Ha had not realized that she was done with the piece Evrim had put in front of her, but it was gone. Ha accepted the second one from Mínervudóttir-Chan’s hands. Then saw them—under the long sleeves of the jacket Mínervudóttir-Chan was wearing. The lacework of white scars up her wrists, clear as any sign could be. It wasn’t only the world Mínervudóttir-Chan had contempt for. Ha’s anger faded.

“Thank you.”

Mínervudóttir-Chan had seen her looking at the scars. Or had she shown them to her on purpose?

“There is another cake. And maybe that is the secret to a happy marriage. There should always be another cake. Or the promise of one. That was another rule I think I missed, along the way.”

“You can’t defend this place forever,” Ha said. And now her words came in a rush. All of the fears keeping her up at night, the dread suppressed by pills and concentration on her work: “No matter how many people Altantsetseg is willing to kill to keep this place safe, it won’t stop more from coming. Not once they find out what is here. Have you thought about that? About what comes next, and what that means for the octopuses we are studying? Not even DIANIMA, with all its international power, can protect them from the world. That world will come rushing in here. It will burst this fantasy world of yours like a soap bubble. And they will be poked, prodded, chased. The best-case scenario is they retreat to someplace where they can’t be found. The worst-case scenarios are so much worse I can’t even bear to think of them. This isn’t going to be a first-contact story, where humanity achieves enlightenment because we finally realize we aren’t alone in the universe, and we all hold hands and sing around a campfire together staring up at the stars. We don’t have the capacity as a species for a happy ending like that. No. This all ends in the destruction of whatever fragile little society they are building down there, in what is left of an ocean ecosystem we have been systematically destroying on an industrial scale for centuries. It ends with us wiping out yet another species. And this time, we will be wiping out a species that has a culture. It won’t be extinction: it will be genocide. And it will happen before I even get a chance to understand them…”

“Yes,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “It will happen. Again.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”