The scene froze, leaving Prentkos, Colette, and Magnus standing within the circle, caught in a moment where none of them were looking each other in the eye, a picture without much visual appeal.

  Spark asked, “Do you want to see more? There’s no more conversation except for Colette giving the command. Instead, they disappear, and I’m not allowed to show you where they reappear.”

  “I guess not then,” I said, “unless you’ve got anything else from his history here.”

  Spark shook her head, “They appeared just before that, already talking. They did test the effect of giving him energy, restraining him, and bringing him back under their control before realizing it would be impossible to keep him in control. You could view that, but they summarized everything you could learn.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The circle disappeared, leaving me with my connection to Prentkos and a decision to make. He didn’t have a choice about killing me except that they’d said pushing Prentkos to pull in energy as an Artificer would allow him to destroy the commands Colette left.

  I had control of life support systems. I’d been taught how to pull in energy by Kee, not to mention being powered up by future me. I had the potential to fix this, collect an ally, and hope that this didn’t change my own past.

  Dr. Mind would have collected the DNA to clone him before they brought him here, right? He had every potential to die, so you’d want to take it beforehand. That meant I’d probably be okay if I taught him enough that he’d be able to help me.

  Probably.

  If Dr. Mind hadn’t taken his DNA and I taught him enough that Dr. Mind couldn’t do it, I’d change my past. It wouldn’t be by much. Rook wouldn’t have had a clone of Prentkos in his lair when I helped Cassie escape, and the Nine would have sent someone else to Grand Lake before the mushroom zombies appeared.

  Swapping him out with someone else probably wouldn’t have impacted the future much. Still, it might. For example, what if they’d have substituted in Power Burst in one or both of those situations because they didn’t have a captive speedster available? I might have lost to the guy if I’d fought him in Rook’s lair.

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  Bearing in mind that he was likely a clone of Dixie Superman, I might lose to him now.

  If I looked at it that way, helping Prentkos might not be the best idea, even if I didn’t feel right about it. Not helping Prentkos created different problems. For one, I was leaving a potential Artificer under Magnus’ control. Even if Magnus couldn’t control him and use him to his full potential at the point where Prentkos had been released from this device, it might have changed between then and now.

  In fact, the reason that I hadn’t seen Prentkos fighting alongside Magnus’ group of proto-Artificers might be that I’d freed him from them before I got out of here.

  I called up all the records that my implant had managed to absorb about him. I’d looked through his files before, and the implant had even absorbed references to him that I’d ignored while looking for other things.

  In short, I had more than I thought. The implant made all of it available to my conscious mind, and I combed through it for patterns. I didn’t see any associations with known Nine operatives, but I did see more than one attack on the Nine that seemed to do real damage. All of the attacks were in Europe, the majority in Germany, but nothing in the reports made me think they were fake and that he was helping the Nine while faking opposition.

  I glanced over at Spark, who stood still, waiting for my actions like the program she was.

  Knowing what I did, I asked myself what I would have done the first time through? Arguably, this was the first time through. I’d met myself in the future. What was the most natural thing for me to do? I didn’t want to overthink it.

  Deciding, I told Prentkos, “There’s something I need you to try before I bring you over here. There’s something inside you. It’s more than your powers. It’s more than your mind. Magnus may have told you about it. You can draw in energy. Start breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth and imagine you’re drawing in a white line. Visualize it. I’ll know if you aren’t.”

  Kee had used almost the same words in one of our earliest sessions. I’d already figured the basics out on my own by then, but from what Magnus said, so had Prentkos. Meanwhile, I reached out to the device and told the life support systems to give him access to energy and tell me if he was using it.

  I felt the life support systems as if they were another limb or sense. Through them, I knew that Prentkos pulled in power at an ever-increasing rate until he stopped.

  When I felt that, I let go of them and turned my attention to him. He stood, breathing, eyes wide open as if seeing for the first time. “They got me again,” he said. His words trailed off, and he said a few more in what I thought might be Polish.

  Guessing from his snarl, I suspected he might be cursing.