While Lilijoy settled herself on the bed, Marcus closed his eyes and calmed his mind. He summoned the connection to his internal network and entered a mind space he had developed over many years. It existed as an overlap of visualization and virtual reality, augsight applied to imagination, making a tangible volume he could enter at will.

The mind space manifested as a cathedral dome of black velvet, the ceiling above lost to vision, the walls rippling, hinting at ribbed vaults and buttresses. Glowing windows of muted aurora borealis provided an ever shifting illumination around the edges. Within the nave, a dome of soft white light with no particular source embraced a circular table carved of dark wood. The eight legs of the table seemed to grow out of the floor, twisting around each other into a spiral central pillar. Eight evenly spaced book shelves, filled with huge leather-spined volumes and all manner of astrolabes, alembics and intricate glassware completed the area.

He walked up to the table and looked down upon the top, white and dark marble laid in an intricate spiral pattern. The pattern was slowly shifting, though the stone itself seemed utterly solid and tangible. After he watched the pattern change for a while, he looked up at the form suspended above, a man’s body made of darkness and swirls of light. His body.

He reached out, and as he touched it he fell forward into the navel and the swirls of light became galaxies of millions of stars surrounding him, resolving further into webs of interconnected filaments. He moved his arms across the cosmic stage and stroked the webs gently with his fingers, gathering them until his hands shone with milky radiance.

He opened his eyes and looked at Lilijoy, gracefully balancing internal and external realities.

“Are you ready, my dear?”

She looked up at him and gave a quick nod. He gently took her head between his hands, one palm on her forehead, the other at the back of her skull. Closing his eyes again, he returned entirely to the cosmic environ. Between his glowing hands was a void of utter darkness. Slowly, gently he coaxed the filaments of light to flow towards each other through the void, his hands melting from the palms.

Minutes passed before the progress of the light was obvious, his hands becoming blurred and amorphous, the tendrils flowing from his palms reached toward each other across a portion of the expanse, perhaps a tenth.

“Please be patient,” he said. “Try not to move. It could be very bad if I lost the connection. You can talk if you need to.”

“It tingles,” she said.

“That’s completely normal,” he replied.

In truth, it was virtually impossible she would feel anything at this stage. The nanoscale filaments making their way through her skin and skull were far too small to trigger any nerve endings. It was simply human nature to have sensations of warmth or tingling in this type of situation.

“How much longer?” she asked.

“At least ten minutes, possibly more. It depends on where your bugs have set up in your brain.”

It would take his bugs about a minute to travel a centimeter, building the filaments by linking end to end, slowing down a bit as they spread out. With luck, he would find the visual cortex quickly, as he knew for sure that her network had a presence there. A few minutes to set up a reliable ongoing communication channel, and then a similar amount of time to withdraw his bugs.

It would be tragic if he lost more than a small percentage, as they were irreplaceable and he only had a limited supply. That was why he had hesitated to do this at all, and why he wanted to make sure that Lilijoy would not panic. It would have been better to do the procedure when she was unconscious, but he didn’t have the means to anesthetize her in his room, and hadn’t dared to try it while she was merely asleep. If she woke up and jerked free from his hands, that would be a huge loss for him.

He returned his focus to the progress of his exploration. The tendrils had reached the visual cortex by now. He could feel neurons firing all around him, a crackling wave of waves. The void between his hands remained utterly dark, other than the emerging outline of Lilijoy’s neuroanatomy, traced by the milky light of the searching filaments. He exulted in the beauty and majesty. Here was the universe and that which contained it!

Still, it was a bit odd that he had found no sign of the other bugs. It had been many years since he had last performed this procedure, but typically the visual cortex was a hotbed of bug activity, and his sensor bugs were designed to detect and intercept the presence and communications of other networks. He sighed to himself and waited as the glow expanded.

Another minute passed. And another, still with no sign. Several inches of Lilijoy’s brain glowed between his hands, the front and back portion still separated by darkness. Then he noticed something. The rate of the progress seemed to have slowed. He looked carefully. Yes. In fact it had now stopped altogether.

He sent his awareness into the finest levels of the sensor bugs at the front edge, and felt something pushing him back. Pushing him back faster and faster.

“Shit!” Did I just say that out loud?, he thought.

A wave of darkness was pushing the light back. No, that was an illusion. The bugs were actually disappearing from his awareness. In a few seconds, he had lost almost a minute’s worth of progress. This time he swore quite purposefully.

“Shit, shit, shit. Oh crap!”

By the time he finished speaking, the wave had accelerated further. Panicking, he began to withdraw, the blackness following his tendrils far faster than he could remove them, consuming as it went. In an instant, he lost everything inside her skull. There the blackness stopped, leaving him with a centimeter’s worth of penetration from either palm. He took a moment to sigh in relief and despair at once. Whatever was disabling his bugs wouldn’t be able to follow through the bone; that took a very specialized tool set, part of what made his bugs so unique.

He went to finish the withdrawal, still trying to wrap his mind around what had just occurred, when the black surged again, through the skull. He ripped his hands from Lilijoy’s head just as the darkness reached his palms.

From Lilijoy’s perspective, Marcus had been sitting next to her serenely for a subjective eternity. Suddenly, under his breath she heard him swear. Then he swore some more, almost yelling, followed by a sudden intake of breath, just a moment before he hurled himself away from her, falling off the bed onto the floor, where he curled up, making whimpering noises and clenching and releasing his hands repeatedly.

She was pretty sure this was not an expected outcome.

“Can I move now?” she called down to him.

He made a sound as he pulled himself up onto his knees. Lilijoy couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. He looked down at his hands, examining the palms, and then looked up at her. His face was angry, and his gaze piercing.

He looked down at his hands again and said, “I think you better go, kid. I don’t know what you’ve got in you, but I haven’t lived as long as I have without knowing when to cut my losses.” He shook his head “I’m not going to stick around here either. I’ve got my own problems and I don’t need the attention you are going to bring down on this place.”

Stunned, Lilijoy could only watch as he went into the other room and began filling two bags with food bars and water packets. He came back into the bedroom and grabbed a larger bag with a long strap attached to it from under the bed. His movements were abrupt almost violent, but when he spoke to her again his voice was gentler than before.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t deserve this. You need to come with me now and I’ll get you started on your way. I put some food and water in this bag for you; it’s a little heavy, so I’ll carry it for now.” She stared at him blankly, and he gestured impatiently. “We have to go. Now!”

Lilijoy was confused by Marcus’ change of attitude. He had been so nice to her before he fell down, and now he was angry. And also afraid? She realized that her thinking felt clear in a way it had never before, and even though everything over the last day had been new and frightening in many ways, her experiences had already changed her.

Most of what Marcus had told her didn’t make sense at the time, but she could remember all of it, every word, and as she kept turning it over in her mind, more and more parts of it made sense to her, falling into place. She felt like she had been a floating piece of cattail fluff, never knowing when the wind would blow her in a new direction, with no choice in the matter. She couldn’t imagine going back to her little group by the piles, and now Marcus was trying to take her somewhere and abandon her. She began to feel angry herself.

“Lilijoy is not a piece of cattail fluff that you can blow wherever you want! You may know more than me, but Lilijoy...” She stopped herself, “...no, I, I want choices. You can tell me choices while we walk!”

She jumped down off the bed, and strode into the other room, while Marcus looked on with his jaw dropped. She stopped in front of the closed door and tapped her foot, like she had seen Grabby do when he was impatient with the Bros. She yelled over her shoulder.

“Are you coming? Open this...this shit door!” The door slid to the side, and Lilijoy strode out into the hall, into the noise and throbbing vibrations of the factory mine, with Marcus close on her heels.