Often, I tried to get Jamie to talk for me when he knew the story well. I liked to watch the enthusiasm light up his face, and the way he used his hands to draw pictures in the air. Tonight, Heidi wanted to know more about the Dolphins, so I asked Jamie to answer her questions as well as he could.

The humans always spoke with sadness when they asked about our newest acquisition. They saw the Dolphins as mirrors of themselves in the first years of the occupation. Heidi’s dark eyes, disconcerting underneath her fringe of white-blond hair, were tight with sympathy as she asked her questions.

“They look more like huge dragonflies than fish, right, Wanda?” Jamie almost always asked for corroboration, though he never waited for my answer. “They’re all leathery, though, with three, four, or five sets of wings, depending on how old they are, right? So they kind of fly through the water—it’s lighter than water here, less dense. They have five, seven, or nine legs, depending on which gender they are, right, Wanda? They have three different genders. They have really long hands with tough, strong fingers that can build all kinds of things. They make cities under the water out of hard plants that grow there, kind of like trees but not really. They aren’t as far along as we are, right, Wanda? Because they’ve never made a spaceship or, like, telephones for communication. Humans were more advanced.”

Trudy pulled out the tray of baked rolls, and I bent to shove the next tray of risen dough into the hot, smoking hole. It took a little jostling and balancing to get it in just right.

As I sweated in front of the fire, I heard some kind of commotion outside the kitchen, echoing down the hall from somewhere else in the caves. It was hard, with all the random sound reverberations and strange acoustics, to judge distances here.

“Hey!” Jamie shouted behind me, and I turned just in time to see the back of his head as he sprinted out the door.

I straightened out of my crouch and took a step after him, my instinct to follow.

“Wait,” Ian said. “He’ll be back. Tell us more about the Dolphins.”

Ian was sitting on the counter beside the oven—a hot seat that I wouldn’t have chosen—which made him close enough to reach out and touch my wrist. My arm flinched away from the unexpected contact, but I stayed where I was.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked. I could still hear some kind of jabbering—I thought I could hear Jamie’s excited voice in the mix.

Ian shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe Jeb…” He shrugged again, as if he wasn’t interested enough to bother with figuring it out. Nonchalant, but there was a tension in his eyes I didn’t understand.