Without realizing what she was doing, Ha found herself holding a macaroon out to Evrim. She had heard, in that interview on the ceiling above her hotel bed, that Evrim did not eat, though they could taste and smell. That they did not sleep. That they never forgot anything.

But how can you be human and never forget? Never sleep? Never eat?

Evrim looked at the object in Ha’s hand. “Is that a shell? A sea creature?”

“It’s a macaroon.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a dessert item.”

“Ah!” Evrim took it, held it in their palm, probed it with a long index finger, smelled it. Then smiled. “Thank you. I have never been given anything quite like it.”

Chapter 5

I think of my predecessors, staring under microscopes at the branching neurons of dead brains. They were no closer to the life that had once lived inside than an archaeologist is to the memories of the person who once held a water jug, now dug up in shards. Those pioneers of neuroscience could only sketch the roughest maps of the connections they saw, the blurred foundations of what once was a fortress.

We, on the other hand, can now reconstruct the entire castle, down to the finest detail: not only every stitch of its tapestries, but every scheme that flitted through the minds of the courtiers who lived and died in it.

—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds

5

THE CAFÉ where Rustem did most of his work was in a run-down part of Astrakhan, near the whitewashed old Kremlin walls. Centuries ago, it had been an Iranian merchant’s house. The former owner had decorated the place like a mosque—gold leaf and plaster squinches undulating from the domed ceilings. But whatever architect he’d hired, around the turn of the twentieth century, had an art deco flair that rendered everything pleasantly vegetal. And despite the mosque-like style of the place, the former owner had a heretical penchant for depictions of the human image—especially of lissome women strategically veiled, drawing water from fantastic springs or reclining on divans beneath arbors voluptuous with grapes.

Age had patinaed it all and flaked away a number of the frescoes’ more interesting moments. Clumsy additions had marred it—wainscoting that hacked a bathing beauty unceremoniously in half, doorways that prematurely ended the Sultan’s lion hunt. But the architecture, and its later chopping up into apartments and storerooms over the decades, offered privacy. The café was a labyrinth of small rooms—screened with wooden lattices, or cut off from prying eyes with rotting velvet curtains or quaintly suggestive tapestries in a sort of One Thousand and One Nights meets late-Russian-Empire style.