I looked around the hall, full of smooth faces, supple bodies, and even more supple principles.

By the standards of the Loop's headquarters, the ground floor didn't seem particularly extravagant. A glass staircase climbed to the next level, where producers leaned against the railing, looking down on us the way auction visitors eye the next painting up for sale. Bars stocked with food and drink waited along the sides, with a few alcoves tucked between them where you could disappear for a moment. The sight of them made me smile.

At the center of it all, on a circular floor of black glass, the perfect curves of new poets swayed, wrapped in colorful suits, alongside poetesses wrapped mostly in their own self-confidence. The music had no memorable melody. It was just a mixture of deep tones vibrating in the chest at a steady rhythm, further emphasized by fast sweeps of laser beams cutting across the hall.

Old age hit me harder than it ever had before. My body was indistinguishable from everyone else's around me — over these decades it had aged barely a few months. But in there, in the place where the anonymous shell became Nox, I felt old.

"Let's move along, Nox."

Corven wrapped an arm around my shoulders. His breath carried the scent of expensive alcohol, because he'd never touch anything cheap. With a snap of his fingers he summoned a girl carrying a tray of brightly colored drinks that were already giving me a headache just looking at them.

"Yes, Mr. Corven?" she approached with a stride that immediately reminded me of Lyra.

"Nox will have a Viral, Jessica," Corven decided.

"You don't have a whiskey?" I tried.

"Oh, nonsense," Corven turned to me. "A Viral, Nox. Look around. People are watching you. You have to stay trendy."

The slender stem of a glass filled with a pale blue drink ended up between my fingers.

"And bring some canapés too. What were they called again? Avocado toilettes?"

"Avant-garde tartlets, Mr. Corven," Jessica nodded, and with the tray in her hands and my eyes on her swaying hips, she vanished off toward the nearest bar.

"So this is what the people I'm supposed to create with drink?" I asked Corven, taking a sip of the Viral. It tasted like a blended smurf.

"This is what people with young audiences drink."

"That's not what I asked."

Corven's grip around my shoulders loosened, and with a wave of his palm he steered me toward the dance floor.

"Come on, there's someone here who might interest you."

A single glance at the uniform crowd swaying on the floor exposed Corven's lie. After a few steps, not just the music grew louder, but also the mixture of perfumes and dancing bodies.

"Over there," Corven shouted into my ear, his eyes flicking toward a cluster of poets a short distance ahead of us. Corven waved at them, and one broke off to walk toward us. The darkness of the dance floor seemed to part for him, and I realized this one was different from the rest.

Raven hair, deliberately messy, white teeth gleaming in the laser light, piercings at the corners of his mouth. A thin tattooed line ran from beneath one eye across the bridge of his nose to under the other. An oversized shirt, oversized pants. He was handsome in a way his entire team must have signed off on.

"He goes by Phoenix," Corven shouted over the music again.

"Avant-garde tartlets, Mr. Corven," Jessica tapped Corven's shoulder.

"What?" Corven shouted back at her, confused.

I watched Phoenix's easy stride, and for a moment I pictured him burning, only to rise from the ashes right beside me a moment later. Reborn through a collaboration with me. The opening fragment of whatever our partnership would turn out to be.

"Tartlets, Mr. Corven," Jessica's shrill voice cut in.

Nox and Phoenix. Something like that could work. I could teach him everything I knew.

"Here's my favorite!" Corven shouted at Phoenix, mouth full of canapé, and swallowed. "One of the most-watched creators of his generation."

Corven gestured toward the nearest bar, and Phoenix and I, with Jessica trailing behind, followed him.

"How do you picture this collaboration of ours?" I skipped the introductions.

Phoenix ran a long look over me as we walked toward the bar counter, from my dark hair down to the tips of my leather shoes.

"Corven filled me in on your situation, Nox," Phoenix began, far more carefully than I would have expected from him. "I think this could be the best comeback story out there."

"I never went anywhere."

I set the narrow glass with the blue drink down on the counter and waved at the bartender, while the gurgling at the end of Corven's straw announced it was time for another round.

"And that's exactly the problem," Phoenix continued. "You're still here. Exactly the way I remember you, from when I was still a kid."

Ouch.

"Phoenix does the From the Ashes series," Corven cut in, "helps poets climb back to the top. And he's damn good at it."

"Exactly." Phoenix ran a thumb over one of his piercings. "We'd start by removing everything that still reminds people of the old Nox."

Youth was more appealing when it kept its mouth shut.

It dawned on me that this would end up being Phoenix and Nox, not the other way around. I was supposed to be the one who burns and rises again. But in his version of the story, I wouldn't stay the main character for long. My comeback would turn into his success story, and a chunk of my viewers would become his audience.

"I'll have a whiskey, and take this crap away," I tapped a finger against the tip of the blue glass. The bartender nodded.

"You should be drinking Virals, Nox, that way you can kick off the partnership with—"

"Screw Virals."

Phoenix watched the blue drink disappear behind the bar, then looked back at me. The black line under his eyes stretched along with his smile. He'd just gotten the best shot of the night.

"That's exactly what we need," he said.

"Excuse us for a moment, Phoenix," Corven muttered, and Phoenix wordlessly headed back to the dance floor.

"I'm trying to help you here, Nox."

A whiskey with an ice cube appeared in my hand.

"Like you helped Edrin?" I looked Corven in the eye, took a sip, and weighed the glass in my hand.

"Edrin?" Corven laughed. "The traitor Edrin? He left on his own. You know that perfectly well."

"Yeah. That's what he says." I finally voiced the suspicion that had been simmering inside me for years. "You forced him out. The same way you're slowly forcing me out now."

"Bullshit," Corven snapped. "Edrin stopped believing in what we're trying to do. He fell victim to conspiracy theories, and I would genuinely hate to see the same thing happen to you."

"You mean conspiracies about snails suffering just a few floors beneath us so the rest of us can live longer?"

I lifted the glass to my lips and crushed the ice cube between my teeth.

"The Loop never disproved any of that."

"For God's sake, Nox. If we had to go around disproving every conspiracy theory out there, we'd never do anything else."

"So show me."

Corven's expression shifted.

"The fermenters," I continued. "Show me that Edrin was wrong."

Silence settled between us for a moment. Corven didn't have to take the bait. But we both knew he couldn't refuse.

"I don't want to lose you the way I lost him," he said finally. "You want to see the fermenters? Fine. But the moment we get back up here, you find yourself a partner within the hour. Otherwise, you're done."

The snails' fate meant nothing to me. Mine, though, was entirely in Corven's hands.

I used to trust him. Now he spent so much time with politicians he might as well have become one himself. But I didn't have a choice. I didn't want to age slowly like Edrin. Unlike him, though, I'd be aging completely alone. No Lyra, no friends, just comments under my Fragments and a follower count slowly ticking down.

If Corven really let me down to the fermenters, at least I'd know whether Edrin had been wrong. About the Loop's practices, and about Corven's.

"Fine. Let's go."

"Excellent, Nox." Corven clapped me on the shoulder and headed for the elevator.

Jessica offered him another tartlet. He took two at once and waved her off, signaling she didn't need to follow us.

The doors slid open with a soft hiss, and I stepped inside alongside Corven. A slow xylophone melody drifted down from vents in the ceiling of the cabin above us, a strange contrast to the party outside. Corven pressed his card to the reader, and purple buttons on the cabin wall lit up. His finger moved toward the well-worn number minus twelve, in the Fermenters section, but I caught his wrist before it touched the button.

"Can we go down to thirteen?" I asked him. I wanted to pick the floor myself. I had no interest in fermenters made for tourists, and I suspected that's exactly what he intended to show me.

"Sure thing," Corven said cheerfully, and touched minus thirteen instead.

The doors closed, Corven bit into his first tartlet and readied the next one. The elevator shuddered and began its descent. I watched the descending numbers above the doors with more tension than I'd ever watched the numbers on my own Loop profile.

"Here we are. Minus thirteen, the fermenters," Corven said, swallowing the last bite.

The doors opened, and I was blinded by light so bright I spent a few seconds just blinking hard.

"We control their light cycle," Corven began. His tone and the pace of his voice had changed. Down here, he wasn't a politician. He was a founder. "The resonance the followers pick up best comes under full light. They only need a short rest phase. A few hours of darkness, without any drop in yield."

The last time I'd seen fermenters had been decades ago, back in the Loop's early days, on one of the tours. That was back when the Loop was still a startup with zero security measures. Back then they were tanks twice the size of a person, a single enormous resonant snail behind thick glass, electrodes attached to various parts of its damp body. A multi-million-dollar prototype that some worker had to visit every morning to scrape the slime off the shower-wall glass with a squeegee from the nearest drugstore, into a yellow bucket.

It was the complete opposite of what I was now staring at, mouth half open.

"They're small," I finally managed, as I took in the enormous space in front of me, divided into aisles by narrow racks of resonant snail fermenters, stacked three rows high.

"Right. That's the other thing. You get more slime out of adults, but they don't react as often as juveniles. They also take up way more space, so..."

"...so it pays off better for you to raise a larger number of juveniles instead of fewer adults," I finished for him.

"Exactly," Corven agreed. "Come take a closer look."

I walked from the elevator to one of the fermenters and peered into a half-meter-tall tank of pale blue liquid, in which a stream of bubbles rose every few dozen seconds. On the base, readouts flickered with vital signs and a graph of current yield.

"What happens to them once they grow up?"

"They don't grow," Corven replied, pressing his head against the fermenter's glass. "The same way you don't age. All it takes is mixing a little of their own medicine into the nutrient solution, and they stay young forever."

"They're locked in here their entire lives," I thought aloud.

"We're a corporation, Nox. Not an animal rights group. And these are snails. They're not intelligent. Though I'll admit," Corven chuckled, tapping the glass in front of the snail, "there are a few people on the board I'd honestly rather see replaced by snails."

"What's stopping me from making a fragment about all this?"

"Ha," Corven raised his eyebrows, "now that's the Nox I need. But I'll disappoint you. There's nothing here people out there don't already suspect. Look around. A farm of happy, healthy snails producing Pulses. That's basically how people already picture it, isn't it? You won't shock anyone with this. Not for long, anyway."

I looked around at the aisles of snails again. He was right. I didn't see any torture. Nothing like what Edrin used to talk about. Just thousands of snails sentenced to eternal youth and a life in a jar. I'd known worse fates.

"We should head back up while most of your potential partners are still at least somewhat sober," Corven ended the tour, pressed the elevator button again, and the doors opened to take us back up.

The party had moved into its second phase during our brief detour. Producers had come down among the poets, and contract negotiations had begun. As soon as the elevator doors opened, Corven sent Jessica off after one of the producers and headed off himself to find someplace quieter for his next conversation.

I made my way toward the dance floor, past a cluster of poetesses preening with tablets in hand. They were trying to charm the producers with samples of their work and offers that many of the producers clearly had to turn down with a heavy heart. The thought of taking part in any of it again made my skin crawl.

I moved through the negotiating poets, looking for Phoenix. Every option I had was bad. Each in its own way, but Phoenix was the easiest of the bad options. And working with him specifically would flatter Corven's ego on top of it.

"Nox?" a woman's voice sounded beside me.

"Yes?" I turned toward it and looked at her face.

She was the only person in the entire hall who wasn't perfectly smooth. Fine lines had settled around her eyes, and a streak of silver ran through the dark hair at her temple. Time had touched her in places I remembered differently, but it certainly hadn't hurt her.

I recognized the silver pendant with the Loop's logo hanging around her neck too. She'd worn it thirty years ago as well, back when we'd stood on this same dance floor, both trying to worm our way into the attention of the producers above us.

"Arven?"

Her mouth hadn't changed. She still looked like she was about to say something that would hurt me, and already savoring it in advance.

"I expected you to remember me a little faster," she said.

"You'd be expecting too much of me."

"I don't expect anything from you anymore."

That much about her hadn't changed either. She could deliver an insult so calmly it made you want to earn yourself another one.

"What are you doing here?"

"Same thing as thirty years ago. Waiting for someone to notice me."

I looked around us. No one was paying her any attention, same as no one was paying attention to me. In a hall full of people doing everything they could for attention, she stood without a tablet, without a producer, without a single colorful drink in hand. Same as me.

"This time there's no one for me to steal from you," I observed.

Arven smiled.

"So you do remember."

I remembered. Just not the same way she did.

Back then she'd had a meeting with a producer who could have pushed one of us up to the higher floors. She'd brought me along because we'd been planning a joint fragment series. And because she hadn't yet realized what I was really like.

"He picked me," I said.

"You introduced me as your assistant."

"And you never corrected me," I answered.

"And you spent the whole evening talking with him and had me fetching drinks for the two of you."

"You got a seat at his table."

"And you walked away with a contract."

Someone on the dance floor shouted with joy. One of the producers had just pressed his chip to a young poet's tablet, sealing a contract. Their names lit up on the screen above the stairs, and the two of them headed off toward the upper floor together. The crowd around them applauded, as if something extraordinary had just happened, rather than just another business deal.

"Did you come here for an apology?" I asked.

"After thirty years, it wouldn't be worth much."

"Then why are you here?"

Arven pulled a thin tablet from her purse and unlocked the screen. A frozen Fragment appeared on it, one I'd seen so many times on the Loop's billboard outside my apartment window that its individual images had burned themselves into my memory.

The street beneath the Aureola. A crowd of confused people. And in the middle of it all, a girl playing hero.

"If you're trying to show me what half the Loop is watching right now, you're a little late."

She started the recording with her thumb. The image moved. The girl ran across the shot, turned her head toward the camera, and for a single instant her face landed in perfect focus. Bright yellow text appeared beneath her figure:

ALERT WOMAN HELPS CATCH ATTACKER!

Arven paused the fragment and zoomed in on the face at the center of the screen. A young face, greasy hair tucked behind her ears.

"Bad footage," I said. "Why are you showing me this?"

"So you realize Phoenix isn't your only option."

She glanced over my shoulder, and I followed her gaze. Phoenix stood on the far side of the floor, surrounded by a cluster of producers. When he noticed me, he raised his blue drink in a toast.

Damn Virals.

"Phoenix has tens of millions of followers and a plan," I said. "I'd bet you have neither."

"I have her," Arven smiled and swiped across the screen.

A different recording opened. The image was grainier, the colors faded, the format belonging to an era when phones were bulky, footage was low quality, and life was simple.

In a small room sat a gaunt man with sunken cheeks and a shaved head. Behind him, shipping crates, cardboard boxes, and open sea containers were piled high. Arven's voice, thirty years younger, was asking him a question off-screen. Over the music in the hall, I couldn't hear either her or his answer.

A door opened in the background, and a girl walked in. Arven paused the recording and zoomed in on her face with two fingers.

The same eyes. The same mouth. Even the way she tilted her head, as if the world in front of her were a poorly worded question. It was the same girl from today's trend.

"I still don't see where you're going with this. Or why this girl gets me something better than what a tattooed raven can offer."

She smiled, and it pleased me.

"I was filming a series about illegal Pulse trafficking. It flopped, only earned me a few extra months of life. But it ended up turning into a long-term investment. That man on the video claimed a girl had lived with him for several months. A girl who had thousands of Pulses."

"Thousands? No one has that many Pulses. The Loop releases them gradually. Handing an individual centuries of life would violate every regulation there is."

Arven nodded.

"The girl in the video is barely fifteen, and I never managed to find her again. That's why the fragment fizzled out and left nothing behind but a pathetic follower count buried in the Loop's database. But here's the best part," she smiled. "I filmed that fragment thirty years ago... So?"

I didn't need long to work out what she was getting at.

"So if she still looks exactly the same," I finished her sentence, "she must have been taking Pulses this whole time, and the whole story must have been true."

Arven nodded again and asked me a simple question. "What if one of the founders gave them to her?"

"You think she's, what, Corven's illegitimate kid?" I laughed, but somewhere in the back of my mind a series was already assembling itself, one that could pull in millions of followers. A girl with thousands of Pulses. Nox and Arven uncovering her secret. Piece by piece. Just imagining all those comments, all those red hearts flooding the screen, gave me goosebumps.

"Yeah, something like that," Arven agreed. "And I have a lot more," she added, tucking the tablet back into her purse.

I stepped closer. I caught the scent of her hair in the air between us. Not sweet like the young poetesses around us. Something dry and bitter. Something I recognized but couldn't quite name.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Attention."

"Be specific."

"You announce that we're partners. You put me in your Fragments, introduce me to producers, and my name stands next to yours. Not beneath it. This time you play fair — I'll make sure of that."

"And in exchange, I get the footage?"

"Unedited fragments, raw interviews, and the name and last known address of the man she stayed with back then. Everything I have."

"Why not publish it yourself?"

"Because you'll do all the work for me, while I enjoy the privileges you stole from me thirty years ago — your audience, an apartment in the Aureola, eternal life, and maybe a few other things I haven't even thought of yet."

"Modesty never suited you."

"That's why I don't wear it," she answered, and the silver streak slid across her face. For a moment I felt the urge to tuck it back into place, to touch her temple without meaning to.

"You need my footage to get back in the game," she said. "And I need your chip on my tablet to open my way back up. We don't have to pretend we like anything else about each other."

I glanced back at the dance floor. Phoenix stood beside one of the producers, showing him something on a tablet. Probably already planning how he'd let me burn out so he could build his own career on my ashes.

Arven didn't have his audience, his youth, or a team of people approving every strand of his hair. All she had was a handful of old recordings, thirty years of carefully cultivated resentment, and a face I couldn't quite manage to look away from.

It was a terrible choice.

A choice I liked.

"Fine," I said. "Let's do it so everyone believes it."

I took her hand and started walking toward the dance floor.

"Nox," she slowed down, "what are you doing?"

"Giving you my audience."

I pulled her through the crowd of guests, all the way to the center of the black circle. The music was much quieter than it had been at the start of the Gala, but it still thrummed in our chests, and lasers sliced through the air around us. The neon Loop logo glowed at the center of the floor.

"Your tablet," I prompted her, and she fished it out of her purse. The people around us slowly began to turn toward us.

I pulled my Loop chip from my pocket and lifted it toward her tablet.

"If you don't actually have that footage," I said, "I'll say I mistook you for someone else and cancel the link."

"And if you screw me over again, I'll sell the footage to Phoenix."

I pressed my chip to her tablet. A short beep sounded, the Loop's logo beneath us blazed to life, and our profiles merged.

Our names appeared on the screen above the stairs. A few surprised gasps rang out first, then applause spread across the hall.

The reflections of poets' and producers' phones flickered in Arven's eyes as they filmed our every movement from every direction. I imagined all the fragments that would be cut from this moment and sent out into the world before long. I wanted to give them something more. Something worth talking about for longer than a few seconds.

Arven must have been thinking the same thing, because she pressed against me and waved to the crowd. She played her new role surprisingly well. I wrapped my hand around her waist, and my stomach clenched again at the thought of Lyra, once she saw these fragments. She'd surely realize it was all just a show. I was doing it for my career, and by extension, for her too.

I smiled into the lenses of the devices around us when a promoter with blue makeup appeared beside me.

"A Viral, Mr. Nox?" she offered it to me as if it were something scandalous.

I took the glass and raised it across the floor toward Corven, who was watching the whole scene from the safety of the bar. He wasn't applauding. He just stared at our names on the screen above the stairs. His lips were pressed tight, same as his fingers around his glass.

Arven followed my gaze.

"Seems like your friend isn't thrilled," she whispered.

"Corven doesn't like surprises."

"Then he's not going to like the next one either."

"What next one?"

Arven rose onto her toes and brought her lips close to my ear.

"He's in one of those recordings too."

I looked back across the floor, but Corven was already gone.