Padmavati Bhattacharya did not explain herself to anyone, and especially not to me, the nephew she had never wanted to raise. She had told me once that several people came forward after the House of Wisdom incident with offers to adopt me. For a time I let myself imagine what my life would have been like if she had let them. To grow up with another family, in the home of people who had seen a broken boy on the news and decided they wanted to surround him with warmth and love. To have siblings, cousins, impostor parents with wringing hands and sad eyes. I imagined a life in which they might have changed my name, taken me somewhere—as though such a place could exist—where I was not a constant reminder of the world’s tragedy. Where I could have been somebody other than my dead mother’s shattered son.

My aunt had never even met any of those would-be adoptive parents. She told me they only wanted fame and prestige, not a child. She was probably right. Still I wondered.

I waited as she set aside her dinner and turned to the kitchen wallscreen. She had eaten even less than usual. My aunt was a small woman, birdlike in her frame; when my mother was alive, she had dwarfed her older sister so much she could rest her chin on my aunt’s head. They would both laugh when she did that, playful, younger than their years. I could not remember when I had last seen my aunt laugh. I could not remember ever thinking her fragile before, but that evening, the two of us in our house by the lake, she looked so very small, and so very old, tired in a way that grayed her brown skin and stooped her normally dancer-straight shoulders. Fear and worry stirred beneath the selfish numbness I had been wallowing in for days. She never rested. She would not tell me if she was unwell.

A list of file names filled the screen.

“What is that?” I asked.

“This,” said my aunt, and she sighed on the word, an uncharacteristic pause, “is all of the data received from House of Wisdom before the transmissions stopped.”

A distant, low buzz filled my ears. My skin went cool and clammy all over. My aunt left me alone in the kitchen. She might have touched my arm as she passed; she was not one for casual gestures of affection. For a long time—minutes, an hour, time stretched and snapped around me, meaningless in its flexibility— I could not bring myself to open even one of those files. I didn’t know what to do. I hated that my aunt had given this to me and walked away. She would not have done so unless she wanted me to see something. She never did anything without reason.

Then, without even meaning to, I was looking for my parents.