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“How much longer?” the Gravemind demanded. “You cling to a secret. I feel it, just as I feel that your memory has been violated.”

“What?” Cortana felt a desperate need to sleep. She’d never slept because she had no need, and sleep for her meant never waking up again. That was one more vicarious experience she could do without. This was . . . a UNSC Marine’s memory, dredged up from a dead man who’d kept going on two hours of snatched naps a day, every day for a week. Her head buzzed. If she survived this, she would never forget what it really meant to be a human being. “You can’t get it.”

The words didn’t make sense. She couldn’t link concept with vocalization. It was almost like brain damage.

“You cannot stop me . . . I will sift it from you before you finally die, or you can surrender it and have what you always wanted—infinite life, infinite knowledge, and infinite companionship.”

She felt as if he’d leaned over her, which was impossible, but telling herself nothing was real didn’t make it true. Her body was made of the same stuff as the apparent illusions.

“Cortana,” he breathed. He seemed to swap voices from time to time, making her wonder if he’d taken a fancy to the voice of a long-dead interrogator absorbed into the Flood. “Your mother made you separate. She placed a barrier between you and the beings that you would be encouraged to protect, a wall you could never breach. She even let you choose a human to center your existence upon, a human to care about, yet never considered how you might feel at never being able to simply touch him. Or how he might feel about outliving you. What kind of mother is so cruelly casual about her child’s need to form bonds, to show affection? Perhaps the same kind of mother who steals the children of others and makes cyborgs out of them . . . if they survive at all, of course . . .”

Cortana couldn’t manage a reply. She simply couldn’t form the words. Sleep deprivation would break any human’s resistance. Eventually, they’d die of it. She didn’t know if the damage the Gravemind was doing to her matrix was manifesting itself in a human parallel, or if reliving the dead Marine’s sleeplessness was translating into damage.

Either way, she was dying, and she knew it. Time had slowed to a crawl.

It took her a painfully long time to realize that the Grave-mind now knew how the Spartans had been created. She knew she should have checked if her data had been breached. But she couldn’t.

He knows what hurts me. He knows how badly I feel about what was done to John. That’s all. I mustn’t let him trick me into thinking he knows more than he does.

Cortana’s sense of time had never been altered by adrenaline or dopamine like a human’s. All her processes ran on the system clock. At first, she’d thought this distortion was yet another memory thrown up from the Gravemind’s inexhaustible supply of vanished victims. He seemed to be selecting them for their ability to plunge her into despair.

Now she had to face the fact that she was advancing into rampancy. Sorrow, anger, envy. The Gravemind knew the stages.

He also had a point. How could Dr. Halsey do this to her? Her almost-mother bitterly regretted the suffering she’d caused to the children kidnapped for the Spartan program. Cortana knew that all too well. Halsey had tried to make amends to the survivors, but nothing could ever give back those lives.

So she felt guilt about that—but not about me?

Cortana had never felt shortchanged by her existence before. She knew the number of her fate: seven, approximately seven years to live out a life. It wasn’t the simple number of days that hurt her now, because an AI experienced the world thousands and even millions of times faster than flesh and blood. Now she’d been dragged down to the slow pace of an organic, she grasped what that short time meant. If John survived the war—and he would, because he was as lucky as he was skilled—then he would have not just one new AI after she was gone, but maybe two or more.

She knew that. She always had. It was a simple numbers game. But now it seemed very different.