A bubbling sack of poison bursts open in my stomach. I vomit discreetly over the threshold. Jagjeet looks down on me, his face velvety and bunched with pathos. He is sorry for me. Of course, given the power of my discernment about people, perhaps he’s mocking me. Either way, the grief and heartbreak and betrayal manifest themselves in a novel way. I haul off and deck Jagjeet in the face as hard as I can. I don’t cry out “And a-one” and I don’t miss, but he doesn’t make a noise or move to block it. He just takes it. As if he deserves it. Or as if he wants to give me something, and this is the only thing he has. Blood worms out of one of his nostrils and he just keeps looking at me with those I’m Sorry eyes, saying nothing.

Snooping through the rest of the apartment is no less vertiginous and no less painful. I find notebooks with detailed records of all manner of Starksiana: my toxin resistances, dosages, vulnerabilities, on-job manner, schedule, locations, provenances of the works I pulse. Everything. On the coffee table is a case of very faintly colored blue contacts—tricky—and in the closet I discover a set of foam body-contoured padding, the man-suit that Charlie wore under her clothes to disguise the narrowness of her waist, the curve in her pelvis, her breasts. There is a second bedroom63 whose only furnishing is a cage with a polecat whose fur is so patchy it looks as if he’s suffered the depredations of chemo: the oft-scissored source of Charlie’s calling card, I real-ize.A plaque bolted to the wires says “Otto.” Jagjeet shrugs as if to say, “Who can possibly plumb the mysterious workings of a woman’s mind?” I put a finger through the bars and he puts his wet, twitching, calico-and-pink nose on it, sniffs, comes to some kind of mammalian determination, and licks me.