"It's not going to work," Sakhr said.

"You don't know that," Alex said. "This is the glyph maker machine."

They watched as Quentin worked the console to the plaque assembler. He'd opened a saved file, which displayed a glyph on the screen. The only option was to send it to the assembler, which he'd pressed. The machine hummed. A progress screen was delayed.

"But the glyph will be useless," Sakhr replied. "If you remember, she always had to finish the glyphs. Look." He hit the back button, returning to the displayed glyph. Picking up the stylus, he doodled across the image. "See? It's not done. She kept bringing us up here because she needed to see us before she finished it."

"Okay," Quentin said, "but it might not be entirely useless. Look at those. What the hell is going on inside there?" He peered through the glass as a robotic arm applied explosive gel to the back of the silicon glyph wafer. "There's got to be something useful we can do with this."

He didn't recognize what the gel was for. Winnie would have to make sure they didn't learn that from her. That meant not letting Alex look her in the eyes.

"What about these?" Christof was standing by three crates in the workshop room, the ones labeled as military property. "Military. Might be something good in here."

"Let's see." Sakhr and Christof pried the lid of a crate. After they pulled away the side panels, packing peanuts flooded out. There was the same clunky machine Winnie had seen earlier that day. It seemed so long ago. In the light, she got a better idea of how it looked. It was like something teenagers might throw together in their garage. Its circuitry was housed inside what looked like a retrofitted footlocker. The reception pan stuck out side like an open car door. Every nut and bolt was plain to see.

"Quentin?" Sakhr asked. "Do you know what this is?"

Quentin looked it over. "It looks like an old assembler."

"Do you know why it this would be military property?"

"No. It looks like it should be in a museum." He tapped a tablet plugged into the device by USB. It lit. "It's a modern tablet though, isn't it." He opened an app and paged through its menu.

"Is this something that can help us right now?" Sakhr asked.

"Probably not. It doesn't look like it's hooked up to the assembler cloud. Either it's really old..."

He trailed off, frowning at a particular page. Then he grinned. "Oh my God. Seriously?"

"What?"

"It's a fuser." Excitedly, he skirted over the assembler until finding the footlocker circuit box. He popped it open and poked through.

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"What's it do?" asked Christof.

"It's something I designed before Victoria put me in the zoo. It's like an assembler, except better."

"Better how?"

Quentin flipped a switch inside the box back and forth. Nothing happened. He left, fetched a power cable from a lamp in the other room, and returned. "So most assemblers work with micro-sems inside of them, right? Once they've constructed a molecule, they pass it along to macro-assembly."

"Micro-sems?"

"Micro Assemblers. Look. How much do you know about microfield technolog—oh, right. Grandparents." He stripped the power cable, exposing bare copper. "Okay. Assemblers work by having billions of tiny, tiny robots that work on individual molecules. Then they push them together or tear them apart to make other molecules. Then they pass them along to bigger robots who take those molecules and make bigger chunks. Who pass them on to bigger robots, and so on, until you have robots the size of your fist that put together the final product." He patted the assembler's reception bin. "Got it?"

"Okay."

"This one is a little different. It does everything that other assemblers can do, except it also has robots that are so tiny, and so precise, that they can actually push atoms together to make different atoms."

He attached the power cable to something inside the circuit box. "It makes the assembler a thousand times more useful. Take ordinary assemblers, right? They can make all sorts of things, literally out of thin air. It pulls its carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen from CO2 and humidity. Then it puts them together to make synthetic fabrics and foods and all sorts of stuff, but that's it. If you want something made of iron or silicon, or any metal, you need to supply those elements to the assembler with little cartridges. This thing can make all those heavier elements from the same air. It doesn't need anything."

He plugged the other end of the cable into the wall. "The best part is this looks like it has a Stiller generator. Assemblers use ungodly amounts of power. This thing even more so, but it should be able to reclaim the power released whenever it pushes molecules together. It basically makes power out of humidity using the same principle that microfusion plants use. But the microassemblers in this fuse a lot more than just hydrogen. All this assembler needs..." He flipped the switch inside the circuit box again. This time, lights came. Cooling fans hummed. "...Is a little jump start."

Quentin took up the tablet and got to work.

"If this thing is so wonderful, why is it locked in here?" asked Alex.

"Victoria is greedy," replied Quentin. "She likes to hoard her technology. I'll bet that even today, no market assembler can make another assembler. Even years after the war, she kept all the food-ready assemblers under contract-only release. Unauthorized use of one was a felony. And this?" Quentin tapped the machine. "She locked all my notes on fuser assemblers away. She didn't want anyone making these. I'm surprised she built these." He chuckled. "I'm surprised she figured out how without me. Her scientists aren't much better than monkeys in lab coats. I made her business empire for her."

"Can it help us?" asked Sakhr impatiently.

"I think so. It looks like it's got a debug build of the designer. Shouldn't need access to the assembler library. The downside? It doesn't have access to the assembler library. I'll have to design everything we use from scratch."

"What can you make?"

"Anything simple."

"Explosives?"

"Sure. I can make better ones now actually."

"Then do that."

Quentin got to work on the tablet. He glanced at the other two crates. "Are those other ones? You guys should probably get them booted. Did you all see what I did?"

No one responded.

"Of course not," Quentin mumbled. "Hey. Telepath girl."

Alex had been fiddling with his stolen sidearm. "Referring to me?"

"Eye contact right?" He stared Alex in the eye. "You can get the other machines going. Do you see what I need you to do?"

"I'm not seeing a ‘please'."

"Alex," Sakhr warned, "help him."

Alex smiled winsomely at Sakhr. "Absolutely."