“He would not willingly give us the information we wanted,” Lucia continued, apparently satisfied with the reaction such an unveiling had produced. She walked around Ben in a slow circle, her hands clasped behind her back as though she were instructing a class on the matter. “So we took it from him. He was so weak, Hedge Master. A sharp mind, I agree. Sharp enough to have aided you in building your machine and designing its purpose, but nothing remotely close to your genius, I’m afraid. Still, we found what we were looking for, and he didn’t even put up a fight.” She slipped her hand below a section of the wires and let them fall through her fingers, as if stroking the long hair on a child’s head. “We downloaded his entire memory—every cell, every firing neuron, every particle of molecular
