It had been two and a half years since the disaster in the bunker.

  For all that time, Brun had remained suspended in a strange trance, floating on a bed of cosmic nebulae that extended to every corner of the operating room. A dense, spectral cloud—a cryogenic chamber’s ghostly filling. A room with its doors left open, showcasing its lone occupant to anyone passing by, like some strange science fair experiment. A frozen snapshot of a destroyed operating room and the one who had destroyed it.

  The Totem, now containing the last dose of the Primary Plasma, was also trapped there, at the far end of the room, immersed in that stellar cloud.

  How many times had Broga returned to the bunker since then to see if anything had changed? He had lost count.

  How many attempts had he made to enter the operating room? Thirty, fifty? None had succeeded; all ended with his circuits fried or the total or partial destruction of whichever limb made contact with the nebula first.

  Forced to stay in the hallway and careful not to step into the room, Broga had tried speaking to Brun to wake him up. Of course, given his brother’s state, he might as well have been talking to the wall.

  How many times had he stood there, replaying the scene in his mind, trying to pinpoint where he’d gone wrong, what calculation he’d misjudged? He had lost count of that, too.

  Those answers always eluded him, especially when guilt was as hard to ignore as his wounded pride.

  “Clemente…”

  But that day, after two and a half years, the situation had changed.

  The double doors to the operating room, which had remained open because of that strange energy, were now shut. Broga pushed one of the panels—its creak was bone-chilling—and from the doorway, he looked inside the room just as he had so many times before.

  Everything looked so clean now. Where that dense cloud full of tiny glowing specks had been, there was now only darkness. Where his twin had once hovered in the air, there was now nothing but emptiness. Where the gruesome stains of blood and disintegrated remains—what was left of his medical team, what was left of Clemente—had been, there was now nothing but cleanliness.

  He scanned what lay ahead with the help of his helmet’s sensors. Nothing indicated danger. He fired an energy beam into the room. Unlike before, when the nebula would have swallowed it, the beam shot clean through, striking the far wall and scattering fragments of laminated plating and rubble across the floor.

  Indeed, everything had vanished from the operating room: the physical objects, the Totem, the last dose of Primary Plasma, and even his brother.

  The Military was now the keeper of the secrets that had once slept in the bunker. But what about his brother? If the soldiers had ransacked the place, it was because Brun had left before they arrived; otherwise, they never would have been able to get into that room.

  So, where had Brun gone?

  ‘The Seeker. He did this,’ his brother had said in that bizarre dream. ‘My foot got tangled in his tail, and now he’s dragging me along with him.’

  “The Seeker…” Broga whispered. Then he said, “Computer, spectrometer details.”

  “A Radioactive Displacement has been detected, followed by a Radioactive Void,” the helmet’s computer confirmed.

  Sebastián couldn’t have known about this; if he had, he would have reached out by now. Broga had to inform him. He activated the wrist communicator and typed:

  Sleepwalker lost. Castle raided.

  But as he feared, the message didn’t send. The electromagnetic imbalance caused by the discharge Brun had unleashed back then was still interfering with radio signals. His Four-Frequency transmitters might be keeping his cybernetic implants functional, but they couldn’t reestablish communications.

  Fine. It was time to leave and try again. Sebastián needed to hear about this as soon as possible. And Brun… he needed to find Brun.

  As he moved away from the operating room, his sensors picked up something hidden beneath one of the corridor doors—something invisible to the human eye and overlooked by the Military in their eagerness to pocket even the tiniest piece of junk.

  He crouched and used a magnetic pulse to pull it into his hand.

  It was a small silver piece. The missing fragment that completed the picture of the break-in at his bunker: the cheek of a metallic face—the face of a Cyclops. A real Cyclops android. And he didn’t need scanners to know who it had belonged to. On the chrome surface of the fragment was a mark drawn with a black marker: the android’s sketched-on mustache.

  “Alfred…” he murmured, and once again, the memories hit him.

  

  “See? Much better now,” Clemente said one bright morning during breakfast. He turned to Broga with a grin from ear to ear, a black marker in his hand.

  One of the female doctors on the team smiled and nearly choked on her toast.

  Sitting on an operating table, a cup of coffee in hand, Broga looked up.

  “What did you do to my Cyclops?” he asked, taking a sip.

  “I gave the poor guy some personality,” Clemente replied, pointing at the android, which had stayed perfectly still while he drew the cartoonish mustache on its face. “I was thinking of asking André to reprogram his language patterns—give him an accent, maybe. What do you say, Alfred?” He patted the Cyclops’s cold metal face and wiggled his fingers across the painted mustache, as if he had been twirling a real one. “I always wanted a butler named Alfred, y’know?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Clemente’s smile, as bright as his golden hair and pale skin, remained seared in Broga’s memory.

  

  In stark contrast to that bright morning, Broga now tucked the broken piece of Alfred’s cheek into one of the many pockets of his black jumpsuit.

  What little remained of his dutiful android was a declaration that his bunker—and everything that had happened there—was now part of the past. At least he would keep that small fragment as a memento.

  “You’ve disappointed me.”

  A woman’s voice cut through the whistling wind.

  “Leaving an android alone as the caretaker here was incredibly irresponsible of you,” the voice accused.

  Broga tensed and looked up. Something moved ahead, where the shadows erased the corridor’s final stretch.

  He wasn’t alone in the bunker.

  Even with his helmet’s advanced sensors, it was hard for Broga to identify who—or what—was in the corridor. Some strange interference was blocking him.

  He switched through the light spectrums in his visor system, but even with the infrared filter, he had trouble. It was as if the person speaking emitted no heat at all, as though it were a holographic projection; yet according to his sonar, someone was there. The night vision filter adapted the best for the task. At first, she was hard to spot—until two amethyst glimmers pierced the darkness: her eyes.

  After that, her pale skin and bald head suddenly stood out. Her long crystal earrings shimmered among the shadows.

  She was an Eddanian, without a doubt, and those people meant only one thing: trouble.

  The air grew heavy. Had she altered the atmosphere somehow? Broga checked the sensors on his helmet’s internal display; the small purple indicator light hadn’t turned on, there were no significant Tau radiation levels around him. That feeling was his nerves playing tricks.

  “When they found little Broga’s body in the snow, half a mile from the lab in Columbia,” she said, “no one doubted that the original Binary-C had died of hypothermia. I was there myself when the doctors dissected your corpse to see what they could salvage. You were so frozen it took them hours to remove the blanket you were wrapped in. Hikaru Templeton chose a bad moment to develop a conscience.”

  The woman ran her fingers along the dusty wall, then wiped them clean with some distaste.

  “I’m disappointed in you, yes, but I must also congratulate you. For many years, you managed to fool a group of people who never would’ve believed they could be fooled—myself included.”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “You must be…”

  “Please, don’t say ‘confused,’” she interrupted. “I already know the truth. Our hound gave you away.”

  Broga said nothing—there was no point playing dumb now.

  The echo of that strange delirium crept back into his mind. There he was, trying to help his brother, who was being dragged by a whirlwind of dust and stars.

  ‘Brun! How the hell did you get in there?!’

  ‘The Seeker. He did this.’

  ‘Where is this Seeker now?’

  ‘He’s gone back to the world,’ Brun had said.

  The woman nodded as though she knew what was on his mind, as though confirming that it had been a real experience and not just some absurd dream.

  “Our hound spoke to us about you,” she continued, “about your brother and the dose you were hiding here. Unfortunately, the poor thing returned in bad shape from his… excursion. For now, he can’t guide us to where the Plasma is, and by the time he recovers, it may be too late.”

  Broga took a moment to process what was happening, then turned his attention to what she was wearing. A long black dress with a slit down the side, a lavender cape fastened with a diamond choker, sandals, bracelets with precious gems, and rings.

  “That’s the ceremonial garb of a Vicar of the Order,” he noted. “You’re one of the few pureblood Eddanians still out there. What are you doing out of your hole, woman? I thought your kind only showed their faces for important events.”

  “Atoning for a sin is an important event,” she said. “Making amends for the mistake born from my carelessness—believing the word of others as truth, failing to consider the possibility of a chain of unfortunate events that ended in grief for my people. In more… mundane terms? I trusted the experts who declared you dead, and nearly ruined everything. So now, I’m here to offer you a deal.”

  “I refuse.”

  “You haven’t heard it yet.”

  “I don’t need to,” Broga said, resisting.

  “You will… if you want the traitor who’s protected you all these years to keep breathing,” said the Vicar.

  Sebastián! And once again, Broga had to bite his tongue behind the mask to stop himself from saying the name out loud.

  Though she seemed to read it straight from his thoughts.

  “Yes, the very same,” she said. “Once we learned about this place, it wasn’t hard to figure out who your… benefactor was. I can even picture how you pulled off that little death-and-resurrection trick without anyone noticing.”

  Broga cleared his throat. “All right, woman, I’m listening. What’s your proposal?”

  “Your brother became uncontrollable after tasting the Plasma,” she said. “But I know you managed to handle him, at least for a while—and a while is all we need. Help us keep him in check if we run into him while recovering the last remaining dose. In this world, you’re the only one who stands a chance of doing it. In return, we promise to forget about you… and that other traitor.”

  Broga let out a derisive snort. “You must be terrified of Brun to stoop so low as to offer me a deal like this.”

  “True,” she admitted. “We can no longer wound the flesh of He Who Never Forgives, though he can still wound ours.”

  As though removing a veil, the woman ran her hand over her face, revealing scars on her pale right cheek—deep grooves that ran from her chin to where her eye should have been, now nothing but a white blotch and folds of skin. Passing her hand over it again, she restored the illusion that concealed her disfigurement.

  “And tell me, woman, who’s to say some Markabian hasn’t already taken the Plasma by now? Or Brun himself, after his awakening, for that matter?”

  The Vicar shook her head. “Our hound would have known,” she said.

  Broga paused, countless equations and possible outcomes spinning in his head. “And who’s to say this isn’t just a trick to use the Plasma on me later?”

  The woman stepped forward. “Your distrust is charming.”

  Broga stepped back. “My distrust is reasonable.”

  “Fine. I’ll make this very clear,” she said. “Now that we know there’s still one last dose, we’ll be able to complete our project. As long as your clone—the one we already had pegged as a candidate before your brother decided to ruin everything—is alive, you have nothing to worry about.”

  Broga didn’t respond. The offer was tempting, but he needed more; the Vicar knew that, so she sweetened the deal:

  “Did I mention that we’re willing to provide the resources you need to complete your own project? You know, the one you started here with your brother and failed spectacularly to achieve. Do we have a deal?”

  The red eye in Broga’s mask pulsed.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” She smiled, and her violet eyes gleamed as brightly as her long crystal earrings.