Arjun and the rest of my coworkers had already flagged a ton of footage from Figueiredo’s world and organized it into theoretical timelines. Arjun had told me when I’d first started here that all the footage from the Envisioner had been copied to a server, and then chunks of footage were randomly assigned to work queues for the techs to review. I figure, now, that Kaori didn’t think I’d be a model employee who scanned the footage queue every day to check out everyone’s flagged videos and notes. Because I sure had a knack for stumbling on important-looking footage for the assignments to be random.

Yusuf had a lot of patience for normals like me, which was a lot more than I could say for some of the others at Dr. Nakamori’s School for Smarmy Overachievers. But I dropped the word random in front of him once and could see the steam erupting from his ears.

“People use the word random when they don’t want to look for patterns,” he’d said.

My shoulders still felt lighter the day after confessing how I felt about Genesis to Yusuf, when I hit play on the latest batch of footage in my queue.

Figueiredo’s face was too close to the camera of whatever device he was recording on, the harsh lighting carving deep lines across his forehead and on either side of his mouth. The flickering overhead lights and the constant filming of his every task didn’t help much to quell his serial-killer vibe. Finally, the lights quit their firefly blinks and cast their glow over the airline hangar—or wherever Figueiredo was—with its lead-gray concrete floor, metal walls, and dozens of shadowed shapes that looked like boulders.

He stepped out of frame, talking to himself, and he must’ve flicked on another panel of lights. White light flooded the gray room, revealing each of the boulders as an Envisioner.

We knew he must’ve had a whole fleet of them but seeing them all gathered there prickled my skin with cold. I could feel their spider eyes moving on him. He strode to the closest machine, still talking to himself, and the thing’s greenish domed screens snapped to life. The one next to it, too—and the next, then the next. The Envisioners whirred and blinked when he strolled by, like puppies reacting to their owner, with answers to questions he probably thought but didn’t ask aloud darting across their screens.