Keri's lungs burned as she sprinted with the others in the direction Eu had gone, pushing herself to keep up with the others. Even the Programmer didn’t seem to be struggling with the exertion as much as her, though that could have had something to do with the way Anisa kept physically dragging him forward when he tried to slow down.

Every one of the stickscreens had gone dark at the same time, seconds after they had learnt the Butcher was in control of the network.

It had been toying with her. The knowledge burned within, rage at the Butcher and at herself boiling up with no place to go. Overlaying that, though, was a web of fear for Eu. They had seen the Butcher, in those brief seconds before the network went down, heading along corridors that led almost inevitably towards Eu.

Andreas continually ran on well ahead of them, Cassandra usually only a short distance behind, but at every turn and fork they were forced to stop and wait for the Programmer to tell them which way to go. He was the only one who knew the layout of the place.

Room after indistinguishable room flew by, Keri only half-seeing the cables and screens and strange ports that blurred in the corners of her eye as she dodged and weaved between them and back out in to seemingly endless corridors. She could not have said how far they had run before the two ahead stopped so suddenly that she nearly ran into them.

They had come to a room much like the generator room, a wide open space with metal flooring and walls that curved smoothly all around to make a circle. The difference was that where in the other room the centre had been taken up by the cylindrical generator, here the centre was empty except for, long and narrow and jutting out of the floor to stand at chest height, a hardpoint. At the top of the hardpoint was an indent exactly like a data sphere port.

Eu’s body lay as if sleeping in front of the hardpoint. She was dead.

“God damn you,” said Cassandra, pushing the Programmer so hard he flew back against the wall.

It had been no more than half an hour since they had found Eu’s body, and tensions were only escalating.

“Leave him,” said Andreas. “It's not his fault."

Cassandra didn’t take her rage-filled eyes off the scientist.

“If he hadn’t been so damned slow…” she growled.

“What? What could we have done?” Andreas shouted, voice filled with fury.

Cassandra span around in both anger and surprise.

“We could have…”

“Could have what? Joined her? Because we haven’t done so well against the Butcher so far.”

Cassandra seemed at a loss for what to say for a moment, before the rage and grief came flowing back.

“Maybe you are too scared to try, but…”

“It’s not fear, it’s truth,” said Andreas, not giving her any time to speak. “That thing would have torn us apart.”

Keri was sat in the corner of the room, a room a short walk from where they had found Eu’s body. That lay in the centre of the room, atop a counter they had cleared of interfaces and electronic paraphernalia. Keri could barely take her eyes off of it.

She had never seen a dead body, not like this. Jayme had died in front of her, but she had hardly had time to process the fact before she ran. She had vague memories of the funeral of an aunt of some kind, back when she was very young, but the corpse had been prepared and made up in such a way that the deceased woman looked as if she were having a short rest.

Eu did not look that way.

There was something very alien about the body. Part of Keri could hardly believe that it was Eu, the person who she had only been speaking to a short time ago. Eu was a powerful, sagacious personality, not this pale and empty husk everyone else was having difficulty looking at.

“Son of a glitch…” said Cassandra, and now she was not speaking to anyone but rather staring up at the ceiling, trying to hold back her emotions. “The monster…”

Keri could feel Anisa’s eyes burning into the side of her head. The other woman was sat off to the side, and had been watching without saying much for some time now.

Doesn’t need to say much, Keri thought.

Anisa had been proven right, and Keri very, very wrong. The knowledge twisted in her gut like a living thing.

Yet…

Keri couldn’t understand it, and she tried not to think about it, but something didn’t feel right. She could still feel disbelief threatening to override the evidence of her own eyes. The Butcher had seemed so… genuine. Could it really have been so proficient at lying?

The evidence lay in front of her; Eu’s neck had been cleanly snapped.

“What was she doing in there?” said Andreas to the room at large. “Why…?”

“She had the sphere.”

There was a pause as they took in the Programmer’s words.

“She… what?” said Cassandra.

“The sphere; she took it,” replied the Programmer, almost matter-of-factly. “While we were arguing over the fate of the Butcher. I didn’t notice until after we found her, but the room she was in made me wonder… so I went back to the observation room, and it was gone. I can only think she took it when we were distracted.”

“She wouldn’t just take it,” began Andreas.

Cassandra interrupted, raising a tired hand to her head and letting out a rueful sigh.

“Yes, yes she would. That’s exactly what she would do.”

She turned to the Programmer.

“The room we found her in, what was it?”

“The Uplink room.”

“Uplink as in… uplink for the AI, right?”

The Programmer hesitated.

“Ye… yes. The final step, after all tests and safety checks were complete.”

“Uplink to where?” demanded Cassandra.

“To the cloud. To the global network, to everything outside of the Terminal.”

“Not the Terminal?”

“No,” answered the Programmer. “Never the Terminal. That will be kept beyond Kai’s reach. Too sensitive. Too much power.”

“She was going to upload it,” said Keri.

“And the Butcher stopped her,” said Anisa.

Cassandra cursed and seemed to fold in on herself all at once. It was Andreas who caught and steadied her.

“We need to stop it,” continued Anisa.

“And how exactly do you propose to do that?” said Andreas, as he let go of Cassandra.

“Ah… well, thankfully we are going to have some help with that.”

Again, everyone turned and looked at the Programmer. He looked at each of them with fearful, wide eyes, as if he were not sure what the reaction to his next words would be.

“You see, after you and the Butcher arrived I considered contacting certain… people, but thought better of it. They really aren’t the sorts I would ordinarily consider contacting under any circumstances, but after the Butcher escaped, you see, I thought we might need some help. So…”

“So?” demanded Anisa. “What have you done? Who have you called?”

“Well, they really are the most equipped to handle a situation like this…”

“Inc-Man,” said Cassandra with an empty chuckle, shaking her head. “He’s called Inc-Man.”