There’s nothing but dust under the bed. No gun beneath the pillow, no grenades in the bedside table. What was I expecting?

I give up and sit on her bed, sighing. I snuggle under the cover, missing Tila so much it’s a physical ache. I’m angry at her, I’m terrified for her, and I’m a little terrified of her and what she might have done. But I’ve never gone so long without speaking to her, or seeing her. The blankets even smell like her perfume—lily of the valley. I press my nose into the pillow.

I allow myself to cry about it all. I’ve kept most of it bottled up close inside, trying to stay strong, to dampen everything through Mana-ma’s training; but I can’t do it anymore. It hurts too much. It’s not pretty tears. I’m keening and sobbing, my nose running almost as much as my eyes. I rock back and forth, clutching the pillow to my chest. I feel like a lost little girl. I don’t know how to save Tila. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I will. If I don’t figure this out, then my sister will go into stasis. I can’t even imagine never seeing her again. I really would be ripped in two.

It takes a long time before I stop crying. I sit up, sniffling, and take a tissue from the box on the bedside table. Beneath the tissue box is Tila’s sketchbook. Still sniffling, I take it and rest the book on my knees, flipping through the pages.

She loved to people-watch. She used to say she liked to record the people that surrounded her in her sketchbook. “It’s different than a picture. This is more honest,” she’d say, bending over the paper to shade in an eyebrow. She never used a tablet, always drawing the way she had at the Hearth, with pen and paper. “So many people. And we don’t really know what makes them tick. So few people we really, truly know in this world. With the rest of them we’re just pretending. But when I’m drawing them, I feel like I can find something about them that’s real. That maybe they didn’t want me to see. Sometimes I feel like I’m pretending with everyone except for you, Taema.”

I turn another page. Here are hosts and hostesses from Zenith—I recognize Pallua, Leylani and a few of the others, either that I saw that night or from the police information brainload. There are a few of her favorite clients—beautiful men and a few women, smiling and holding glasses of champagne. Their names are neatly printed next to them in our alphabet. Nadia. Jeiden. Locke. Men and women with money to burn to stave off their loneliness.