“No, Kamran. What I mean is that I am, literally, trapped. I am a prisoner here. If I try to leave the island, Altantsetseg has orders to kill me.”

“Certainly she wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“I wouldn’t want to test it.”

“And DIANIMA—they can’t possibly justify that.”

“It’s not them that justified it. It’s me—lying to myself, telling myself that a nondisclosure contract would be enough. That they would be satisfied with such a thing. Why? Why would they be satisfied with that? A contract? My word? Their company is on the brink of proving the existence of an advanced form of life on this planet outside of the human. I had no reason to think they would allow me to leave here with that knowledge. None at all. Except that I wanted to be here. That I wanted to be the one. So, I told myself what I needed to hear. I lied to myself. I put myself in danger.”

“Everyone does it. Everyone lies to themselves.”

“That’s no excuse. Not when the lie has so many consequences. My presence here is moving something forward that I don’t understand. And I never even thought about any of that. I never stopped to care about it. What am I a part of? What will be the consequences of my work? I’ve been lying to myself about so many things, for so long. One lie piled on top of another. I need to stop. I need to have a clear head. See things exactly as they are so I can be sure of what the results of my actions will be. How do I get help? Who are my allies? Where can I turn? I keep thinking of the cuttlefish. I can’t allow that to happen again. I won’t.”

“You know it wasn’t your fault, Ha.”

“No. It was my fault. I was running the research station, working out my theories, my experiments, so absorbed in them and in my project that I never stopped to think about where my actions might lead.”

“It doesn’t help to—”

“Hear me out. The whole story. You’ve never allowed me to tell it to you. You always tell me to ‘let it be in the past.’”

“All right. I am listening.”

“For the entire four years we were there, we were fighting a battle with the locals encroaching on our project’s territory. They were constantly poaching fish, using whatever means they could—spears, cyanide—they even killed some of the cuttlefish we were studying. I hated it. Hated them. They were destroying everything we had built up, threatening our experiments, and my animals.