I stared at the ground, suddenly angry, all the mundane horrors of the day closing in on me. “How can you sit here wrapped up in this bullshit? Whatever happened to technolibération ? Solidarity with the renegades? Smashing the boycott?” My own meager skills and connections had already come to nothing in the face of the invasion – but somehow I’d imagined Akili proving to be a thousand times more resourceful: taking a vital role at the hub of the resistance, orchestrating some brilliant counter-attack.

Ve said quietly, “What do you expect me to do? I’m not a soldier; I don’t know how to win the war for Stateless. And there’ll soon be more people with Distress than there are on this whole island. If ACs don’t try to analyze the mixing plague, no one else is going to do it.”

I laughed bitterly. “And now you’re ready to believe that understanding everything drives us insane? The Ignorance Cults were right? The TOE sends us screaming and kicking into the abyss? Just when I’d made up my mind that there was no such thing.”

Akili shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know why people are taking it so hard.” For the first time there was a hint of fear in vis voice, breaking through the determined acceptance. “But … mixing before the Aleph moment must be imperfect, distorted – because if it wasn’t flawed in some way, the first victim of Distress would have explained everything, and become the Keystone. I don’t know what the flaw is – what’s missing, what makes the partial understanding so traumatic – but once the TOE is completed … ” Ve trailed off. If the Aleph moment didn’t put an end to Distress, the misery of a war on Stateless would be nothing. If the TOE could not be faced, all that lay ahead was universal madness.

We both fell silent. The camp was quiet, except for a few young children crying in the distance, and the faint clatter of cooking utensils in some of the nearby tents.

Akili said, “Andrew?”

“Yes?”

“Look at me.”

I turned and faced ver squarely, for the first time since I’d arrived. Vis dark eyes appeared more luminous than ever: intelligent, searching, compassionate. The unselfconscious beauty of vis face evoked a deep, astonished resonance inside me, a thrill of recognition which reverberated from the darkness in my skull to the base of my spine. My whole body ached at the sight of ver, every muscle fiber, every tendon. But it was welcome pain, as if I’d been beaten and left to die – and now found myself, impossibly, waking.

That was what Akili was: my last hope, my resurrection.

Ve said, “What is it you want?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on. I’m not blind.” Ve searched my face, frowning slightly, puzzled but unaccusing. “Have I done something? To lead you on? To give you the wrong idea?”