I wrestled with whether to tell Yusuf about the footage of Figueiredo and Tiago, ignoring the sugar-rush at picturing me and him together. I didn’t want to mix up whatever was happening between us—this limbo between hanging out as friends or something more—by slamming the gas pedal. Hey, it looks like we’re married in the other universe. Should we at least make-out in this one? We had no phones and I didn’t know how to reach him. I didn’t even know which one of these tin box houses he lived in. I’ve never been into game-playing and waiting some random number of days to text someone. I could practically hear Genesis’s voice ribbing me. You’re knee-deep in a multinational conspiracy to keep the most significant scientific discovery ever imagined from the public, and here you’re worried about getting dick?

I buried myself in work for the day. I told Arjun about the riot footage and his teeth glinted through his smile in the lab as he wrangled the others for an all-hands snoop for any clue about what happened. I even made a few bags of vending machine popcorn in the kitchenette and lugged them over to the farm. One of the other techs pulled up some footage of Figueiredo on the big screen and I tossed a few faux-buttery kernels at his face, booing.

“You think this asshole ever smiles?” I asked.

I was the circus ringleader running a room again, killing time by trying to make the others laugh. Until—screw it—I found Yusuf in the Theater before the staff cleared out and told him to meet me before he left for the night. We could walk back to our houses together.

The other techs cleared away one by one, leaving me without the armor of my jokes. Hours of watching Figueiredo and the way he bulldozed everyone, with his staff clearing paths for him and clamming up whenever he was near. As much as he was an asshole, I admired how he took no shit from anybody and knew what he wanted.

Then, sometime past ten when I thought Yusuf had forgotten about me for the day, he knocked on the Footage Farm door and sat down by me with a tired sigh, brushing his knees against mine. For a moment, my whole world shrank to just that warm point of contact between us and I forgot about what I’d planned to say to him. To hell with rushing. I pulled up the scene of Figueiredo and Tiago, and hit play, the whole time watching Yusuf’s eyes. This close, his eyes glinted an iridescent brown, like the glossy shell of a beetle.

“What do you think?” I asked him after we’d watched twice.

“Who was shot?”

“I don’t know. This is the only angle of the footage I’ve found so far. We’re looking for more.”