“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Why? What for?”

“Everything. For . . . I don’t know. Everything.” My voice cracked on the last word, and there were tears stinging my eyes again. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save Ariana. I’m sorry I never asked . . . I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Jas,” Baqir said. Then, his voice little more than a whisper: “We’ll be okay.”

It overwhelmed me, how very much I yearned to believe him, to trust in the warmth of his hand holding tight to mine, his brown eyes warm and sad and knowing, and the reassurance that he was staying, staying beside me, staying close, and not leaving.

After a while he fell asleep with his head resting on the bed, a position that could not possibly be comfortable, but then Baqir had always been able to sleep anywhere. I watched him for a while, brushing my fingers gently through his dark hair, afraid to move too much lest I wake him. It seemed impossible that I could still be so tired, after doing almost nothing but sleeping for a couple of days, but my eyes kept slipping closed. Every time, every time, House of Wisdom was there, burning, and from the wounds in its side the dead drifted, alight as candles, and silver worms curled and crackled and whipped, and I could not grasp anything in the darkness. I had brought back an entirely new style of nightmare from House of Wisdom.

Eventually I gave up on sleep and turned on the wallscreen, without any sound, only to have something to stare at besides the gray city.

I was still staring blankly sometime later when the door opened. A nurse leaned into the room, and when he saw Baqir he rolled his eyes.

“There he is,” the nurse said quietly. “Should’ve known. He’s been asking about you nonstop for three days.”

I didn’t say anything, but whatever crossed my face made the man laugh softly. He came in to look over the medical monitors beside my bed. He had the tall, thin frame of somebody who had spent his life in low gravity, and he moved with the ease of a longtime Moon resident. When he saw the news on the wallscreen—they were showing images of the man called Adam Light and his top followers—he let out a breath and shook his head.

“Those people,” he said, and I tensed, not wanting to hear what he was about to say. But he went on, “It’s so heartbreaking. I can’t imagine being so desperate that devoting myself to a monster like that seems like the only way out. But I suppose that’s the problem, isn’t it? I live in a great bloody bubble on the Moon. I’ve never had to imagine it.”

The nurse caught me looking at him, and he smiled sheepishly.

“Sorry. You try to get some sleep too.”