A few days before, she had told Evrim they would do their best work on this island together. But now this didn’t seem like a team at all. She was a part of something she did not understand, making calculations that were unacceptable to her. Putting the lives of innocent people in a balance, weighing them against the safety of her work, against the lives of the octopuses. As if it were a calculation. It wasn’t a calculation—it was killing. It may have been necessary, but she wasn’t obligated to find it acceptable. She could not—and the fact that both Altantsetseg and Evrim did frightened her. She remembered Evrim’s indifference: the way they treated the corpses, as if the bodies were no more precious than the sand they were being buried in.

She didn’t want to be there, at the table. She wanted to be with Kamran. Just talking with him, in the safety of her room. But Kamran would sense something was wrong. Kamran would want to help fix it. She wasn’t ready for that. Wasn’t ready to retreat into that easy relationship. To have someone try to heal her. The sight of the torn bodies on the beach, the cloud of flies: She needed to carry them with her a while longer. Needed to keep them in her mind—the way she had focused at times, during her studies, on the anger that came following a negative review, a rejection: Not as a way of stymieing her research, but as motivation to work harder, to push further. To make the sacrifices of all these people worth something.

The thought returned to her again and again. It had first come to her at the port of Ben Dam, where the scars of what had been done to the people here during the island’s evacuation were visible to her for the first time: the blood shed, the lives uprooted, the families ejected. The population of the archipelago had been only five or six thousand, at the most. But now they were five or six thousand refugees. Were they huddled together somewhere, in a single neighborhood, trading reminiscences of the islands they would never see again? Or were they already scattered across a dozen cities?

How much had DIANIMA given them? What compensation was enough for never being able to see one’s home again?

On-screen, the submersible was navigating into the dark hatch. Here in the research lab, Altantsetseg signed in a language shared only between her and the submersible she commanded. One gray-clad palm brushed against another. The submersible’s running lights brightened.