“Lee. I’m…How did I get here?”

“Oh, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Kay said, sitting down at the desk and angling the laptop towards herself. “Can’t tell you that. Don’t fucking understand it yet. Which is a bother, really.”

“Why?” Lee looked over her shoulder. There was nothing comprehensible on the screen. Oh, she knew the individual numbers, and she could spot familiar conventions like equals signs and nested brackets, but the actual arrangement of characters was a wall of random text.

“Well firstly, darling, I am the best theoretical mathematician and physicist you will ever meet. And I am fucking well meant to be able to understand impossible shit like this,” Kay said sourly. “And secondly, I think the world is going to end, and I need to understand this if I’m going to make it stop.”

PART 2

LOOKING GLASS CREATURES

6.

I

Nobody could explain how it had happened. Julian had read through the reports of three agents who’d been monitoring Khan’s safe house. She’d been entirely happy with the arrangements, as far as they’d been aware. She’d had someone on hand to get anything she wanted. Another field agent had been positioned unobtrusively in the building, catching up on paperwork. A third had been off duty and asleep, but reachable. Nobody had expected Dr. Khan to simply vanish.

There was no camera footage. The safe house had surveillance inside and out, but the recordings had…gone.

“So what happened?” Julian was debriefing Roland Rigo, an agent who he’d always felt was sound. “I mean, I know she slipped out without anybody seeing her, but…there must have been something.”

Rigo rubbed at his lean hatchet of a face, a man who knew there was no way this would look good on his record. “Before? Nothing, Jules. I spoke with hi—her last, of the three of us. I got her a download of a book she wanted, and junk food. She wanted junk food all the time, said it was comfort eating, cos she was so stressed.”

“How stressed?”

Rigo shrugged. “You can’t always tell with someone, right? And he—and she was a bit high strung anyway, I reckon. But we’d been there a few days, and she was way calmer than she was at the start, at least.” He grimaced at the corners of the room, as though looking for a way out. “Jules, she’d settled.”

Julian nodded. “For the record, Roland, did she get any stick about being…”

“Trans?” The grimace deepened. “Not on my watch, and I don’t think so—I know, I screw up the pronouns. She called me on it, believe me, but…I don’t think that’s it.”

“And she didn’t get any calls, any contacts? Any information about the case, a threat against family?”