Emmett stared at the notes he’d scrawled in the nanites on the kitchen table.

“TINA… There are different types of manufacturers, right? Some for blood, some versatile, etc?”

“Yes.”

“Are the manufacturers limited by a total number or does each subtype have its own limit?”

“Each subtype has its own functions, and therefore its own limit.”

“Can we create new types of nanites?”

“Yes, with enough time and research.”

“Can I create more subtypes?”

TINA didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Could TINA break herself with logic?

“It appears that you can create more subtypes…”

Emmett smirked. Both Athena and Clara had stopped to stare at him. An episode of Full Throttle Heart: Redux was paused on the TV. Al, the foul-mouthed barbarian, was frozen with his axe in mid-swing.

Clara asked Emmett, “What are you trying to do?”

TINA interjected, “Each subtype will require resources to control. Creating more subtypes will take even more resources.”

“And that would be a problem, but we can stack subtypes. Stack them and create a subroutine to run them all the same way. We can bypass the manufacturer limit!”

Athena raised an eyebrow. “What are you on about?”

Emmett drew out diagrams on the table as he explained. “TINA and I are generals on a battlefield. Manufacturer nanites are colonels. Controllers are majors. Builders are soldiers. There are technically limits on how many of each TINA and I can support. But there’s a loophole…

“There are different types—different units—of nanites. The ones in my blood are different from those in the table. I have a unit for each of these functions.

“The important part is that none of Dr. Venture’s limits matter. The only part that matters is all of the limits are based on the unit. He left room for us to create more units—more types and subtypes. If I wanted to, I could make fifty different types of blood nanites.”

Clara was leaning over the back of the couch now. “Yeah, but I think you missed the part where those limits are for your own safety.”

“That’s the thing—the danger isn’t from making fifty different types of blood nanites, it’s from trying to coordinate all of those fifty different types. I’m not going to do that though. I’m going to pretend I’m making fifty different types of my regular nanites to get around Venture’s limits, but in reality, they’ll just be doing the same task. We’re still coordinating a bunch more colonels, but only giving them one set of orders.”

The group stayed silent, and all eyes fell to Emmett’s phone—to TINA.

“It will be inefficient, but it should work,” she replied hesitantly.

“Better than being completely stalled.”

“You’ll quickly run into problems with scale and complexity.”

Emmett nodded. “The more nanites we control, the less complicated our commands can be.”

“Correct. We will need to do more testing. Trying to control a large swarm could still compromise other units of nanites, such as the ones that maintain your bodily functions. Again, there is also the chance of irreparable damage to your brain and mine.”

“No worries, TINA. We’ll be careful.” Emmett met Clara’s eyes, and her cheeks flushed. TINA wasn’t the only one he was being careful for.

“You better be careful,” Athena replied. “What about Gray Goo…? Isn’t there still a risk of a runaway whatever you mentioned earlier?”

Emmett smiled. “Subtypes have to be manually created, so TINA and I still control the overall number. There’s still a limit to the swarm, but now it’s in our control.”

Athena clapped him on the shoulder. “Sounds like you’ve got something else to practice. Come on, Clara. You’ve got stuff to practice too.”

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~ ~

Clara groaned. She got up and walked down the hall, leaving Emmett and Athena in the living room. She spared a glance back at Emmett, but he was already back at work. He was hunched over the table, writing its black surface, not so much staring at it as staring through it.

He’d felt distant lately. He always had this way of deeply focusing on a task, like he was retreating into his own head. It seemed like it happened more and more ever since he’d upgraded his brain.

Clara stayed in the doorway a moment longer, waiting for Emmett to look up and notice her… but he never did.

Clara told herself that she was overreacting. Told herself that it wasn’t jealousy or anything like that—she was just concerned about him being distant. When Emmett got like that, he reminded her of her dad. He used to get the same faraway look in his eyes when he was working.

Maybe that’s what it was… Emmett just reminded her of her dad and the fact that he was gone.

Clara sighed. She slipped inside the bedroom and pushed the door shut. Then she sat cross-legged on the floor. A ball of steel sat beside her on the floor—the remnants of a stove. Emmett had offered her more, but Clara refused. There already wasn’t much left of the appliances that Athena salvaged, and Clara didn’t want to take anymore for herself.

The ball sat idle, feathers and waves melted into its surface. Clara didn’t have any wooden canvases.

For so long, she’d preferred working with metal over wood. Burning wood was permanent, but metal could be reshaped over and over. Working with a canvas was daunting. Working with metal was safe. It felt like she’d spent most of the last few years working with metal.

Then she’d met Emmett… and things had changed. It wasn’t just him. Clara had grown too and would’ve grown without him. Just when she’d wanted to make changes again—to start working with wood canvases—the world had been flipped upside down. The Freakshow, war with the Deep Ones, Dad… So much had changed that it felt like a struggle to keep up. There was a comfort in the old and familiar, and it was tempting.

But there was no going back.

She learned that from Emmett.

No matter what happened, he kept moving forward. Sometimes Clara wondered how much of a plan he even had, or if he was just stubbornly pushing forward.

Clara grabbed the hunk of steel. She warmed her hands and pressed her fingers into the steel, smudging leaves across the surface. The actions were familiar to the point of being meditative. Before, Clara had used the spheres to relax and take her mind off of whatever had happened that day.

Now she focused on the flow of power within her. She felt it coalesce in her fingertips, the heat building and steel softening beneath her fingers. She traced the flow of power through her wrist, her arms, and past her shoulders.

Despite the numerous systems in her original exosuit, Clara didn’t need to control her power all that much to use it. Clara built the power within her like a furnace, and let it flow out of her entire body. The suit did the heavy lifting, shunting power to individual systems as needed. Even her thinsuit didn’t need that much control.

Before the war ended, Dad showed her a new suit. The schematics only showed a few separate pieces—a helmet, chest piece, gauntlets, and boots. And she remembered her dad’s words:

“The day will come when you’ll no longer need one, and this is the first step in getting you there.”

Clara hadn’t realized how much she wanted that. Up until then, she just assumed that she would need an exosuit to be a super… and that she’d always be living in the lab in case she had a meltdown. A lot had changed. She didn’t even have the prototype suit. It was still in the lab, unless Midas destroyed it.

She sighed. The prototype was probably gone, but TINA claimed she could rebuild it, eventually. With enough time and processing power, she could probably rebuild the entire lab.

Clara shook the thought from her mind. She had no idea when TINA could remake the prototype suit… but she could practice in the meantime. When they could finally remake the suit, she’d be ready.

Clara focused again, tracing the flow of power from her core. Her hands burned hot, almost like lightning was dancing in her fingertips, but the sensation changed as it moved up her arms. It was always warm—that never changed. Instead, the feeling of electricity in her hands changed to a steady pulse in her arms, like a heartbeat. In her core, it changed again, feeling still and motionless, like a pool of lava.

Over the last few days, Clara had realized several things about her power. First, she had much better control over her power when it was at the tips of her fingers. That sensation of lightning coincided with better feeling and control, like writing with a fine-tipped pen instead of a marker. Despite all her practice with flying, she didn’t have the same sensation of control in her feet. Even the sensation in her upper arms felt numb and distant in comparison.

Clara let the sphere cool to a safe temperature in her hands before setting it back down on the bedroom floor. Then her real training began.

She’d already hypothesized that the difference in control was because of her artwork—all the time she’d spent practicing with wood and metal. She needed practice channeling power through the rest of her body and had just the thing in mind. Just as she’d repurposed scribbling in steel, Clara turned to yoga. Instead of centering herself, Clara focused on her muscles and the flow of power through her limbs.

She moved into a downward dog pose, focusing on the building heat in her arms and legs. Instead of quieting the fire inside her, Clara listened to it.

It was difficult. Where before Clara could easily hold a pose for minutes at a time, she was only moments in and struggling. Her arms were shaking, sweat beaded on her face, and it took everything she had to focus on the power in her core. It felt like straining to hear a single conversation in a crowd. The power in her arms and legs began to burn and then it began to scream.

Clara startled and opened her eyes. She wasn’t on fire, but the room was steamy.

She quickly sat up and started meditating like she used to, relaxing and quieting the power inside her. Thankfully, she’d had years of practice doing just that, and her power quickly subsided.

Then she got up and pushed open the bedroom door. Steam spilled out into the hallway.

Athena called from around the corner, “You good?”

“Yep!”

Clara stepped into the hallway, savoring the much cooler air.

Emmett glanced up from the table, looked her up and down, and smiled.

Clara’s face couldn’t get any warmer. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and smiled back.

~ ~ ~