I wondered if I was dead.

This couldn't be real. I was walking with three corpless through the twining alleys outside Unilox, and I was alive. Although perhaps walking was the wrong word. Deeka ducked ahead, nose twitching, her knife held low and careful. Then she'd scan the darkness and beckon us along after a short, tense moment. The giant Fayin brought up the rear. Despite the fact he probably weighed twice my size, he slipped through the shadows noiselessly. It added to the feeling of unreality, of impossibility. My brain felt disjointed. Surely they were going to sell me out at any moment. Surely they were taking me back to butcher me.

I tried to keep track of where we were going, but it was useless since I hadn't really known where I'd been in the first place. I hadn't realized how sprawling the corpless' territory was. How Unilox's shadow had spread so far and so thickly.

We eventually came to a building that looked like the rest: sad and sagging, bricks and stone tumbled around it like fallen tears. Cam twisted aside the broken door. It fell into two pieces; he stacked them on the side and walked through. I hesitated for a moment. It looked dark inside, like a trap, like everything I'd ever been warned against.

Oddly enough, that thought was enough to make me set my shoulders and walk through. Nobody had ever warned me against my own city, or against my Corporation's suits showing up in the night. And I was starting to understand the corpless. More than I'd ever wanted to. Enough that when I felt their eyes on me, I recognized the glint of approval. I must have passed some test I hadn't even known I'd been taking. I tried to hold on to that when Fayin pulled the two broken pieces of the door carefully back behind us. I wasn't trapped. I wasn't.

I could barely see inside, but the others seemed to move as if there was a hidden light pulling them all toward the center. It was instinctive enough for them that nobody warned me about the stairs. I almost broke my neck on the first one, catching myself just in time on a rugged outcrop of torn plasterboard. I took each step afterward with gritted teeth, hating the encroaching walls and the feeling of walking down to my grave. The only thing that kept me going was the faint glow at the end. There was light down there.

Halfway down, Cam spread his arms. "Everyone!" he announced. "Deeka found a mech-head!"

There was a chorus of surprised shouts, catcalls, cries. I blinked. Somebody must have tapped into an electric system. Down here, the light was low and warm, scattered around in broken bulbs. As my eyes adjusted I saw people heaped on low nests of blankets or salvaged furniture, all on a surprisingly clean floor. Fayin joined one of the men with a rumbling laugh and they wrapped together like two puzzle halves. Behind them, a young woman nursed a child, humming. Two older men sat in another corner playing some sort of game with pieces of paper. One of them had lost half his arm; it ended in a stump just below his elbow. He was older than my father, but he moved without my father's shaking hands. I had to swallow down the sudden ache in my chest.

A little boy ran past me. "You mean it, Cam? She's gonna fix the Leviathan? You're not just tricking?"

Cam laughed, easy. "Well, she's going to give it a damn good shot, aren't you, Madeline?"

Eyes fell on me and widened. It was only then that I remembered my bare skull and my reddish, blood-spattered skin. The thought suddenly occurred to me that if anyone had peered into this room and picked out a cannibal, it would have been me.

I grinned weakly. "Sure," I said. "Where's your . . . Levithan?"

"Leviathan," the little boy corrected me, bouncing now. "And it's over there. Are you blind?"

My jaw dropped.

I had no excuse for not seeing it before; my human eyes had already adjusted. But I had never expected to see a fourth-generation HARLIN Receiving and Broadcasting system in a corpless den, let alone one tricked out with the latest screen and MERCE sound tech. "How did you . . . how did you even get this?"

The little boy opened his mouth. Cam gave him a look. The boy shut it again.

"Xi'en," Cam told me. He was trying to be terse, but somehow that just left more room for the grief to leak out. "She was a Plugger too. She died a couple of months ago. Got infected bad. Refused to go to the city or any of the charity stops in case someone scanned her."

The strangest shiver ran down my back, as if someone had just read my eulogy. "Why'd she leave Unilox?"

"Now that's a story." Cam gave me a keen look. Whatever he saw in me, I hoped it was enough. "Perhaps one we can leave until after dinner."

It was as if he'd said the magic words. Half the corpless lounging around immediately stood and started shoving and laughing their way toward the back of the basement. Two peeled off from the group and went upstairs instead. They came down with what looked like two fat, charred, fleshy nightmares hanging from a stick. My jaw dropped. Someone laughed at me. I turned and saw matted hair framing a mouth that had more holes than a graveyard. "Rats aren't good enough for you, Plugger?"

I blinked. "Those are rats?"

"None of that for you," Cam snickered. "Your stomach couldn't take it." He grinned suddenly. There was a distant look in his eyes, a bright spark. "First time Xi'en was hungry enough to try, she shat her guts for days."

Relief drowned out my hunger. "Right," I said stupidly. "Good."

I realized I was talking to thin air. Cam had disappeared off to manage the people bringing supplies out from the back. Feeling like an idiot—and far too aware of all the corpless eyes still watching me—I looked around for something to do with my hands. I ended up with Deeka and two other kids, stripping the packaging away from a stack of food. I couldn't help but notice the expiration date stamped across the tops. Three months ago. No wonder PERCO "donated" them.

The rats were cut up. The food and water was sorted into a pile. Then Fayin and Cam started handing it all out. To my surprise, the giant pressed a small package into my hands. I didn't protest. I was hungry again. And just grateful it wasn't the rat.

The corpless had arranged themselves into a rough, scattered ring around the dead Leviathan. I sat down awkwardly at one end and watched Deeka dive happily into her double share while Cam gazed around at his Chameleons, empty hands folded casually away, a distant but satisfied look on his face.

The entire affair took what felt like ages. I'd eaten my share in three bites. If Jake's lunch had tasted like sand, then this tasted like off sand, but I choked it down anyway. I was still hungry, but I wasn't stupid enough to ask for more. I watched the corpless instead. Two or three of them had never stopped staring at me, as if I were a predator waiting to strike, but the rest acted as if I didn't exist. They talked, they laughed, they gesticulated, they complained about the Leviathan. Slowly, slowly—and to my absolute shock—I felt myself relaxing. It wasn't that different from the school canteen where Eleika, Carly, and I had always found ourselves a corner and then joked and trash-talked our lunch away. The corpless were . . . human.

The realization shouldn't have hit me so hard, but it did.

Finally, everyone finished and started drifting back to their discrete groups. A few headed upstairs to keep watch. The rest fell into chaotic routine—some returning to their games, some sleeping, still others focused on cleaning the detritus of dinner away. I looked around to find Cam. It took me a few moments—he was lounging now in a corner behind the Leviathan's shadow, picking at his teeth with a ragged nail. But his eyes were bright and fastened on me. I had the feeling he'd known exactly where I was this entire time.

I sat down carefully across from him. "You said you had a story," I reminded him.

"All right," he said. "Here's the short version. Xi'en worked with HARLIN in their transmissions team. Loved it. But then one day, she noticed something was off."

I took a breath. This wasn't my story. It wasn't.

"Now apparently, the way HARLIN has their systems, you can't ever actually delete something for real. She said there was always some trace . . . some ghost that you could find again. And she couldn't help herself. She went looking."

The words were out even before I could stop them. "What did she find?"

He hesitated for a moment, something heavy on his face. "Distress calls. Storms disintegrating levees. Epidemics." He shook once, violently, like he was trying to throw off a shadow. "She told me once about this one transmission. There was this man shouting for help. Gunshots outside. Someone breathing real close to the receiver. Then one last shot. But the transmission just kept going. Forever."

My voice was hushed, horrified, cracked. "So . . . what are you saying?" I tried to swallow down my belief. "That there's nobody out there? That we're alone?"

Alone. The concept was somehow even more terrifying than the idea that the other cities were out there, just waiting to strike. Cam shrugged. "I don't know. But there sure seem to be a lot of cities that killed themselves off. Anyway, once she realized they were onto her, she up and ran. But she had enough time to take things with her."

I looked at the machine, so horribly out of place in this basement, and shook my head. "When was this?"

"About fourteen years ago."

It had to be because I was so on edge, so psyched out by the similarities and the jarring differences, that my tired brain made the connection immediately. "You mean . . . wasn't that when they shut the city down?"

He gave me a blank look. "How the hell would I know?"

I winced. "Sorry." But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced. It had been such a long time ago. I'd only been four. But some things I would never forget. The emergency sirens that had wailed in our implants. The report that another city had attacked us. I could believe now, with all I'd learned, that there was a possibility it had just been a cover for another story. A darker one. I remembered the room inside the Library and the way the walls had bent away from my eyes coyly, trying to make me sick. And I thought of illusions and tried to force myself to see the truth.

There was probably nothing. Nothing outside of Unilox, a pitiless city in the middle of a pitiless desert. Nothing inside and nothing outside, an empty bubble, a piece of legal fiction. There were only the people within in the end. Thousands of them. Clinging to life and an illusion.

I opened my eyes. The Leviathan stared back at me, solid and real, and suddenly I was inordinately grateful for the existence of something I could fix. "All right," I said. "I've heard enough. Let's give this a shot."