Preface: This one jumps right off of the last one, for once.


Rinzler


It accelerates so very quickly after that. The gangster doesn't talk. Tron doesn't torture him. I don't touch him again once he's restrained. All he has for us is a diatribe on our handling—Tron and his handling—of the system, chatter, chatter, none of it helpful to us. Tron sighs behind his helmet.

"Bring him in."

"You can stick me in a cell," the program says. "I don't care. It won't help. This system has rejected you, do you hear me? We are the order, and you can't—"

I shove past Greshim, the big dull one, to drop to a knee in front of the gangster.

"What do you fear?"

He all but spits on me. "Go short yourself."

I hold up an arm.

"What do you fear?"

"What am I looking at, glitch brain?" he demands. He stares warily at my upper arm, at the bands of bright color like cuts around my biceps. I remember what user blood looks like. It's not this bright, not this warm. But I remind myself of it sometimes, all the same.

I don't ask him a third time. I stare at him instead, and wait. Something is slowly processing in his expression, like he's seeing me for the first time. The light lines in my skin, glowing from beneath.

"We represent order," he says, some of the force gone from him. Good. I'm tired of him in the hateful way that Tron and his band of desperate misfits can no longer muster. I don't feel like listening to it anymore.

I disable the orange circuit mask that hides the emblem on my arm. I let that register on his face, too.

"There is no order," I tell him, as the horror flashes to life in his eyes, a spark somewhere inside him. "You live a lie."

I step up and away, and his captors drag him to his feet. He stands on weak knees. Staring at me.

He's welcome to look.

I'm used to being on display, and I am at my best when that display is a tool for my own devices—once Clu's. I don't like being watched, looked at when I'm not demanding it. But with him, now, I am, awash in the horror and shock on his face and his incomprehension of how I can be. With what I mean. Which is surely something.

I have no doubt of that—

The fear I breed, even around this people who have decided to pretend to trust me, cannot be for nothing.


Tron


It takes three shifts before the program talks. He does it with Rinzler staring at him from beneath a helmet. Silent. Watching. As he used to do.

As I did.

He stands tall and stoic for microcycles on end. Not too impressive, I suppose, given that he has nothing better or more important to do, though it's striking to my mind nevertheless. He's restored his disc's settings and his power consumption now at its optimum has him on his feet constantly, as if he never needs to sleep. I think I remember something about ISOs that way: some tendency to draw power from the system around them as if it were a part of them. Flynn always found it fascinating.

When the program finally cracks, he calls himself Das, and he tells what his operation looks like. He tells us that he is one arm of a larger system. He also tells us where he's been working out of: Bostrom.

It turns out that I remember the place.


Yori


There was a brief period between Clu's coup and when I lost—really lost—Tron, and in that time he developed a network the two of us shared that was as extensive as it was ugly. We knew people, then, whom no one could trust. And some of them, as it turns out, still remember us—including Das' associates. Reports tell me that they're more defiant of Tron than they used to be, but Tron is not as patient as they remember, and they make short work of whole arms of the criminal network that I pause—despite the never-ending scroll of other tasks staring back at me—to map.

It's perfectly clear, looking at it this way. I send the information along, and as I do, I can't help but think that if Tron and the enforcement team don't have the ringleader in custody by the end of this shift, I'll be genuinely surprised.