her hand and kissed the center of her palm. I could see the injection point now—a tiny dot where the skin was whiter. Tess’s gaze jumped to mine, a hesitant smile pulling at her lips.
“Let me get this straight.” Watching her closely, I kept her hand in mine. “You were eight years old, your mother had just died from a mysterious fever, your father—or the man you thought was your father—was a tyrant who terrorized you and everyone else, and you waltzed into his private office, eavesdropped about a brand-new invention he was going to use to benefit only himself, and took the damn thing before he could?”
She looked at me blankly, clearly not getting where I was going with this. “I guess so.”
“Do you understand how incredibly strong and brave you are?”
Denial flashed across her features. “I was scared out of my mind! I just wanted a bargaining chip. I could tell something was happening. Something big. Iknewhe was about to get rid of me. Mom was gone. He already had a basement full of my blood. He’d always been so cold to me, sometimes violent. Not paternal at all.” She snatched her hand back and folded her fingers in on the tiny pinprick. “I thought if I took his AI and made it merge with me, he couldn’t kill me. He’d still need me for something.”
“You wanted to stay with him?”
“No!” The word blew from her with the force of a jet engine. “I was a kid. Alone. I didn’t know what to do—besides try to find Uncle Nate. I wanted to run away. Mom and I had wanted to run for years, but we couldn’t escape. There was nooutfrom him.” She snorted in disgust. “No out but death.”
Our eyes met. Tess’s suddenly widened. “He faked my death.”
I slowly nodded. I didn’t like the way Bridgebane had done it, with secrets and lies, even from his niece, but he’d given her the only out either of them could conceive of: the death of Quintessa Novalight.
“Fuck.” Tess ground the heel of her hand against her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. “Should I feel guilty for being awful to him? Because I was. Don’t deny it.”
“Don’t even think about that.” I clasped her head in my hands, urging her to look at me. “He deserved everything you said to him. But what you can do is move forward from here.”
Her eyes glittered with moisture again. She finally nodded and swallowed so hard I could practically hear the tears sinking back down her throat.
Letting her go, I asked, “What made you think the Overseer couldn’t just get another AI from the scientist?”
“It was the only one. They said so. A unique piece developed for the Overseer alone. It would give him access to anything, anywhere. No one could hide from him—or hide anythingfromhim. He would never allow anyone else to have that kind of power.”
