I thought about going to Vegas, but I didn’t want to be any place where synths were property. I booked us a night at the cheap Gold Rush Hotel in Beatty nearby, a sleepy ghost town except for tourists from Death Valley National Park. When this whole unincorporated corpse of Nevada was still a part of the United States, the nation used it to test nuclear weapons in the middle of nowhere. I guess it’s only fair that we were there to lob bombs of our own.

We dumped our backpacks in our small hotel room and explored the tiny town, wandering into an open-air art gallery since you were supposed to do cultural stuff on dates, and soon ending up at a restaurant. We ate burgers and fries and cooled down with bottle after bottle of beer, switching to cocktails for dessert because why not? Not like we were going anywhere. Being in a different place with him made me goofy-brained and giggly, like we were skipping school.

I poured a martini into my stomach to try to drown out the sound of the bus wheels in Cape Town rolling away. I should’ve seen that Yusuf was on a mission to blast his memories of that same morning to static, too, with how many drinks he knocked back. I’d been there before. I should’ve known better.

I was the first one to bring up the attack, even though I was the one who’d blabbed about forgetting work for the weekend.

“We crossed a clear line here,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. Always the corner when he had to stop and think about what to say, instead of quark flavors and super-positions that came so naturally during our tutoring sessions.

“Is the whole world gonna start slapping cuffs on people for crimes they haven’t committed yet?” I asked, martini sloshing over my hands.

We spilled out of the restaurant and over the dusty sidewalks, all the while flinging accusations meant for Kaori and stabbing the air. Because who does Kaori think she is, playing with people’s lives like this? We dumped gasoline on each other’s fires, but I took my lead from the Storyteller voice that was prodding me to ask Yusuf, maybe this shouldn’t be a secret anymore?

We bought frozen cones from an ice cream truck and laid back in the grass of a public park, watching the clouds warp and blow past us. Chains on a swing set nearby creaked. We were just like the kids running around and playing freeze-tag, right?