The orphanage was not where she had learned to be alone, though. She had been lonely there, yes, but she had always held out hope. Things the next year would be different. A new girl would come and they would connect. Or she would be adopted.

It was here that she had learned what it meant to be completely alone.

She found herself thinking of Evrim. Of what they had said about the automonks at the temple:

I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when you look at a monkey. Unsettling.

That was how she felt, looking back at herself as a child: Like looking at some half-minded thing. An inferior version of the self she was now. A failed attempt.

Torn tarpaulins and ragged awnings flapped in the morning breeze across the maws of looted shops and warehouses. The road and jetty were scattered with ripped netting and shattered crates. There was a dark stain that could be dried blood.

This is the price the people of Con Dao paid. We should make their sacrifice worth something.

Hon Ba Island, green and silent, rose beyond the still life of a past chaos.

Ha walked back along the road, past a Buddhist shrine besieged by vines, past an abandoned ice factory where a monkey gathering fallen fruit stared at her.

There was no movement at the hotel. The sun was above the horizon, in a thin mist that silvered it and drained it of glare. The security gate opened automatically when Ha approached, as it had when she had left the hotel, though she could see no camera. Too crude. No, the camera would be insect-like, crawling along the hotel wall. Or winged and silent, a mote in the air above her.

She crossed the cracked terrace with its weed-choked pool. Below the silver coin of sun, she saw Evrim on the beach. Gathering shells?

But as Ha approached, she saw Evrim was sitting in the sand, hands wrapped around knees. And before them, at the tide line, a heap.

As Ha came closer, a cloud of flies rose from the heap and fell on it again. Ha saw the waterlogged clothes then, and knew. She began to run. No—to half run, pulled toward the scene but also resisting it. Evrim did not turn toward her. Ha stopped a few meters from the thing in the sand.

Half a man. Torn away at the waist, burned beyond recognition. Farther down the beach, another mound of mangled clothing and flesh. And then another.

Ha had seen a dead body before—a research assistant who had gone for a swim alone in the morning, and drowned. They had pulled her from the water hours later and brought her onto shore. Ha had looked down into the bloated horror of her face. But that had been nothing like this.

Evrim was muttering something, almost inaudible above the buzz of flies.