Oh, bravo. I could practically hear Narek smarm, clapping. Classic fucking Hayes. He’ll go on about wanting to take the bullet, then when it’s time, he hits the deck like a coward.

*   *   *

I stayed away from Yusuf that day. Even though Kaori was already gone, I could feel her eyes watching us. Only after everyone else in the Theater cleared was I able to track him down in his office. His old office, I guessed, figuring he’d move into Kaori’s soon.

“Should I call you Director Hassan?”

Yusuf frowned, standing in the center of the room like he forgot why he was even there. “Interim director,” he said. When he caught my eye, I saw a tiny spark. “And only in the sack.”

It wasn’t the first joke he made to me, but it may as well have been, I loved it so much.

He didn’t have time for any was it us handwringing, not when he was ready to steer the ship away from what he knew were Kaori’s bad calls. We should be looking backwards instead of forwards—literally—using the device to ask about and gaze at the earliest instances of this universe where the laws of physics probably didn’t even exist yet. We should be trying to stitch together quantum physics and relativity, not dicking around with predictions. Kaori set some parameters about what kinds of past-facing questions the staff could ask, given the leakers still potentially here—so questions about personnel or other vague non-research topics that might otherwise cause more panic were off limits. He didn’t like having his hands tied, but he could deal, and he was on fire already with talk of what this could mean for everything. I forgot about Kaori trying to scold us all into feeling guilty because I believed in him.

“This is my chance to do something big, for as long as I’m here,” Yusuf said.

I know he meant it like as long as I’m temporarily filling her captain’s seat, but looking back, his words sound ominous. As long as I’m alive.

*   *   *

We were so cut off that watching the world grapple with the news of the Envisioner was just like sitting in a movie theater. None of this was real. The only link I had to the outside world was a TV in one of the breakout rooms that was always switched to the news. During breaks from the Footage Farm, I’d head there for some microwaved food and watch the protests in front of the White House and the Pan-African Parliament in Khartoum, the signs and the shouting so scattered that it didn’t seem like the people knew what they were pissed about. Beam Me Up scrawled in marker on a sign, next to someone with Everyone Loses the Arms Race.