She didn’t know yet what linked Figueiredo to the machine. She didn’t need to know, really. That was for her staff to piece together, later. There would be decades to figure it out, and books to write, and she’d pioneer entire fields of physics and quantum resonance imaging to pierce through the shell of the machine to see what’s inside, what foreign energy the thing ran on. Right now, Hayes just had to be similar enough to Figueiredo for the link to activate, and then she could guide him. Help them prepare for natural disasters and regulate the climate. Keep them from annihilating themselves with nuclear weapons or genetic warfare. The problem with Figueiredo—well, one of them—was that he wanted to be a god.

But she could make Hayes a tool.

They were genetically near-identical, meaning the connection wasn’t just a simple gene link. What else made up a person, a consciousness? Memories. Emotions. Don’t say love, don’t say love. If E was the Envisioner link and F was Figueiredo—her marker squeaked in the footage that I had to blink through the tears to see—and H was Hayes, she could map this out. What did she need to do to H to make him the percentage of F that activates E?

She didn’t have forever for trial and error. Don’t say love, don’t say love. But there was something that would change him so fundamentally—his body chemistry, his hormones, his memories—aligning him closer to that percentage of F, maybe. What happened to Figueiredo before his breakthrough?

He’d met his Yusuf. He’d fallen in love and changed himself—became more ambitious, tried harder. And Yusuf had helped with the research, too. She had to bring them together.

“You’re talking to it again?”

Back on the beach where my feet were, I blinked from the Envisioner to see Yusuf with a T-shirt full of dark purple coconut things bundled in his arms, his sunburned forehead wrinkled at the sight of me.

“Just trying to find answers,” I said.

“Find anything good?”

The cold look in Kaori’s eyes in the footage scraped barbed wire across my chest. I had to tell him what I’d just seen, but I was still slogging through what it meant for both of us. How he bucked against the idea of fate and how stupid and impossible it was because nothing was ever supposed to happen a certain way. So, sure, forget about fate. Would it change how he felt about me if he knew that we only even met because Kaori was messing with us like we were an experiment and she was watching us from beyond the glass?