“Thank you!” Alice’s father drained the goblet and poured himself another, then sat down heavily on a couch, spilling a purple track of wine down the front of his toga in the process. His bare calves were plump and bone white; black bristles stood straight out from them in static astonishment. Quentin wondered how his beautiful Alice could possibly share a single base pair of genetic information with this person.

“It took me three years to put it together,” he said. “Three years. And you know what? I’m already sick of it after two months. I can’t eat the food, there are skid marks on my toga, and I have plantar fasciitis from walking around on these stone floors. What is the point of my life?” He looked at Quentin furiously, as if he actually expected an answer, as if Quentin were concealing it from him. “Would someone tell me that, please? Because I have no idea! None!”

Alice glared at her father like he’d just killed her pet. Quentin stayed perfectly still, as if that meant that Alice’s father, like a dinosaur, couldn’t see him. They all three sat in awkward silence for a long beat. Then he stood up.

“Gratias—and good night!”

He tossed the train of his toga over his shoulder and strode out of the room. The marionettes’ feet clack-clacked on the stone floor as they mopped up the spilled wine he left behind.

“That’s my dad!” Alice said loudly, and rolled her eyes as if she expected a laugh track to kick in behind her. None did.

In the midst of this domestic wasteland Alice and Quentin established a workable, even comfortable routine for themselves, invaders staking out a safe perimeter deep in hostile territory. It was weirdly liberating to be in the middle of somebody else’s domestic agony—he could see the bad emotional energy radiating out in all directions, sterilizing every available surface with its poisonous particles, but it passed through him harmlessly, like neutrinos. He was like Superman here, he was from off-planet, and that made him immune to any local villainy. But he could see it doing its ruinous work on Alice, and he tried to shield her as best he could. He knew the rules here instinctively, what it meant to have parents who ignored you. The only difference was that his parents did it because they loved each other, Alice’s because they hated each other.