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The first video of the storm that she watched was taken on a sunny day from the height of one of the spires. It showed the glittering spread of the spire community under sunlight. In the distance, the horizon was black and fulminating. The video had no sound.

A follow-up was about eight minutes long. It showed a wall of dark gray turmoil, as of a hurricane funnel, but massive, unimaginably broad. In the battering, crackling audio a voice called it, with ominous theatricality,
“La espada di Dios.”
The sword of God.

As the video started, the edge of the storm was creeping forward over a slope, shattering short spires, swirling their pieces into a vortex, and tearing chunks out of the ground. As Chance watched, the storm consumed two full spires, one of which shivered into thousands of beautiful shards. The shards were quickly lost in the maelstrom. The other spire came apart in large chunks. It also disappeared.

There were videos that showed the hovering storm during the days when it squatted on top of the area where the spire community had been. As the storm slowly dissipated, people grew bolder and began to venture into the devastation in its wake.

Videos of the area after the storm showed a flattened and churned landscape, shocked rescue workers finding pieces of bodies in trees miles from the actual storm. There were interviews with solos who left before the storm arrived and somehow made their way to a hastily constructed refugee camp in the city of Saltillo. Several were crying as they talked of their losses. Their stories drowned Chance.

The short spires of Cordial were notorious for a thriving black market for mined commodities. Revolutions in the scale and efficiency of tunneling equipment had made the black market possible. The short spires throughout the El Coahuilón region were places where a small, enterprising team could purchase some mining tech, find a spot to mask the entrance of their operation, and, if they were fortunate, make good within a few years. Many of the solos in the videos were hard-bitten, grime-encrusted men and women who had been taking such risks for decades.

A join in Edinburgh had lost two drives in the storm. It was adamant in its demands of world governments, of the Directorate, of all the institutions who wield true power. “I was a nine. I'm now, because of inaction and apathy on the part of our authorities, a seven. Never mind how the feral, solo community of the area was affected. Their terrible losses.”

Of course, like so many things happening in the past few decades, such a storm had not been contemplated or planned for. There were warnings about weather patterns; there were other freak occurrences. But after the storm hit, the majority opinion on the network was that a storm of such magnitude in such an unlikely location was both unprecedented and unforeseeable.

Associated with their storm coverage, several outlets revived coverage of the many global weather-management systems that had been proposed over the previous two decades. For the most part, they were deemed too large, too impractical, the science too uncertain, the needed research too expensive. And those systems did nothing to address myriad other environmental challenges such as detoxification or the resurrection and repopulation of wild species. Civ News reports concluded that the issues were systemic, the system complex, and that storms like El Coahuilón were simply anomalies.

Chance has some understanding of meteorology and has spent a career learning about the vagaries of known storm systems. When people in the videos she watched described the storm as impossible, she heard the word echo in her own heart, within the hollow chambers of her own fulsome certainty. She would also have said it was impossible. Now she'll have to learn why it was likely.

As Chance Two watches these videos, somewhere in North America, Hamish, Chance, and Leap have begun their conversation about what Excellence was actually saying during the conference and about how Leap might be treated. When Hamish is done talking, Chance Two goes back to bed.

Hamish had said, “When you
have only one active drive, I will make the required alteration to that drive's caduceus.”

When you have only one active drive.
Leap Four lies on her back under a green wool blanket, facing the ceiling. Chance Four sits beside the bed, thinking about Leap Four's eyes. Right now, they appear to be dark brown, but the irises are usually slightly lighter, with a hint of orange, and are solid. They aren't flecked with other colors. Leap Four blinks and turns to look at Chance. It's clear that Leap wants to speak, but there's a slackness in her face that implies that speaking may be beyond her. Not knowing how to help Leap, Chance offers a restrained smile and puts a hand to Leap's forehead. Leap doesn't respond in any way, just looks dully into Chance's face.

As a join, Chance has gotten used to a sense of security. When Renee and Ashton—Chance One and Two—first joined, Chance practiced feeling safe. Chance would stand close enough to an electric transformer to hear the hum or walk at the edge of an aqueduct in New Denver or just look down from a pod's travel lane, and when the nagging, subtle sense of disastrous possibility made itself known, Chance would think: Even if this drive dies, I won't. There were moments when the insight took hold powerfully, making the world more vivid, richer. And there were more and more moments when the anxiety was simply not aroused. When there was no sense of risk.

Over time, Chance found that the body might still flinch: a drive's pulse might race, its heart pump adrenaline. But a join could manage a drive that was in peril, soothe it, smooth its responses, and direct it toward action. It became easier to face the prospect of a body dying.

That changed so many things. Throughout history, when solos engaged in ambitious projects, they might say something like “I'm working against the clock. I want to see this completed in my lifetime.” Joins could spot the real risks of multigenerational projects—funding and irrelevance.

It also changed things at a personal level. After joining with Chance Four, Chance won every Jai Kido tournament that Chance Four entered except two. Speed was her weapon. Her body would never be where her opponents' expected it to be. Her hands would avoid her opponents' defenses. Chance Four would suddenly have a hold on their arms and bodies and would be forcing them to the floor. That was how she experienced it. Chance Four was clearly gifted, and Chance practiced endlessly. During tournaments, Chance focused on winning and trusted the drive.

In the second tournament she lost, Chance Four was slammed to the mat by another drive so suddenly that she had no memory of it happening. She was just down. She struck the mat at an odd angle and pulled a muscle in her neck.

It was a jarring impact, and Chance feared she might have been permanently hurt. That her spine might be injured. Losing Chance Four would be difficult but not
crippling
. Chance felt only the briefest intimation of mortality and quickly dismissed it.

Watching Leap lying in her near coma of grief and disorientation, Chance is acutely aware that all of Leap is lying on the bed. Leap has only a single perspective. In fact, at this moment, Leap has a gender.

It's a temporary state. But no matter how confident Hamish is of the surgery, the procedure will require opening the one cranium Leap has left. Chance glances at Elicia, sitting near the foot of the bed. Tall and slender, folded into a narrow wooden chair like a stick figure. She catches Chance's eye and smiles.

“How do you do it?” Chance asks.

“What?” Elicia asks.

“Live so close to the edge.”

A look of annoyance flickers across Elicia's face, but she says, “You're thinking about Leap?”

“I've sometimes thought about what it would be like to go back to being solo. But I never believed it would happen. Not since I became Chance. I always assumed I would have more drives, a richer life, more choices, a broader perspective.”

Chance appreciates how well Elicia hides her distaste for what Chance has said. Maybe it's not distaste; maybe Chance is just tired and paranoid and is mistaking how Elicia feels. Elicia smiles wanly. She says, “You were very respectful with Leap One.”

Chance turns to Leap to see if the reference has hurt her, but Leap is looking at the ceiling again and appears impassive. Chance says, “That was difficult.”

They had euthanized Leap Three first. He took a sleeping pill. Ernie, one of Arcadia's doctors, had strapped a mask to his face, then turned a valve that pumped in carbon monoxide. Hamish and Leap had agreed that killing both Leap Three and Leap One at the same time could be too traumatic for Leap. But Hamish had first made the argument, energetically, that it might be the right thing to do. Leap had already lost Leap Two. Hamish was concerned that after Leap Three died, Leap would decide to face the flip rather than lose another drive.

When Leap did balk, Hamish reminded Leap of their agreement. “Remember, I told you how you were going to feel, and you chose to euthanize first one and then the other, rather than doing both at the same time. This next step is hard, but you must take it. Your fear is pushing you in the wrong direction.”

“Oh,” replied Leap One. “Oh, if you only knew how many people in my life have presumed to know more about what I wanted than I do.”

Hamish accepted the rebuke, his lids lowering briefly, and a very slight nod demonstrating regret. “Yes, of course,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“You can't know how I feel about this body. This isn't a drive. I gave birth to this.”

“I am truly sorry.”

And then something happened that Chance hadn't seen before. There was some discussion of it in the literature, where it was referred to as “simulated autonomy” or occasionally “facile autonomy”—an intense response to feelings of guilt, in which the join retreats from the reality of the union and attempts to simulate a reality in which one or more drives are still independent.

It was as if Leap had decided to let Leap One make the case for his own survival. Leap Four sat unmoving in one of the wooden chairs, like the one Elicia is sitting in now, and watched as Leap One advocated passionately and almost incoherently for changing Hamish's approach to the treatment.

“I know you think you understand all of this,” Leap One began.

“I don't,” Hamish replied.

Leap, clearly ramping toward an argument, stopped for a moment but then plunged ahead. “I mean the network connection, the flip.”

“I know what you mean,” said Hamish.

And Leap paused again before taking another deep breath and continuing. “There's evidence,” he said, “that a bath of organic copolymers, such as polylactic acid and polyglycolic acid, stabilizing a matrix of silver-coated graphene nanotubes, will safely inhibit and then degrade the quantum properties of a caduceus without altering the mind's magnetic signature.”

“That's meaningless nonsense,” Hamish said sadly. “There is no such evidence. And if there were, would you want that solution applied inside your skull?”

“If it would save me. If it would save me, I would.”

“You're going to be fine.”

It went on. Leap Four watching with the same look she wore now while Leap One attempted to debate Hamish by drawing on the years that Leap studied alternative theories of join science. Chance was surprised by Leap's breadth and depth of knowledge, by the volume of loosely connected detail that Leap rushed through—manically and meticulously—while arriving at one unsupportable conclusion after another. At one point, Leap spent ten minutes cataloging famous cases of meme viruses with such rapidity and in such detail that Chance, with a professional's depth of knowledge, was left breathless. At the end of that magnificent and pitiable display, Chance felt the injustice of Hamish coolly dismissing both the detail Leap had produced and the question it led to with a single, simple judgment, “Nonsense.”

After nearly an hour of barreling forward, Leap One began diving into an exploration of the possible quantum effects of meteorologic phenomena, and Hamish looked at Chance out of the corner of his eye, raising an eyebrow questioningly. Asking for help. Elicia had quietly entered the room fifteen minutes before. She stood listening from across the room.

“Elicia,” Chance Four shouted the name, catching Leap's attention and interrupting the manic flow, “do you know if Ernie is ready?”

“He is,” she said.

And then Chance Four turned to Leap One, who was standing very still and staring wide eyed at her. “You have to do this,” Chance said calmly, “so that we can join. There is no other treatment that you, or I, can trust my life to.”

Both of Leap's drives were quiet. Then Leap One took a deep breath, grimacing, his face reddening. He acknowledged with a slight tip of his head that Chance was right. Leap's fever had burned itself out.

Now Leap One is dead, and Chance and Leap are waiting for Hamish, who will arrive with an oral anesthetic for Leap Four, Leap's last drive. Twenty minutes after she swallows it, they'll wheel her into the operating theater, they'll apply the second- and third-tier anesthetics, and then Hamish will begin the adjustment to her caduceus.