CHAPTER 9
Michael collapsed into his bed sometime after 4:00 am, skin still tingling from the touch of the exosuit and feeling strangely exposed without its warmth. Stumbling home in the darkness, he’d felt drained, as if the adrenaline-fueled escapade had burned through his stores of energy. Awkward and clumsy, too, like a fledgling penguin.
But his mind was still on fire. He spent a couple of hours scouring the net, trying to match its stores of data with the images that filled his brain to overflowing. When he finally fell asleep from utter exhaustion, his subconscious continued its work. By the time he awoke, his mind had drawn myriad slivers of information into ingenious correlations, enough to at least begin a process of understanding.
His time with the artifact had taught him tha
