We met halfway between the door and his glass habitats. I stared at the creature in his hands. True enough—the dead butterfly was completely encrusted with an emerald-green fungus. The outstretched wings had sprouted a thousand tendril colonists, topped with red and resembling a confusion of antennae. It looked like some intricate wind-up toy covered with jewels. It looked more beautiful than it could have alive—not just a butterfly choked with fungus, but a completely new creature. Even the texture of its exoskeleton appeared to have changed, become more supple. I stared at it with sudden irrational fear. It was too similar to the process that had begun to claim my brother. (I am neither butterfly nor fungus, and I chose my fate, but I appreciate your concern.)

Sirin’s voice brought me back to the present.

“It’s a shame, Janice,” he said. “A terrible waste. A tragedy of Manzikertian proportions. I should never have left.” He had recently returned from a “vacation” in the Southern Isles forced upon him to avoid the backlash from his role in the Citizen Fish Campaign, about which the less said the better. (Even an aging historian such as I, Janice, must consider that statement a challenge: Senior members of the Hoegbotton clan had suggested Sirin temporarily disappear after it became known through a leak to the city’s broadsheets that Sirin had been behind Citizen Fish, an effort to fill the recently vacated Antechamber position with a stinking, five-day-old freshwater bass.)

“You had no choice,” I said.

A dismissive shrug. “We might have won the election. Anyone would have been better than Griswald. He’ll last a few weeks, perhaps, before they tear him down. Figuratively, one can only hope. A shame.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.” But I wasn’t sure if he meant the butterfly or something more elusive, more dangerous. The distance between us grew with each new utterance.

Sirin turned toward his desk, butterfly still cupped in his hands, and seemed startled by the cacophony of papers, books, pens, manuscripts, newspapers, and contracts that greeted him. Most prevalent were the manuscripts, which had been so thoroughly lacerated with red pen marks that they looked as if they were bleeding out. (Sirin the Invasive, I used to call him. Always trying to put his stink on a poor writer’s immaculate style. Always intimidating people with his little red pen. I used to joke that if he had had to use his own blood to make his marks he’d have been stingier with his criticism.)

“Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to a chair piled high with books. “Just push those off.”

Bent almost double by the burden, I did as he suggested. As I sat down, I could not help but notice a ragged piece of paper, in his handwriting: “Did the arrival of the Manzikert family in some way trigger a change in the gray caps? Did the arrival of M ruin our chance to understand them?” (That is another thing I will never forget about Sirin: his ragged notes, the emissaries of authorial destruction.)