Hassan hadn’t made it for me, I knew. He was fussing over the man whose face I was wearing, whose clothes I was in. Whose eyes glared at me from the walls in this house, this mausoleum for their love.

“So good,” I told him through a mouthful of cake that was turning into cement on my tongue. “So, so good.”

Grinning, he pushed off from the stool at his breakfast counter and started gathering the dishes of our mushcube masala. Yusuf hopped up to help while I choked down the rest of the strawberry shortcake as a favor to Rui. When the dishwasher softly gurgled from the kitchen, we moved to the living room, where Hassan yanked books off the shelf to show Yusuf something they’d been chatting about. They flapped their hands at pages, and each other, and out to the world—smiling and chattering and solving equations already—because if Figueiredo and me were each other’s shadow, Yusuf and Hassan were brothers. Twins.

Before I’d handed Hassan his Portacle back, I’d asked it what do we do? No luck. Invalid query. Hassan had told me that the things have limited predictive power since they’re a dumbed-down user-friendly version of the Farsight. I don’t know what I expected the thing to say, anyway.

“You have to come to the center with me tomorrow,” Hassan said to Yusuf over a world atlas. There were no refugees coming in for a while, so things at work were a little lax. “I’m already thinking about all the research you can help me with.” He looked up quickly and had the politeness to add both of you even though we both knew I could contribute squat.

He’d dropped his citizen card that I returned to him in a bowl by the front door, which also held his work badge. I wonder, now, if he made a show of doing it—look, Hayes, where I’m dropping this. I see you. Smile at the birdie!—but I know that’s unfair. That shifts the blame from what I was already planning onto him and away from me, which I’m really good at.

“Quantum time entanglement theory you called it?” Yusuf asked.

“Time travel,” Hassan said.

And with those words, I disappeared for the night in Yusuf’s eyes.