The men’s excitement turned to frustration, until they’d holed up in the barracks below to alternate between watching the brain band feed and complaining. Without so much as an update from Ling, a second day passed, and with Fangwenzhe burning in the dark blue sky, the order to go in still had not come. Scanning . . . The word pulsed in one corner of my brain band’s holoscreen as it had for the past hour. I’d been searching for a remote node, any node that might belong to a captive inside the factory. No doubt the farmers had disabled any implants they found, but if I did catch a signal I could use a security override to access the device. If I could do that, I’d be able to switch it back on, but after a long stretch of silence I thought I might have to concede soon that there was nothing to find. Just one signal. Anything at all. “What the hell are you doing up here?” I glanced back and saw Liao had come up to join me.
