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sarcastic. Only that little coma . But I hold back. “Nothing other than those that you already know about.”
    The wheels seem to be turning in his head as he looks me up and down.
    “It’s a possibility,” he muses, almost as if to himself. “The neural pathways of the
     Garde have been dormant far too long to attempt the transfer again with a new host.
     But with the original subject, from the original experiment—”
    I can’t help interjecting. “What are you talking about? What Garde? You can’t mean her .”
    Dr. Zakos just grins and struts over to the laboratory’s wall, which is covered with
     ten or so off-white square tiles. He places his hand over a small steel control panel
     next to the wall and performs an elegant sequence of hand gestures across the panel’s
     surface. With a sudden and jarring hydraulic whoosh, one of the tiles slides out of
     the wall, opening like a drawer, spewing cryogenic vapors.
    It’s like a mortuary slab.
    He stares down proudly at what’s lying on it.
    “Have a look,” he says.
    I step deeper into the lab, peering over the edge of the tile.
    “Perfectly preserved.”
    I can’t believe my eyes. She doesn’t even look dead: she looks like she’s sleeping.
    My best friend in the world.
    One.

CHAPTER 8
    One keeps me up half the night, bombarding me with questions I can’t answer: about
     Doctor Zakos’s experiments, about what he meant when he said he could successfully
     download the entirety of One’s memories, about what it meant that her body had been
     so thoroughly well preserved.
    “Well, you’re still dead,” I say.
    “Uh? A little tact, please,” she says, laughing.
    I’m in bed. She’s sitting on the floor in the corner of my bedroom.
    “Sorry,” I say. I’m a bit rattled. Seeing her in the flesh like that, a corpse on
     a cold steel slab, has upset me more than I’d like her to know. She’s been my constant
     companion for years now, but the sight of her body brought home to me how tenuous
     her current existence is.
    “Did you notice?” asks One, jumping right back into her excited speculation. “There
     were at least ten tiles on that wall. Remember what that Arsis kid said in those chats?
     About humans being dredged for intel? You think they’re being kept preserved on those
     slabs too?”
    I marvel at One’s mind. She wasn’t even present until I finished reading Arsis’s IM
     transcripts, and she was definitely gone when I was in Zakos’s lab.
    She clocks my amazed look. “What?” she says. “You already know your mind’s an open
     book to me. Just because I’m gone when stuff happens doesn’t mean I can’t see it once
     I come back.”
    And without skipping a beat, she returns to her obsession. “Anyhow, if I’ve been so
     well preserved, that means we can probably jack into each other again somehow and
     kick-start my memories inside you. I mean, I know I’m pretty, but I don’t think Dr.
     Zakos has been preserving me for my looks . He must’ve been doing it to keep the stuff inside my brain, like, fresh.” She nods,
     pleased with her reasoning. “We need to get back into that lab.”
    I look away from her. “One, what I need is to get some sleep.” It’s the middle of
     the night, and I have to be at the media facility in four hours.
    One is silent.
    “If I screw up at work, I’m as good as dead. And if I’m dead, you’re dead, and this
     whole lab plan will be moot anyway. Okay?”
    I turn back to One. But she’s gone.
    It occurs to me that I’ll never know when one of her disappearances is her last. One
     day she’ll blink out, just like this, and I’ll wait for her to reappear … but she
     won’t.
    For all I know I just saw her for the last time.
    I force my face deep into my pillow and try to sleep.
    I arrive at my console the next morning groggy and bleary-eyed, dreading the next
     twelve hours. I take my seat next to Serkova and dive into the data stream.
    Despite my fuzzy head, I pull a