Static filled my head as I drifted through the Compound and into Yusuf’s bedroom, where Figueiredo’s shadow crept in under the door. The ball-bearings were back in the cement mixer of my gut, clanging around along with Figueiredo’s words. His eyes still kicked up my heartbeat. I felt him gliding along the walls and dipping into the shadows cast by the parking lot floodlights through the window blinds. Yusuf was zonked out in bed—lost to the even, slow inhales of sleep.

Tomorrow I’d tell Arjun everything I had seen, and there’d be lots of scrambling around the Footage Farm and the rest of the Compound. It’d throw everyone’s marker-board chronological theories about Figueiredo’s research lab mostly out the window. He knew about us, and he’d been watching us. Still was, somehow? What if he sent us the Envisioner out of panic because his underlings turned against him?

I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that it seemed like he was speaking right to me.

I crept into bed beside Yusuf, who murmured something as he rolled to face me. And then I couldn’t sleep—his breath across my face, his elbow jammed in my side—because the bed was too narrow and cuddling always sounds so romantic until your arm falls asleep. My face was somehow on fire and clammy at the same time, my body shivering and sweating the ghost of tequila past out of my pores.

Then leave, came Figueiredo’s shadow voice, just a whisper of sandpaper over the low hush of Yusuf’s breath.

I shifted in bed, easing his arm off me, and tried to shove out the voice by cramming my eyes shut. My eyelids were just screens for more footage of Figueiredo plucking off his gold-rimmed glasses to squeeze the bridge of his nose in annoyance. Sure, this is fun for a while, but you know that this won’t last. It never does.

I didn’t want to listen. The lamplight through the blinds turned the skin of Yusuf’s bent arm into a rolling desert landscape. He needed sleep more than I did, with all the work he was doing. Sure, sure. And I was leaving for him, right?