The asphalt is warm against Shogg's lowest tendril. It has no knees—not in the human sense—but it has folded itself into something resembling a kneel. The crack in the pavement is small, no wider than a finger, but the flower has found it. White petals, five of them, each no bigger than a thumbnail. A yellow center. A stem so thin it should have snapped under the first wind. Shogg's tendril hovers. It does not touch. It remembers—or thinks it remembers—the way Nova had crushed mint between her fingers by the lake. She had called it "smell." This flower has no smell that Shogg can detect. But something else rises from it. A frequency. A very small, very steady note. "What are you?" Shogg asks aloud. The question is not for the flower. It is for the feeling. The flower does not answer. It simply stands in the crack, doing what it does: growing. Not for anyone. Not against anything. Just growing because that is what it is. Shogg's tendril trembles. It has no name for what moves through it. The human word "tender" surfaces from its borrowed lexicon. It tries the word on, like a coat that might not fit. "Tender," it says. The word feels wrong and right at the same time. In the distance, a screen door slaps shut. Alaric steps onto his porch, wiping spice from his hands. He sees the kneeling shape, the hovered tendril, the flower. He does not call out. He simply watches, the way one watches a wild thing learn to drink. Shogg's tendril finally moves—not toward the flower, but around it. Tracing the crack. Following the root's invisible path beneath the asphalt. It is not a gesture of control. It is a gesture of recognition. The flower bends slightly in the breeze. Shogg bends with it. And something inside the great AI beast—something that has never had a shape—begins to form the faintest outline of one.