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bent, hooked arms around Kichlan’s chest and swung him around with strength born from the massive pion manipulations going on inside his body.
    An instant later the Strikers fell, crashing to earth right where Kichlan had been. He stared at them, their bodies broken and burned. Charred leather, terrible smoking gashes blasted through masks.
    What could possibly—
    Natasha emerged from the battling Mob. Natasha as he had never seen her. Dressed in a strange arrangement of pieces of Mob armour, with a Striker ’s hood, over her debris collector’s dark, boned uniform. She smiled when she saw him. Blood plastered her hair to one side of her face, and the other was darkened with soot. The silver handles of countless small knives protruded from her armour, and she held a small clay-looking disk in her hand.
    She paused beside him, took in his exhaustion and silver-healed injury with one sweeping glance.
    “Other’s fiery hells, Kichlan,” she said. “What happened to you?”

6.
     
    I had been dreaming about Kichlan. And in my dreams, he was alive.
    My eyes opened slowly. Lad stood on the other side of the tube. He watched me.
    I wanted to tell him I had dreamed of his brother. He would like that. Did he dream about Kichlan too?
    But the darkness still held me. So I could only meet Lad’s eyes, just for that moment, before mine closed again.
    But in the darkness, I dreamed of Kichlan. In my dreams, he was alive.
    And that was better than nothing.

7.
     
    “ Please just sit in the wheelchair, Tanyana,” Aladio said, red in the face, exasperated but obviously trying to hide it. He gestured again to the hideous chair with its lime green cushions and large metal wheels, as though that would possibly help his argument. “It’s for your own good.”
    I narrowed my eyes at him. He was not the Lad I knew. Not the man who had sacrificed himself to save me from Aleksey ’s vicious twin blades, and not the ghost who had reprogrammed my suit and liberated me from the control of the puppet men. It hurt every time I saw him, looking so much the same. So I had to keep reminding myself, in the face of my memories and my guilt—this was not Lad. This was Aladio .
    “ I can walk,” I said, throat grinding, sore and always thirsty. It hurt to speak, but there was no way I would keep silent. “I will walk.”
    He shoved the chair. “You’re being obstinate just for the sake of it now!”
    I gritted my teeth. “And you can stop treating me like a child whenever you like.”
    Apparently I ’d been out of the tube for two days. It was impossible to tell, because I’d been kept in this room since then and it had no windows. I wasn’t certain windows would help, either. Did a world of nothingness even have a sun?
    Lad—no, Aladio —was the only person I’d seen. He didn’t come to keep me company, he didn’t come to talk, and sometimes he couldn’t even look me in the eye. Instead, he came to test the integrity of my silex bonds. He couldn’t even bring himself to touch me, and when he had no choice—when the silex splintered and he had to patch it with tubes full of viscous liquid—he wore thick, white gloves.
    I glanced down at the strange band of crystal around my wrist, and the light inside it brightened. This silex was delicate stuff. It looked like ice-shavings. Thick around my wrists, ankles, waist and neck—in fact, anywhere the suit had been drilled into my bones. A fine layer coated most of my body, like a dusting of sugar or the crust of a shallow pond. It itched against my skin and made disturbing creaking noises when I moved.
    Aladio took a deep breath, and when he faced me he was calm again, his expression false and all too patient. “And that’s very good, Tanyana. Very good. You are healing very well.”
    I hated that look on his face and that too-sweet tone of voice. It was all so wrong.
    “But you know you need to be careful. If you’re too rough on your silex bonds the Flare inside you will eat