Komachi approached Yuma, her sketchpad open to a page filled with symbols.

  “I… I need to show you something.”

  Yuma looked at the drawings—spirals, crossed?out circles, stars. Their pre?agreed code.

  But there was a new symbol: a flower with three small petals and two rge.

  “I drew this in the chamber,” Komachi whispered. “While deciding.”

  Yuma studied the symbol. “Three small, two rge. What does it mean?”

  “Three taps. Hikari’s Morse signal. Two people—her and me.”

  “You’re saying… she’s signaling through you?”

  “Maybe. Or… or I’m signaling to her.”

  Yuma’s mind connected the dots. “You think she’s aware. Even in coma.”

  “I know she is. The monitors… her neural coherence increased when I chose Sacrifice. She responded.”

  “Then the coma is…”

  “A ruse. A shield. ARK can’t eliminate her if she’s already ‘dead.’ So she’s pying dead. And signaling.”

  “Signaling what?”

  Komachi pointed to another page—a sketch of the central scale, but with the ptforms beled differently.

  Left ptform: ARK.

  Right ptform: PROMETHEUS.

  And between them, a tiny figure standing on the bance point.

  Subject Zero.

  Hikari.

  “She’s the fulcrum,” Komachi said, her voice trembling with realization. “The bance point between ARK and Prometheus. Between the test and the testers.”

  “And she’s tipping the scales.”