Word had spread far beyond the island that something had gone horribly wrong with the Arrival presentation. People close enough to Lisa to have her personal cell phone number were calling, one after another, hoping that the news of her passing was wrong. In the past half hour, Sandra had taken calls from several other titans of industry—one of them, she was pretty sure, was Richard Branson, but she hadn’t stayed on the call long enough to confirm it—as well as celebrities and politicians.

“I’m not Lisa Carver,” she’d been saying. “Ms. Carver—I’m sorry to be the one to tell you—is dead. I have to go.” God forgive me, she thought, if I just told a mother or sister or brother to basically fuck off.

Sandra emerged briefly from the community center to survey the damage. There was little left of the fire truck but charred, black metal. The ambulance was on its side, surrounded by several Arrivals that had essentially destroyed themselves in the attack. What had become of the paramedics? The surviving firefighters?

When she went back inside, Sandra had to deal with a different group of predators: journalists. They had questions and expected Sandra to provide answers. She’d been in the administrative office with Albert Ruskin, trying to figure out a way to get into Carver’s laptop, when several reporters started banging on the door.

“You go,” Ruskin said, his voice shaking. “I can’t. I just . . . I can’t do it.”

Sandra had given him an icy glare, but had agreed to meet with reporters in the gym in five minutes. “What am I going to tell them?” she asked Ruskin. “What’s the plan? What’s the strategy?”

Ruskin muttered something under his breath that sounded like little more than gibberish.

“What?” Sandra asked. “Tell me!”

But when he raised his head, and Sandra could look him in the eye, she saw nothing there. He was shutting down.

“Fine,” she said, and headed for the gym.

The questions came at her like a hail of bullets.

What had gone wrong? Was it a software fault by the company? Was Arrival Inc. a victim of corporate sabotage? Were the rumors of a ransomware attack true? What was the death toll across the island? Was it true that Arrivals elsewhere had gone rogue? What was happening to the company’s stock price? Had trading in Arrival shares been halted? Would Arrival financially compensate the families of those who’d died today?

Sandra tried her best with each question, coming up every time with, essentially, a variation of “I have no fucking idea.”

She attempted to explain that while she’d helped organize this event, she was not an official spokesperson for the Arrival corporation. The more logical person to answer those questions was Albert Ruskin, she insisted. Well, the reporters asked, why isn’t he taking our questions?

Good question.