Since that day in the cafeteria, I’ve stayed angry at Gemini Twain for almost two years. I guess that wasn’t fair or justified. But I don’t like anyone making my friends hurt.

Now, HP has been destroyed. Nelinha’s future is once again a giant question mark. Like me, she doesn’t have any family or home to return to. All we have is this boat ride to the middle of nowhere….

“This is crazy.” Her voice breaks me out of my trance. I wonder how long I’ve been standing there watching her work.

“What’s crazy?”

She holds up her gadget, which looks like a bespoke metal tennis ball that had a head-on collision with a Slinky. “If I’m right, this is a LOCUS.”

I try to place the name. The memory of Dr. Hewett’s dry voice comes back to me from some long-ago theoretical marine sciences lecture. “An electrolocation sensor?”

“Correct!” Nelinha wriggles her immaculately groomed eyebrows. “Imagine a more effective, undetectable alternative to radar and sonar, based on aquatic mammals’ senses. Whales. Dolphins. Platypuses. If I can figure it out, it could allow us to check for incoming hostiles without giving away our position.”

“Or it could make us light up on sonar screens,” I speculate.

“Maybe,” Nelinha agrees cheerfully. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

I shake my head in amazement. “How can you take all this so calmly? Stuff like that shouldn’t be scientifically possible.”

She tosses the LOCUS into the air and catches it again. “Babe, our understanding of the laws of science changes all the time. We’ve only got so many senses. We have such a narrow perspective on reality—”

“Uh-oh.” I realize I’ve blundered right into a #NelinhaLecture.

“That’s right, uh-oh. This LOCUS…it’s like something dolphins might engineer if they wanted to augment their natural senses. Or squid, if they had a few more millennia of evolution. Your ancestor was a genius. It’s like everybody was looking at the world in three dimensions, and somehow, he was able to step back and see it in five. Everything is the same, but everything is different. If we could replicate—”

I’m saved from the rest of the lecture when Ester stumbles in breathlessly, Top at her heels.

“COME WITH ME—YOU NEED TO SEE THIS.” Her eyes are red from crying. “YOU DON’T WANT TO, BUT YOU NEED TO.”

What I hate the most?

None of us will ever be able to get these images out of our heads. The feed recorded at HP by Dr. Hewett’s drones is playing on six monitors on the bridge. We will be reliving this trauma in full color for the rest of our lives.

Tia stands back from the console, her hands tented over her mouth. Virgil and Dru seem paralyzed at their stations. When we walk in, Nelinha grunts like she’s been punched in the chest.

The drones show us our former campus from six different angles. The bay churns white and brown, frothy with debris. The cliff has been sheared away in a near-perfect crescent, like some god took an ice-cream scooper and helped himself to a giant serving of California. Nothing remains of Harding-Pencroft except the buckled asphalt of the main driveway leading to the now-abandoned gatehouse. None of the videos show any people. I can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.