They performed it three days later, once Lucien had been stabilized enough to leave the hospital and Ezra had spent every waking hour preparing — consulting quietly with Roan's contact, the same one who'd helped build the dead man's switch weeks earlier, refining a technique that had never, as far as either of them could determine, been attempted for this purpose by anyone before them.

"I need you to understand the risk fully before we do this," Ezra said, the small device from the cabin now considerably modified, wires and components added with careful, obsessive precision over the last three sleepless days. "Going into a mind to extract something is...