The sun glowed distant and cold in the sky. It leapt across the unimaginable distance, making the city shine so brightly around me I had to drop my eyes. A sea of feet shambled past, accompanied by the hum of transactions and the flash of Ads. I looked at the Promenade with tired eyes. I'd spent hours of my life here, just eating away time. Maybe even days. I remembered the first time I'd dragged Jake here, how we'd tried to come up with the most ridiculous outfits. It had been a good day. We'd bought PERCO's TripleChoc Ice Cream afterward and savored it together. A safe day.

Jake. I looked at the Promenade now and all I saw were the towers flanking it like mercs. The towers that had held sway over me for so long, over both my waking life and my dreams. MERCE. ANRON. In the distance, I saw the gleam of PERCO Center and HARLIN Solutions, and I knew that if I turned around, I'd see the rows and rows of DRAYTH's warehouses. I took three breaths in quick succession. ANRON was the tower I noticed now, yawning above me, casting a shadow as thick as dust.

Defiantly, I walked under it and into the nearest shop.

There was a single girl at the front watching something on her UConn. She didn't even glance up as I moved past her and let the shop swallow me whole into a different world. A world of pastels and soft music, of artfully arranged beauty. I took my time, brushing my hands over the soft fabrics and inhaling the scent of clean clothes. They smelled sharp, almost warm. I grabbed a handful and moved to the back.

I'd never noticed it before, but the dressing rooms now seemed too confined. Too flimsy. It reminded me of stepping into Jake's office and the moment I'd realized what the heavy footsteps outside had meant. Well, I wasn't running for too much longer. I gritted my teeth and yanked the curtain across to hide me. Suddenly it could have been last week, when I'd been shopping for my Auctioning clothes with Carly and Eleika. I remembered pouting at the mirror then and killing myself laughing, finding it hilarious. Now, I was afraid that if I started laughing, I wouldn't stop. I leaned against the cold mirror, hard, and then started stripping. It felt like crawling out of a cocoon. I hadn't realized that on one side, the professor's blood had stuck my sleeve to my skin. Her blood crumbled to dust as I pulled it off. I watched the flakes float through the air. After a while, I squeezed my eyes shut.

When I was naked, I forced myself to look at the ugly thing in the mirror: at my swollen limbs and my reddened skin from the chemical burn. It was actually less awful than I'd imagined. I put my nose up to the glass just to check. Yes, the redness had mostly faded, and it'd even taken some of my imperfections away with it. The shiny skin on my forehead that had once been puckered with acne scars was now soft and clear, burned to purity.

I looked away, feeling not quite human. I wondered how long I'd stay alive with whatever ANRON decided to do to me. Whether they'd cut me open again and again, or whether they'd just kill me outright and dissect my remains. Which would give them the most data? What would be the most profitable to them? I didn't know. My body started trembling and it did not stop. As if somewhere, it had an animal instinct for the oncoming death, or that sixth sense that made rats abandon a sinking city. In that moment, I looked into the mirror and recognized my mother's eyes staring back. And something broke in me. It unfurled like the light from the illusion room spreading its secrets across the walls.

I saw it all then, finally. The fear beneath my mother's devotion to ANRON. The way my father's gaze slid away from his shaking hands when she spoke. The air suddenly seemed too thick. Too bitter. The weight of it crushed my lungs. I couldn't believe it. After all this time—after eighteen years—I finally understood my parents. When I'd never see them again. When I'd missed my chance to press my father's shaking hands still in mine and hold my mother as she coughed her awful, rasping cough and tell her it was okay, I understood now. What ANRON had done to them. What ANRON had really done to them. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once.

I did neither. The knowledge settled in me like sand, and I felt the weight of it sink into my spine. I straightened. I took a shaky breath. I dressed in hard colors, my colors. Orange and black, purple and red. If I'd had time, I would have gone to get a massage and enjoyed warm hands moving over my skin one last time. But I didn't have time, so I just wiped my face with my hands and looked back at myself gravely. Whatever happened, I wanted to be myself at the end.

I stepped out of the cubicle, leaving my lovingly chosen Auctioning clothes in withered tatters on the floor. They lay like an empty body, the husks of another life. I pulled the curtain closed on them and strolled insouciantly up to the counter, feeling dangerous and stupid and brave. On the way, I stopped for a moment. Just a moment. Long enough to examine the UConn embedded in my arm, take a deep breath, and then step past the point of no return.

I switched it on.

It surged to life instantly, hungrily, as if it had been denied long enough. I gasped as everything connected. My ears rushed back online with a hollow pop. Then my eyes; I blinked, and the world lurched to the right and came back brighter, as if somebody had whipped away a fun-house mirror. Suddenly I could see the girl behind the counter, still far away, raising her eyebrows at my antics.

Connected. I could feel it all the way down to my bones. I opened up my feed and everything was there: panicked messages from my friends, from Jake. My heart hurt. Words leapt out at me, as disjointed as tears. I wished, violently, that I had more time to go through them, to catalog them, to hold them close to my heart.

"Hey," the salesgirl called out, disgruntled. "You going to pay or what?"

I tried to swallow down my tears. "Just give me a moment," I said.

She huffed impatiently. I tried to master the squirming mass of rats in my stomach. I took a step toward the counter, then another, and then another, counting down the moments toward my last transaction.

The girl held out the scanner. There was a beep as the transaction went through. And then I saw her eyes move up to my face again, and the slow widening as she struggled to place me. I smiled at her—not a nice smile—and then kept up my stroll all the way to the front doors.

I made it about ten steps before the alarms started.

I wasn't prepared for how ear-splittingly loud they were. I winced and dialed down my implants. Just in time. Because as I stepped out into the Promenade, the transmitter in my pocket sighed and the lights in the city changed.

There's something in us, hardcoded, that makes humans always look for the light. Even though I knew what was happening, I caught myself glancing at the screens above the city buildings and perched on billboards, constantly reflecting Ads and devouring our displays. I saw them flicker as they froze in the middle of two laughing women about to take a bite of a new PERCO Nutritub. And then the colors were gone. In their place was me against a backdrop of corpless streets, the Wall rising high behind me. Me opening my mouth to speak:

"Hello, Unilox. My name is Madeline and I am a criminal. But I need to tell you why."

People on the street stopped. They gasped. They turned like flowers to look at the screen, drawn to the light.

"I am a criminal because ANRON wrote a contract that said this wasn't ever my body, it was theirs. And now they're trying to take it back. I'm a criminal because I want to live."

Hearing myself speak outside the shell of my skull was alien, frightening. So I listened to the people around me instead, the stunned silences and dying footsteps as Unilox ground to a halt, as everyone's feed rang with the sound of my voice. I sent a silent thanks to Cam and the Leviathan, and had the sudden inane thought that if my mother was still alive, perhaps she might be proud. She'd always wanted me to change Unilox.

"Unilox has always promised to protect us from the outside, from the corpless, from ourselves. But who protects us from Unilox? ANRON's men gunned down an innocent woman yesterday to find me. Her name was Professor Cellowen, and she could have been any one of you. Any one of us."

I heard sirens start from far too close. My heart pounded beneath my ribs. Maybe we'd misjudged. We had to get to the end. I hadn't expected them to react so fast. They must have been deployed across the city, just waiting for me to slip up.

"And now they have three more. My parents, who signed that contract. An innocent employee of Gaudron & Mason. And that's still not enough. They've offered three hundred thousand credits. They want you to sell me out to them for three centuries."

Too late. There was nowhere to hide in the Promenade, because I'd never intended to hide. Not that I could have, with the transmitter and its limited distance and my UConn blazing its pure signal, lighting me up in the sky like a beacon. Four black hovercars snarled through the streets, screeching up to me. On the screen, I launched into my final salvo.

"But I am not just a number on a sheet, and neither are you. We are more than our licenses. And that's why I'm offering a better deal. A limited-time offer. One for the price of three, Unilox. One for the price of three."

The hovercars stopped. I saw shadows moving behind that tinted glass, the doors swinging open. Raw panic seized me. No. Not yet. I had to get the call. I had to get the call. I looked for help, for a distraction, for anything. But there was nothing around me but frozen people and the open sky and the world we had built together.

On the screen, my voice came too slow, too liquid. "John Whittaker Charles Anron. You have one minute to call me before I disappear."

A number ran over my face. The screen flickered once, twice, and then I vanished. If only I could do the same in real life. My heart, beating so fast and hot in my chest, almost turned to ice when I saw exactly who stepped out of the first hovercar. Mr. Sharp. I recognized every line of him. We'd both killed people now. I felt the blood between us burn. I put my hands up. "I'm not running," I shouted.

He stalked toward me. How long had it been? Ten seconds? Twenty? I'd lost count. I'd been so certain someone would call. So certain. My back-up plan seemed a distant dream away, one that I'd never thought I'd need. "Stop!"

He didn't stop. He moved toward me like death incarnate and I resisted the urge to take a step back, to run. I'd never seen him properly in the daylight. Only ever heard his voice, or seen him briefly through the hovercar window when I was out of my mind with terror. He looked all angles and shadows, all years and hardness.

Thirty seconds.

I put my hands higher in the air, trembling. "I'm not running!" I repeated. And when that still didn't stop him, I did take a step back. And another. "Wait," I said desperately. "Please, wait."

His hand closed over my arm, and that was when my UConn rang.

A/N: Sorry I'm late! I actually had some minor surgery on my jaw earlier this week, and I'm still feeling sick and tired and a little dizzy. But we're almost there. Thanks again to everyone who's come along on this journey!