She plugs it in. The lights go out.

Your eyes react to things that aren’t light. Ashlock learns this when the glow through the ice of the floor picks out their veins and skeletons, faintly, backed by colors that have no name. The drive is whining. Air thumps above them. Tach convulses, and she holds him down, eyes stung with the hate of it, counting seconds against transfer-rate math in her head.

“Three cronomicon, two cronomicon, one,” she whispers, fingers tight on the cable. She’s already pulling it free when she makes the same mistake as Orpheus.

Ashlock looks down.