Our first official session after the supply run, we mostly talked shop, with me asking a million questions. I wanted to see what info I could wheedle out of Kaori for background on whatever doc-to-be I was filming at the Compound. I got her to gossip a bit about her staff—juicy if not super helpful—until she wised up and said we should leave work at work. Background snooping over. We spent a few of sessions after that mostly talking about our favorite sci-fi movies, with me drawing on my encyclopedic knowledge, and Yusuf and Kaori shredding the scientific accuracy of each plot. Then something shifted between them. We were all set to leave for one trip, when I headed to the Theater and both of them were as rigid as the angles of the Envisioner. Some calibration test had failed, from what I could gather, and she cut off his sentence that started with perhaps if you would just as soon as she saw me. Yusuf looked like she’d just thwacked the backs of his hands with a ruler.

I pushed them to reschedule for the next day because it was a month into my time at the Compound—when I theoretically would’ve been rolling out of my artist residency and back home with my finished doc about Genesis—and I wanted to celebrate. I should’ve read the grim line of Yusuf’s lips and the way that Kaori’s bent elbows jutted out from her hips. But all I thought about was myself. Big shocker.

“We should keep our promises,” Yusuf said looking from me to Kaori.

I shuffled Genesis’s tarot deck in the strained silence of the car on the way. I’d planned on trying to cut the tension by going full jester for them and reading their fortunes. Kaori would often sum up things with one word, out of efficiency. Guns were boring. Money was gross. Tarot was stupid, she told me as the cards rippled in my hands. Yusuf mumbled something about the iconography of tarot actually having valuable psychological significance, which was the first time I’d ever heard him disagreeing with his intellectual hero.

“Ah,” was all Kaori said, leaning back.

I should’ve kicked open the car door and barrel-rolled out into the desert.

In the restaurant, I soft-shoed for my life—yacking about what each card meant and spinning some dumb fortune for us that ended up with me not paying my share of that night’s bill. I could see stage-mom Genesis flailing at me from the wings behind Kaori. Smile! Smile more! At least Kaori chimed in with a few ahs and I sees here and there. A round of drinks and a plate of nachos later, Yusuf tapped on the nail-polish-flecked deck.

“What we’re doing is like this,” he said. “Trying to pull data out of a million possible stories. What you called stupid.”