“Yes. Though there is certainly nothing new about that. By the way—this is also the beach where a ranger was allegedly killed by the ‘Con Dao Sea Monster,’ as the islanders called it. Though many say it was his fellow ranger who killed him, in a lovers’ quarrel. The fellow ranger told quite a story: He said his friend was spearfishing along the water’s edge. And then he saw an octopus … walk down the beach like a man, kill his friend, and disappear into the ocean.”

Ha had not, in fact, heard any of this. “How did the ranger die?”

“He was slashed to death with a razor. That was what the inquest surmised after the autopsy. In the end, the authorities decided it was turtle egg poachers, and not the fellow ranger. That the fellow ranger’s story was a cover-up to save his own skin. That he didn’t want to rat out the poachers who had really done it, risk them coming after him as well.”

“Slashed to death?”

Evrim watched the little discs of turtles paddling through the inlet’s bright water. “Yes. Over ninety cuts to the arms, face, chest, and head. His aorta was severed.”

Ha helped the automonks direct several of the turtles back toward the ocean as they attempted to clamber up the beach. Finally, all of them made it into the water. They paddled their way awkwardly, childishly, through sun-bright chop. Watching them, Ha felt a sense of peace come over her again, a contrast to the darkness earlier, the confrontation with the human cost of their presence here on these islands, and the feeling of great separation from the others on her team. No, not just from them—from everyone in the world. That feeling had started here, with her time on Con Dao as a teenager, and then continued throughout her life. That unceasing feeling of being apart. She remembered it from her scholarship days at Oxford, where she thought she had escaped what she left behind here.

It was not that she had not made friends, not found people she identified with, not laughed with other students in those cozy Oxford pubs, not gotten drunk with them, made out, built suitcase robots that toilet-papered rival dorms—it was that she had conducted all of that at a distance. There was the her doing those things, and there was, as if somewhere behind glass (for some reason she thought of the warped portholes of the ground transport unit), another Ha, always untouched, observing and never being observed.