Alright, I may have been purposely trying to work him up.

“You know I’m not saying that,” he’d said. “A lamp is not a quantum event.”

“Then refresh my memory, doc.”

“Particles are clouds of probabilities that—”

“The wave function,” I’d offered. “See, I’ve been taking notes.”

“Right. Do you want me to finish?”

“Yeah.”

“Observation is… is a violent action that collapses the wave function in the instant of—”

“People observing is what makes the particles actually real.”

“No, no. Think of it as measurement instead of observation. Or something knocking into something else. Nothing about magic, nothing about consciousness making reality.”

I’d listened to him talk for a while about the outcomes of this experiment or that one, proving his point and doodling on the windows like he’d loved to. What had stuck with me the most, though, was observation as violence. Collapsing wave-functions and squashing possibilities. I’m just here observing, I’d said more than once with my camera in hand at some place where people hadn’t wanted me to be.

*   *   *

There are things I observed that didn’t make sense, the day of the attack, after the security staff hauled away the body of the black-clad intruder with his new forehead bullet hole and mopped the blood off the floor. After the news that the security drones and reinforcements had robbed the armada of their weapons and kicked them out far into the desert. I didn’t ask about the casualties. Panic bled into a slow drip of hours with Yusuf in his bedroom, kissing the knuckles of his steady hands, asking him again and again, are you okay? He said he was fine—if not surprised by how fine he felt—and I told him I’d have done the same. Why feel guilty about shooting someone who had a gun pointed at your head?

The hows and whys niggled me. How did Yusuf get the gun? How did Yusuf, a Ph.D. not a sniper, shoot the guy clean in the forehead without harming Xin? Why did things turn out different than what the Envisioner seemed to tell me would happen, and what did it have to do with whatever connection, whatever spark I’d felt when I’d pushed at the machine with my mind? All this building up into static that kept me awake late into the night, eyes pinned to the ceiling.

Kaori, again. But at the same time, here we are.

After Yusuf fell asleep, I slid out of bed and looked down at him. The bow of his parted lips. The hairs over his crossed forearms. The two lines between his knit eyebrows, like he was pouting even in sleep. I moved like a ghost, careful not to wake him, as I shrugged into my clothes and wandered back to the Compound.