“I had become disconnected from others, and that disconnection put everything I cared about at risk. In the end, that disconnection destroyed the cuttlefish as surely as if I had done the poisoning myself. And I was repeating the pattern here, on Con Dao: being indifferent—indifferent to what is going on inside your mind, indifferent to Altantsetseg and how she must see things, indifferent to DIANIMA and what they want from this place, and the threat that presents. I needed to think clearly—not about myself and what I want, but about how I fit in to everything else that is going on around me, and what impact my actions have. That was why I had to destroy Kamran.”

After a long pause, Evrim said, “You spoke of indifference. And now I know that is what I was feeling as well—the indifference of others. Arnkatla created me—she brought me into this world. But she never seemed to care much for me—for me as person rather than product. And the world itself—I was alive like them, real as they were: They could see it. I had proved it to them over and over again. But they chose to ignore it. They debated me, as if I were theoretical. I was a concept, not a person. And then, with their laws and their bans, they made an outcast of me. An object. They threw me away, Ha. And the one who made me was so ashamed of me that she hid me here, out of sight.

“She never said a word to defend me, when the laws were passed. We went to the roof, to her private hexcopter pad on the roof of our offices in the HCMATZ, and she put me in the copter. She told me I had a new assignment, on an archipelago. Real work, finally. Enough show. But I knew what it was: banishment.

“When the copter was pulling away I looked down to see if she was waving—but she was already gone. I’ve said that Arnkatla always has multiple reasons for what she does, and it is true. But what is also true is that I am here because she needed me out of the way. And she never cared how that might make me feel.

“I know I am not a human, Ha. I know it for certain. I can never be one, because I do not understand humans.”

“That’s okay,” Ha said. “Humans don’t understand humans, either. Or at least I don’t understand them.”

Evrim put their long, copper hand in Ha’s. It had that same warmth Ha remembered from the beach, perfectly analogous to the warmth of a human hand.

But it was not a human hand: it was Evrim’s. No less, and no more.

There were no more sounds from outside: just the alarm. Then that stopped as well.