Their assailant fell to the ground with a thud, shouting as ashes drifted from the laser wound in his leg. Lyra jumped when she shot him, either from excitement or fear; maybe both. For a moment, Acidalia pondered whether he’d really come to hurt them—one one hand, he looked menacing and wore a military uniform, but on the other, there were plenty of soldiers who joined up because they were forced to and who meant average citizens no harm. Then she noticed the motto on his fatigues: Vae victis, woe to the conquered. “He’s Nova,” she said, and aimed her gun at his head.

“I have no idea how I just did that,” Lyra admitted, looking shaken. “I mean, I’ve never-“

“That’s why you got his leg. Always aim for the head or the chest—for obvious reasons, but also because they’re easier to hit than extremities.” Wispy embers blew from the now-dead man’s open cranium as Acidalia’s laser shot hit him square in the forehead. She didn’t particularly enjoy the sight of dying men, but thinking about her own little brother, she didn’t feel so bad about it, either. She had a war to fight, a loved one to avenge; there was no time for remorse. Besides, death by laser was a painless fate; unlike the loud, obnoxious guns of old, with their mechanical parts and metal bullets, laser pistols were beautifully efficient. For a second, she actually felt a bit satisfied, which sickened her.

Good leaders aren’t motivated by revenge, she reminded herself. Good leaders don’t feel anything, good leaders rely on logic and reasoning, good leaders are hardly human at all…

But good leaders fight for the rights of their people, and if fighting for the rights of her people just so happened to involve slaughtering the eugenicists who killed T, Acidalia wouldn’t complain about that.

Lyra, on the other hand, looked unsure. She stared down at the dead soldier like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing, eyes glassy, gaze empty. The scene wasn’t particularly gory—like T, the man looked like he was sleeping more than dead—but there was a certain strangeness about not seeing the rise and fall of a breathing chest or the rapid eye-movements of deep sleep when one expected to, and even to Acidalia, bodies fell deep into the uncanny valley. She couldn’t imagine what it must look like to Lyra, who was new to all of this.

“They would have died eventually even without us,” Acidalia said, trying to make her feel better. Her words were empty platitudes, but it still felt good to say them. “My gun isn’t like the guns you see most of the time down here,” she added. “It’s a short-range laser-pulse blaster. Instant and painless.”

“I think his brain’s leaking out of his skull,” Lyra replied, voice wavering.

Acidalia pursed her lips. “Let’s get going.” Before Lyra could say anything else or look at the bodies any more closely, Acidalia was pulling her away, back into the shrouded darkness of lower Appalachia.

“Why are there so many dead people?” Lyra asked, sounding afraid. “They’re dropping in the streets, I can see it through the thermal goggles. I thought it was the riots at first—you know, shootings, arson, crush injuries—but they’re dying so fast, even after the sounds of rioting stopped.”

“Because it’s not the rioters that are killing each other, it’s the Nova that’s killing the rioters,” Acidalia said. “No ordinary citizens have chemical weapons like lethal gas. We’d be seeing a lot more petty violence and a lot fewer sophisticated weapons if all of this was a result of mere anarchy instead of targeted military action.”

“Why are the Nova attacking the Underground?”

Good question, Acidalia thought; Lyra was right that this response was completely unjustified. “They may have wanted to pause the battle, so to speak, at least for a little bit,” she said. “The Revolution has soldiers down here, too; the Nova wanted them cleared out, and they want the fighting to stop so they can swoop in and seize the city. All of the ordinary people who died just happened to get caught up in the crossfire.”

Lyra didn’t say anything, but she sighed like she almost expected that answer.

They walked another three blocks, following the blinking white dot that symbolized the Terminal on Acidalia’s GPS. The city streets were emptier than Acidalia had ever seen them, deserted save for the corpses on the ground. Gone was the ambient noise of Appalachia; the sounds of hovercars and maglev trains and the chattering of a billion people had all been replaced with an eerie silence, symbolic of a dying metropolis. In the distance, unstable buildings swayed back and forth to invisible music. Every so often, something collapsed and kicked up decades of untouched dirt and grime, which flew violently into the air before settling down in layers like Eleutheria was filling in its own grave. The world smelled like smoke, and Acidalia found herself looking for the source of the fire, which seemed to be nowhere and everywhere all at once, like the entirety of Eleutheria was burning.

“There’s the place I work,” Lyra said suddenly as they passed by a row of dilapidated stores. “I mean, used to work.” She pointed to a seedy-looking place at the edge of an alleyway, lit by dying neon lights and the bright orange glow of flames that raged within. Beside the broken doors, inefficient laser-proof forcefields flickered on and off. Signs in the windows advertised a myriad of services and products, some more legal than others, but it didn’t look like any employees were still there to provide them.

“I wonder if Alicaria…?” Lyra began, then she trailed off.

“Here.”

“Here?” Lyra asked.

“Definitely here.” Acidalia looked around quickly to make sure no one was watching, then slipped inside the doorway. It looked identical to every other doorway in this decrepit pit of hell, but she knew the Terminal like the back of her hand. Delicately, she removed her glove and touched the door.

It sprung to life beneath her fingers, slowly but surely rising like she’d awakened a long-sleeping elder god. The silver concrete turned to white under her hand, and years of dust and disrepair seemed to vanish in an instant. With a soft chime, the doorway slid open, and the air seemed to whisper, welcome back.

The inside was all organic curves and blinding white, which was such a sharp contrast to the black-drenched battleground outside that Acidalia had to stop and let her eyes adjust for a moment. The design wasn’t exactly modern—it screamed 3002, when this layer was built—but it held that familiar sleekness and perfection she only ever associated with the Eleutherian upper class. Suddenly, she felt like she was home; this place was seeped in childhood nostalgia, filled with long-lost childhood memories.

Lyra, blinking, shut the door behind them. It drifted back into place, then sealed itself seamlessly into the wall. “Where do we go now?” she whispered, lost.

“This is just a maintenance tunnel,” Acidalia said. Her voice echoed down the empty hallways in a pleasant, musical way. “We still need to go up to get to the Terminal itself. When this place was built about a thousand years ago, the middle class still lived on ground-level, and workers would have actually accessed the inside this way.”

“Not many workers around now,” Lyra remarked.

“Well, no humans, especially after the Automatic Revolution in 3478, and no outsiders at all after the wars in the ‘500s…”

“Wars?”

“We’ve been at war for practically our entire history,” Acidalia said, sighing. “Even before we were Eleutheria, we were at war. We once destroyed an entire nation because we felt slightly threatened by them once, and that’s before we had the coup d’état that led to the monarchy. The Ciphers are violent people.” She fingered the grip of her gun. Violent war-mongering psychopaths seemed like the perfect description of the majority of her ancestors. Alestra was no better or worse than any of them, in the end; the entire family was corrupt from its earliest roots to its furthest leaves. Even Katerina, the Luminosa, wrote in her journals that she wasn’t fit for politics; she seemed like the last of the lineage to ever have that level of self-awareness.

“It’s so strange, thinking of a time before Eleutheria,” Lyra said. “I guess every country has to have a precursor.”

“And a successor. Every empire falls.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” she asked. “Make your own empire fall?”

Acidalia hesitated. “I’m trying to protect my citizens from danger,” she said eventually, “which is the ultimate duty of all servants of state. I do what I believe is best for my people. In this case, I believe the current administration is so corrupt that the best way to help my citizens is to burn the entire thing down and start anew from the ashes. I don’t want to make the empire fall, but sometimes you need to destroy the old in order to make way for something better.”

“Better how?”

She bit her lip. Loaded question, she thought. In truth, she and the others hadn’t exactly hashed out all of the details yet; the factions of the Revolution were mostly united by a unique hatred of Alestra and a bond that could only happen as the result of a shared enemy. Once Alestra was dead—if they ever managed to kill her—Acidalia had no idea what would happen. They didn’t even have a unified political theory, let alone a constitution or a code of law. And the keys needed to seize power weren’t necessarily the keys needed to keep it.

“It’s complicated,” she admitted. “There are a lot of things that need to be changed. We need better healthcare, better schools—actually, any schools period would be an improvement—better support for the poor, better infrastructure, better everything. We need to put the power back where it belongs. I live by the rule of ‘consent of the governed,’ if that makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Lyra said, sounding very much confused. Acidalia decided that it wasn’t the right time to elaborate.

They walked on in silence for another few minutes. Every so often, some piece of sleek white machinery would fade in from nowhere and ask Acidalia for another DNA sample or iris scan or drop of Cipher blood. For the most part, the security systems ignored Lyra, and she ignored them.

The maintenance tunnels were nothing like the deep underground; they were completely empty and untouched. They were dusty, but beautiful in their own kind of way. As Lyra and Acidalia went deeper into the maze, the decor shifted from one architectural style to another, but it always seemed to revert to a timeless sort of neoclassicism that blended ancient Rome with ancient America. Elaborate Dorian columns held up the carved ceilings, adorned with ornate but cracked stained glass backlit by bizarrely natural light despite the fact that they were on the very lowest levels of a layered metropolis. Eventually, maintenance rooms turned to libraries and then to offices, which held faint imprints of the people who used to occupy them. In one room, an old-fashioned photograph of a pretty, blonde woman and a little boy with missing front teeth lay on the floor. The pair stood in front of the beautiful backdrop of an organic city—green woven between white, curving seamlessly in that distinctive architectural style that was popular back then. The back read Appalachia City, ’92. It was perfectly preserved; it probably hadn’t been touched in centuries.

Acidalia took out a tiny shield capsule, intended for protecting one’s skin from minor abrasions, and opened it around the centuries-old photograph before tucking it away in her breast pocket, not entirely knowing why. These people were long-dead by now, but still…

“God, how this city has changed,” she murmured. How she wished things stayed like they were then. But she had no time to be wistful, and it felt strange to be nostalgic for an era she’d never lived in, so she walked onwards.

The entire building was just as large and empty as it’d always been, but the rooms became more recognizable the deeper they went. Each marble and quartz-lined hall brought back memories of Acidalia’s childhood. When she was young, her mother would drag her all the way down here and make her wait outside those heavy doors while she did Imperial Business—Imperial Business that Aleskynn, who was a toddler at the time, could be a part of, but Acidalia was excluded from. She used to get so angry, waiting in these hallways all alone. If she was Cipher enough for the Terminal, why wasn’t she Cipher enough to be a part of her own family? She was too young, then, to understand the complicated politics of the court, and certainly too young to conceptualize what being a bastard meant.

As she passed an old table, she noticed a change in the pattern of the dust on the surface: written in the mess was a clumsy ACIDALIA, traced by a child’s hands. She must have written that once, during one such lonely afternoon. Biting her lip, she hurried her pace.

Eventually. Clunky old DNA readers that no one ever bothered to replace started appearing on the sides of the hallways, clogging up the space like plaque in arteries. Decorative, scientific-looking holograms of double helixes that served no real purpose and were scientifically inaccurate anyway (wrong chirality, Acidalia thought, annoyed) sat above every doorway. The atmosphere was stagnant and quiet again, the silence broken only by the hums of ancient computers, until something shuffled a hallway over and Lyra jumped six feet in the air.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” Acidalia said, drawing her gun and peering around the corner. The biotracker in her helmet showed no signs of life, but she could just make out the silhouette of a man in the distance. For a second, she was alarmed, then she realized that his skin was the color of rusted iron and his hair was made of metal; this figure was more machine than man.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully, noticing her but not looking up. “Salve!” His voice crackled like a broken radio.

“Er, salve,” Acidalia responded, switching on her headset so Andromeda could hear them, were things to go south. “Quis es?” Who are you?

“Ego Alpha dash viginti-quattuor. Quis es?”

“Acidalia est nomen meum. Quid tu hic? Est hic periculo.” Acidalia is my name. Why are you here? It’s dangerous.

“Laboro hic,” he said simply. I work here. He had the same accent she did, that of an upper-class Appalachian noble, and he probably would have sounded very eloquent if it wasn’t for his broken-record voice and his blank-eyed gaze.

“Et non operatur hic,” Lyra said. “Nullus operatur hic.” You don’t work here; no one works here.

Rather than outright talk to Lyra, he just smiled vacantly. “Would you like me to speak in Classical Latin instead?” he asked. Then he repeated what sounded like his stock introduction: Salve. Ego Alpha dash viginti-quattor… except this time, his C’s sounded like K’s and his V’s like W’s. He’d adopted Lyra’s accent so seamlessly that its accuracy was almost alarming.

“Woah, how did you do that?” Lyra asked.

“I speak six thousand, five hundred and twelve languages.” Alpha-24’s voice was so joyous and light that Acidalia almost wanted to laugh with him. “The most common languages people ask me to speak are Latin, English, Spanish, Greek and-“ He broke off suddenly and sung a word, humming three notes in quick succession.

A pang of recognition rose in Acidalia’s chest. “What was that last one?” she asked.

“Solresol.”

Solresol… the name rung a bell, quite literally. Acidalia suddenly recalled days of tapping out notes to make words and sentences, translating music into colors and flags and strange, loopy letters that made alien words. She’d learned it what seemed like an eon ago, and hadn’t used it since. It had been used by the military up until about 3500, probably due to how many subtle ways people could communicate in Solresol, but it had fallen out of use everywhere but the most militarized parts of the Sinensis wastelands, and even then it was only popular with high-ranking soldiers and Princeps-castes from military families.

But seven hundred years ago, Solresol was everywhere.

And six hundred years ago was the android revolution, and the reason they stopped making sentient AIs forever.

“Alpha,” Acidalia said slowly, “we don’t want to hurt you.” She’d never met a sentient android before—she knew too many cyborgs to count, herself technically among them, but that was different. Cyborgs had human minds and hearts and souls. But someone fully mechanical was unpredictable and dangerous, and according to the history textbooks, they could be violent.

He started humming again. “Dore dofadofa. Dore do do mifala fa fafadore domi.” I know. I don’t want to hurt you, either.

“How long have you been here?” Acidalia asked cautiously. “And if you could speak in Latin, or English, please.” She’d been able to recognize notes by listening to them since she was three and a half—some implant behind her left ear—but it was getting tiring, and her SolreSol was rusty anyway.

“Seven hundred and eight years, two hundred days, twelve hours, sixteen minutes and eleven seconds. I was created in 3342 by Cyber-Core Media on the seventeenth of April. Would you like to see my system information?”

“No, that’s okay,” Acidalia said. “And you’ve just been living here, for seven centuries, alone?”

“Approximately four hundred years ago was when the last human left. Approximately two hundred years ago, the last android broke. Now it is only me.”

“And you’ve stayed here, working, this whole time?”

“I do my job proudly. We are Eleutheria’s future!”

“We?”

“Correction: I am Eleutheria’s future!”

Lyra looked sympathetically at the silvery android. “I don’t think the future has turned out the way he thought it would.”

“I will make Eleutheria’s future better!” One of his mechanical eyes drooped out of his head. He pushed it back in with a click and began excitedly sweeping again.

“We can’t just leave him here,” Lyra said pleadingly. “Look at him. He’s all alone.”

Acidalia thought for a second about the logistics of bringing a fully sentient android with them. “We can’t. Too risky.” There’s a reason this type of technology was outlawed centuries ago, she reminded herself. This robot is much too volatile. He looked sweet and simple and innocent, standing here with a broom and sweeping like it was his life’s purpose, but that could easily be a guise intended to endear him to a potential victim. Robots were not above foul play.

Before Acidalia could explain further, Alpha interrupted her, pure joy in his eyes—cameras? “Where do you want to bring me?” he asked excitedly. “I have not left this place in several hundred years!”

“He’ll get destroyed if we leave him here,” Lyra pleaded. “You know he will. Your mother’s men won’t be nice to him.”

“I don’t want to be shut down.” Alpha-24’s expression changed, jolting from a pleasant blankness to something not-quite-angry and very uncanny. It was like a skilled artist had tried to replicate human emotions and had come as close as possible without being exact. Something about it didn’t seem right, and Acidalia was reminded of all the stories about robots with the strength of a hundred soldiers killing humans who displeased them. Normally, she’d never take a random stranger with her to such an important place, but she and Lyra were tiny compared to this metal man, and she couldn’t afford to risk her life.

“All right,” Acidalia said quickly. “We’ll take you as far as we can go, how’s that? If you could begin by showing us to the central Terminal-“

“Yes, I can do that!” Alpha’s features relaxed into the same dull, vague expression he’d worn before his outburst. “Clearance, please?”

“Of course,” Acidalia said, leaning down so he could scan her iris. Feeling slightly unnerved, she allowed the android to lead her along a path she already knew well, more for the sake of keeping him placated than anything else. Lyra shuffled along behind her, gazing absentmindedly at her surroundings. Lights buzzed in the background and papers blew in the barely-working air conditioning, but other than that, it was completely silent—almost too silent. Acidalia didn’t know what she was expecting, but she felt like something was gnawing at her insides, and her anxiety was growing by the minute.

All you have to do is input your code, send the weapon, and get out, she thought. That’s only three things. It sounded simple in theory, but so did a revolution, and that was anything but simple in practice.

But there was nothing left to do about it now other than make sure she was armed, so she kept walking, feeling more like a prisoner on death row with every step.