Yumi set the sphere on the workbench between us with the care of someone handling a sleeping grenade. The blue-white veins pulsed in slow rhythm against the black metal, casting moving light across her face and turning her neon eyes into something alien. The graft in my chest answered each pulse with its own, a low tug below my sternum that felt less like pain and more like recognition.
Like two dogs hearing each other bark through a fence.
"This," Yumi said, and she pulled her goggles down over her eyes, clicking a secondary lens into place that made her left eye look enormous and slightly insectoid, "is the second prototype of something I've been working on for six years. I call it a Phase Edge."
She let that hang there. I waited.
"Phase Edge doesn't mean anything to you."
"Not a thing."
