I wasted time with footage reports the next day, waiting until I could find Yusuf for dinner. He was too busy to eat, he told me, talking of probability waves and Envisioner question parameters, sentencing me to a solo night of reheated pizza slices. He didn’t show for our nightly divination session with the Envisioner, either. I found Kaori in her office, where marker equations and notes covered the three glass walls, making it look like her handwriting hovered in the adjoining Theater. Her desk was a slab of glass stacked with Envisioner printouts and abandoned mugs.

“No Yusuf tonight?” I asked.

She didn’t bother looking up from her Envisioner readout, her fingers threaded through the handle of a mug that was veined with gold. “You’d know better than I.”

“I should go remind him we’re here.”

“He’s a big boy. I’m sure he just got busy.”

I frowned. “So we’re just going to completely pretend that last night’s weirdness never happened.”

“Ideally.”

“You don’t want to… talk this out?”

She finally looked my way. “Hayes, when has the answer to that ever been yes in the history of anything?”

For Yusuf’s sake, I bit back a sarcastic crack and sat at the chair across from her. Neither of them asked me to choose a side on whatever they were brawling about, but I felt yanked in the middle anyway. She had to know how much a fight between them tore him up, how he worshipped the ground she walked on, in his own way. Didn’t she? She must’ve seen the war going on behind my eyes and decided to give me a break before I had an aneurysm. She sighed.

“He doesn’t like the direction of the research here,” Kaori said. “And I almost wish he’d fight. I’d enjoy the challenge. A coup. Rally the researchers and we can duel over who has the strongest vision for our work. Instead of this sulking.”

“You have to know he’d never do that to you.”

I knew he’d worked under her for seven years at Oxford when he could’ve left and chaired a university department himself before he was thirty-five—at least that’s what he told me. I’m in for the research, not the ladder-climbing bullshit, he’d said of his career.

“He’s not that ambitious.”

“It’s not that. He trusts you.”

She scrunched her mouth up to one side. “I have been a bit rigid.”

“You? Never.”

“You know, he turned down a director position at the Large Hadron-X to come here? I asked him to. I promised he’d be an integral part of this work. I told him that I needed his vision.” She took a slow sip of her tea. “I told him I needed his help to change the world. Perhaps I haven’t been delivering on that.”

“You can change. If you want.”