“Lot of bloviating over there. I’ll be honest, I think Kierk’s a dick. Then again, he might be a genius. But the complaints have reached the funders now so tell your boyfriend . . . I did what I could. I’m sorry.”

Max moves off into the crowd, grabs at a champagne glass and immediately begins to drain it. Carmen, with one look at the still-animated table, is already heading the other direction toward the exit, leaving Alex glancing around bewildered.

The tennis ball ricochets angrily off the wall, and Kierk slumps down to a sitting position on his mattress. He’s looking at his hands and feeling this space-time world line slip from his grasp, a rope falling away into darkness. He hasn’t been able to stop the mental replay of the fight, his words, Moretti’s words overlapping—and Kierk’s hatred is a sickly tide, a green and red synesthetic torrent; and high above it, from a tight, protected place, a small low voice of logic, telling him that he will remember the moment he made the decision to speak to Antonio, that he will remember it in a month, a year, in ten. That the decision will be one of the defining events of his life. Such a small movement on the tree of possibilities has destroyed everything, and he wishes desperately the world was like the video games he had played as a teenager so that he could reload some previous save—why should this be so irrevocable?

A knock on the door. He jerks up from his slump, his mind focused for the first time since he’d left the CNS. Right before he looks through the peephole he hears a questioning call—“Kierk?”—so he throws the door open to Carmen in a dress clutching her purse to her chest and looking worried.

To her, Kierk looks wild, his eyes emotional, tired and angry. When he sees her he just puzzles his face, waiting for her to act, and Carmen doesn’t know what to do.

“I wanted to come by, I heard . . .” she starts, but he just waits, leaning there against the door, so she continues—“Did you eat dinner? ’Cause I was thinking of making something, maybe I could do that here, or if you wanted to get a drink . . .”