Small stature never bothered Gaz, not really. Height and volume made little difference to her. The only thing which mattered was mass. She chuckled at her own joke. Was matter mass or mass matter? Strands of segmented wiring, metallic and shining against the alabaster white walls of their operating theater, shook in response to Gaz’s chuckle. If she’d absorbed those she might have regained some of her substance. And irritated her host for no reason.

  “Good humor settled on your tiny shoulders.” Nathaniel looked down at Gaz where she held the optical wiring in place.

  “I was thinking about how long its taken me to replace my lost mass.”

  “You were affected by some nasty magic. I remain surprised that you lived at all. Thank Eitolon Inc.”

  Feeding the line from the spool, Gaz didn’t bother to nod. Technomancers like Nathaniel could read Gaz’s digital thoughts without the need to touch her. Besides, she was surprised she’d lived too. “Tell me your theory again.”

  She could have replayed his words. But Alaya had loved to chat meaninglessly with Gaz while they worked. Nathaniel was a poor substitute for the woman Gaz loved… for the woman Gaz had betrayed. But he was a more than adequate storyteller and Gaz could use a story.

  “I think the priest enchanted the branch which struck you.” Nathaniel paused to concentrate while he tweaked settings on the neural interface they repaired. “I could do something similar, as could almost any Technomancer. But why bother… at least in your case.”

  “Right, you could just disperse me if you wanted.”

  “They are not capable of simply dispersing you.” He paused to acknowledge her comment. “So I’d guess the Root clerics enchanted that section of their tree ship while simultaneously cursing your ability to repair yourself.”

  It was the same diagnosis he’d offered the first time Gaz asked. She idly wondered if he thought she doubted him, if Nathaniel didn’t just read her mind in the first place. So the Root Clerics had tried to kill Gaz, Isham, Evan, and Kirk. From what Gaz observed personally, they’d killed Evan and Kirk, almost certainly. As for Isham… as far as Gaz knew, he lacked any advantages which might have protected him from the attack of those clerics.

  And then there was Alaya. “Tell me she’s alive again.”

  Pink motes of light rose around him and his aura became visible to Gaz as he spoke. “I cannot say for certain where she is. But I can say without a doubt that the cortical cybernetics I implanted are still working, and connected to neural tissue. Living neural tissue.”

  Cyborg bodies were not immune to pain. Pain served a function for the human brain: a way to avoid danger. But almost all borgs could mediate their pain to one degree or another. The mental anguish which reached out and grabbed Gaz could not be shunted away by a few digital switches. Alaya was alone and probably afraid. For all Gaz knew, the Roots Clerics had jarred her and left Alaya senseless in a constant loop of torture.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  A lot of people were going die if that were the case. Several of them with Gaz’s hands wrapped around their necks.

  “Come back to us, Gaz?” Nathaniel’s voice cut through away the anger and the pain for a moment. “Hard to read you through that storm of emotions.”

  She let out a breathy laugh. “Good, maybe that will give me some privacy.” Nathaniel started to apologize, but Gaz stopped him. “I am mostly kidding. I don’t really mind the mental intrusion.” Nathaniel was kind about it, but Gaz suspected he did it automatically.

  “Evan could only read my thoughts when he was touching my chassis.”

  Nathaniel nodded and reached back into the system they were repairing. “Because Evan is a specialized kind of Technomancer. He can do things with his own chassis and to people with chasses that I would need some time to effect. But in exchange many powers which would be active constantly and in close proximity might not work as well for him. It’s part of why he dislikes working on repairs or upgrades directly. Where I can sense and — to a limited extent — influence a piece of technology close by, Evan cannot. He must touch everything he’s working on, which would become tedious quickly in my line of work.”

  The influx of information about Technomancers, more than Nathaniel had ever shared, kept Gaz from interrupting or asking for more information. But he ran himself down and focused on his work. If he’d wanted to keep going, Gaz suspected he would have. So she shut up and turned her full attention on their project.

  Like he’d said, Nathaniel could have snapped his fingers and repaired the entire neural interface in front of them. He probably would have had to touch them to do more than sense the components. But still, he could have completed this job and dozens similar to it from their past in seconds. Instead he spent countless hours with Gaz teaching her to repair them manually. Literally hardwired to learn, Gaz had no complaints. Until her mass was recovered, she had no hope of saving Alaya. Even then, she had to find a counter to the Root Cleric’s magic. They could bless the very wood of their ship to destroy her and curse her form to make regeneration impossible. What could Gaz do against such power?

  The obvious answer was to find another magic user willing to oppose the Root Clerics. And that would have been a brilliant solution to Gaz’s problem. But first: magic users were incredibly rare. Rarer than borgs by an order of magnitude. And second: fully half of the magic users in the solar system were theurgists. And they would not be on board to attack the Root clergy, no matter how much they deserved it. Gaz had checked in with Nathaniel on this very question and he’d shut her down with a definitive “absolutely not.” He even refused to help find any other magic users who would help.

  Gaz and Nathaniel finished their work cycle — thirty-six hours on, seventy-two off — so Gaz headed back to her chambers alone and sent her consciousness into the sensor systems of the Pillar of Man. Parts of the computer systems were black, off limits to Gaz. But she was encouraged to look out into the void and search all she wanted. Her chambers were bare white stone with no furnishings or even a bed. What use did Gaz have for furniture or a bed without Alaya?

  Her coprocessors hooked into the sensor recordings and reviewed the historical data while her active systems reviewed the live material. Nothing interesting happened while Gaz watched, but her coproc sent her a series of sensor readouts which made Gaz switch jobs with her own cyberware.

  A long sleek ship flew up to the Root cluster as the Pillar of Man looked on. It had the old-school traditional look of a cigar. Tapered at the nose and cylindrical at the body, the black metal ship could have been an overly large missile. Technically, all void ships were missiles, but that was beside the point. This particular Void ship was familiar to Gaz.

  It belonged to Malorn, pirate admiral of the Mal-wares. “Fuck.” No one was there to tease Gaz over cursing.