Scattering

She said we and meant it. Six weeks later, the word has become a weapon she can't put down.Avra's Fire connects her to Scion—the ancient machine intelligence that stores 412,709 compressed consciousnesses and controls the city's infrastructure. Through that connection, she pulls intelligence that saves dozens of lives. The cost is measured in memories she can no longer feel, sensations she can no longer name, and a bridge building itself inside her skull that is replacing the girl with the machine.Dr. Leit's scans confirm what Avra already knows: her neural patterns are constructed, not organic. Geometric. She is ahead of her sister Liora's trajectory—the same trajectory that ended with Liora becoming Directive Lux, the Continuity's most powerful enforcer.Three months remain before the bridge reaches irreversibility. Three months if she stops. Less if she uses the amplifier. She takes the amplifier anyway, because seventeen people are in processing facilities, and the math says she can find them.The people around her hold the shape of love against the architecture of a girl who is forgetting what the shape means. Rumi leaves cups of tea. Isen stands in corridors. Dr. Leit watches it happen again with trembling hands. And somewhere in the machine's ancient code, a ghost remembers what Scion was built to do before preservation became control—and produces a datum it cannot delete: This is wrong.Book Two of The Fire and the Bridge—a literary YA dystopian trilogy about a girl deciding what she's willing to become to protect the people she's already forgetting how to love.