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Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.

“Um … eighteen million?”

Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.

“Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”

A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.

“One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”

Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.

One hundred and ten million dollars …

“I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”

Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”

The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.

CLEAR YOUR MIND

Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.

Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.

Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”

Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margaret could have seen with the naked eye.

She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

There weren’t any.

Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”

Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.