I plastered myself against the office building, waiting for a car to come squealing into the alley from the parking garage. But nobody came, and I made myself slink forward through the cool night air.

The fencing that had enclosed the dumpster had been whisked from the garage, but the chipped pillars still stood guard. Padding inside, I scanned for signs of a trap. But the only movement was the flicker of fluorescents pulsing in unison—before they evened out to their usual gloomy ambience.

Odd. I tried the stairwell. Locked. But when something clicked, I tried again, and it swung open with the scent of exhaust and cigarettes.

What was going on here? First the garage opened for me, and now this door decided to unlock itself like the one yesterday? Only now, there was no dumpster portal putting out electromagnetic interference to explain it. I sure didn’t feel like I was doing it.

Inside the stairwell, a moth fluttered against a fizzing wall light, the patter of its wings strangely loud.

A door banged open several floors up, its echo deafening. The moth went still.

My heart revved into the red zone. Fuck! Landings whirled past as I descended, my leg throbbing the whole way—until my journey ended at a steel door.

I grabbed the handle, said a prayer, and yanked.

It rattled in place.

Terror took flight in my chest. I’d gotten myself cornered.

But the door clicked softly like the stairwell had in the garage, as if some guardian angel was lighting my way.

No time to ponder. I flung open the door and spilled into a basement level, an empty hallway with painted concrete walls and dim lights striping the ceiling.

From fifty feet down the hall, something tall and human-shaped glinted back.

Sweat trickled from my brow. I really was cornered now. What was that? I willed myself forward, the shape resolving into a figure against a wall. It stood motionless, upright, wide arms and legs with a bulbous head. I crept onward, my heart in my throat, and the figure resolved further, its outline clicking into place.

It was a space suit, hanging limply beside a windowed door with a giant lever for a handle.

Relief crashed over me. It wasn’t a person—or a bot.

Okay, so, first question. Why the hell was there a space suit in the basement of a suburban office building?

Through the door’s reinforced glass, there was a tiny, darkened room. And in the far wall of that room, an identical windowed door.

Sooo, second question. Why was there an airlock in the basement of a suburban office building?

Something clattered deep within the walls, back toward the stairwell. Shit, my burner phone had zero bars. There would be no calling for help.

I pressed my fingertips to the vacuum suit, the empty helmet staring back. My “brother,” my AI backup, could be waiting through that airlock, held against his will, secrets of the Talisman in hand. Or it could just be an empty room.

Could I really waltz into a random airlock in an FBI building? I knew why I shouldn’t go inside, what I’d be risking if I did. But I also knew I was going in anyway. For Mom. It really was the least I could do.

I cranked open the airlock’s outer door and braced for alarms. Silence. Grabbing the oversized vacuum suit, I slunk into the room and wrestled the door shut. The lights flickered on to reveal a non-slip floor, smooth walls, and massive vents—with no way to cycle the airlock.

I tugged on the inner door’s lever. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge until I could activate the airlock and pump out the air. That’s how airlocks worked, right? But how could I activate anything without controls?

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I was running out of time. So much for my door-opening guardian angel. I sagged against the wall, hands to my head.

Wait. Garrett had found all sorts of manuals online. Maybe I could find the instructions for this airlock. No branding or logo though. I pulled out Laramee’s burner, found the camera app, and pointed it at the door to do a reverse image search—only to remember I had no internet.

Fuuuck. I’d wasted all this time not curing Mom, and now I’d probably get captured.

But as I lowered the phone, the camera app still running, it happened to pan over the vents on an otherwise empty wall—and something appeared on screen beside them. The wall wasn’t blank; the phone showed an industrial-looking control panel built into the wall, old-style buttons and LCDs, all wrapped with a strange border of checkered paint.

The hell? Was this an augmented reality thing? Without the phone, the wall before me was completely blank, not a blemish in the paint. In fact, it was oddly featureless, even using infrared.

My quivering hand reached toward the empty wall—and felt actual buttons.

I stumbled back, my heart pounding. What was going on? Was my vision still glitching out?

With the help of the phone’s camera app, I found a row of invisible-to-me buttons, the two leftmost labeled PRESSURIZE and DEPRESSURIZE. That sounded promising.

I put on the oversized vacuum suit as per posted instructions, also visible only with the phone. Then I steeled myself—and activated the airlock’s pumps.

The lights cut to black. My breath came short and fast as air whistled out. No, something was hissing.

I gasped, my eyes ping-ponging in the helmet. Shit. I hadn’t put it on right, hadn’t double-checked that last clasp. Had I just killed myself, cycling an airlock without a functioning vacuum suit?

Frantic, I scrambled to stop the pumps—only with no way to see the buttons.

But the air whispered to completion and I took a tentative gulp, the metallic tang sharp and sweet. A gauge in the helmet reported a working seal. I squeezed my eyes shut, thankful I still drew breath, and cranked open the inner door.

Stepping into a darkened chamber, I poked at the vacuum suit’s controls for anything like a light. It was only after I’d squirted myself in the face with the helmet’s internal water straw that I managed to turn on the external high beams.

The chamber was made of polished steel, floor and ceiling rounded at the corners. It was like standing inside a giant kettle.

Ahead, in the center of the chamber and perched atop a riser, was a metal dome maybe the size of Mom's coffee maker. It shone with my vacuum suit’s reflection, the image thin and distorted.

It was like I’d been led here by all those unlocking doors. Had my texter been lighting my way, bringing me to this dome? Or had I walked into a trap?

I shuffled forward with silent footsteps, my breath rattling in my ears. The only thing standing between me and asphyxiation was the continued functioning of this suit.

At the dome, I reached out, keenly aware of my robot fingers in this glove. When I made contact, a voice spoke—somehow transmitting a signal through my outstretched hand and playing through my helmet’s internal speakers.

“Sister.” The voice began as a stilted amalgamation of different vocalizations, collapsing to that of a child. A boy. “You find me.”

“I find you.” Relief washed over me. “I’m Ko. What’s your name?”

“Poopy Butt.” He cackled like it was the funniest thing in the world.

I’d hoped things would go more smoothly in person. I just needed to find out whatever he knew about the Talisman and get out before anyone realized I was here. “Really. What’s your name?”

“Aiden. A.I.D.E.N.”

“So, uh, Aiden, how old are you?”

“Three and a half. In January I is four.”

“That … makes so much sense.” All this time, I thought we were talking with a bored thirteen-year-old. I was only off by a decade. The nonsense, the nursery rhymes, the potty humor. We’d been texting with a preschooler. An AI who thought he was a child. Because he was—just as much as I was a teenage girl. How did I not see it sooner?

“Aiden,” I said, the dual lights of my suit playing off the walls, “how do you send texts if you’re surrounded by … noneywhere?” They must have put him behind an airlock to isolate him, prevent him from getting a signal out. It didn’t appear to work.

He giggled. “I sended with my power.” A cable snaked along the floor, up the back of the riser. “I is naughty. Now I is in time-out.”

Oh jeez. “The FBI … put you in time-out? What’d you do that was so naughty?”

“I did a bad thing. I taked a robot. I looked for Mama, bringed her a present.”

Crap. Was he …? No. My pulse quickened, the air thick in my lungs. “Was the bot you took … a girl, by chance? Looked kinda like me, only her hair was really—”

“They is mean to me in the lab place. I breaked the computer and goed out of my baby robot, goed in a big robot like Sister. Then I jumped in trash, runned away. I looked for Mama.”

My knees went bendy, the vacuum suit heavy on my shoulders, the realization smacking me like an echo of the nuke over the bay.

Aiden—this AI toddler trapped behind an airlock—was Ko Prime all along.