AFTER TAMARA showed him the program on the Ultra 27 workstation, he sat in front of the computer the whole night and the following morning, staring at the lines of code for sixteen hours. Then he took a nap. Tamara woke him in the evening and gave him another snack. She said she had to go away for a while to do an important job, but another of Brother Cyrus’s soldiers—Angel, the man with the curved scar on his neck—would take care of him until she got back. An hour later, when the sky was fully dark, Angel led him outside and put him into the cargo hold of a big green truck, along with his computer and desk and the bare mattress. For the next ten hours Michael sat in the cargo hold with Angel while the truck bounced on the bumpy roads. But he wasn’t bored. He was still working on the puzzle, which he could do even when the workstation was turned off. The software code was in his mind now, arranged in long lines and vertiginous blocks that he could scroll up and down on the black screen of his eyelids.
