But humanity had cured HIV and had found life on Titan. No more Alzheimer’s. Almost no maternal death, anywhere. Here, let me lift the cue cards off-screen.

I guess what I’m saying—and sorry for getting so pissed here—is that I know squat about geopolitics. But I can still hear the bubbly-popping in the Theater after the big countdown when the bus rolled away from the bus stop.

Because the Envisioner filled in the outline of Kaori’s story, months later when me and Yusuf were marooned on our beach, about how someone had hired a kid to plant a backpack bomb on a bus outside of Cape Town, where two water cartels were warring for control of the Theewaterskloof Dam and the drinking water supply for six million people. Someone had told the kid his family would be taken care of. Extra gallons of water every day—more than they could ever drink. And I know that he was going to kill dozens of people and that’s a fucking nightmare that keeps me up at night. But instead of celebrating how Kaori and the team were able to use the Envisioner to send police to pull the kid out of bed that morning and cart him and the backpack bomb away—and I know I’m probably oversimplifying all of this—they could’ve done something about the cartels instead.

Unless Kaori chose this exact “solution” to this exact horror to send Yusuf over the edge and over to me for comfort, which—again—has my eyes up to the starry sky of my pink beach at night. As the Wheel of Misfortune spins round and round again.

But what the fuck do I know.

*   *   *

I couldn’t find Yusuf in his closet of an office by Kaori’s, once the confetti cleared and the champagne bubbles died on my tongue. No one knew where he was. I spotted him circling the outdoor track outside in the afternoon heat, his hands plunged into his pockets and his eyes locked on the ground. He’d ditched his lab coat. Dark storm clouds of sweat pasted his button-down to his armpits and mid-back. He blew past the thin dirt path that led from the track to the Compound without even noticing me there and I had to jog to catch him.

“Hey,” I said at his side. “Come back to Earth.”

He looked up and jostled his head like I’d launched a spitball at him. I fell into step with him and, since I didn’t want to push, we looped once around the track before I screwed up the courage to ask what was wrong.