“Don’t worry, shrimp,” he says, disappearing under the spray. “I’ll get you jacked in no time. But if you think you’ll ever beat me, you just keep on dreaming.”

***

The basement lab at Le Corbeau feels different today. No Bran to be the intermediary. No bustling around with a group activity. Just Siaka and me. The room feels charged with an airborne electrical current that zaps me every time he gets close. He obviously doesn’t feel it, acting as friendly and natural as the day before, whereas I’m stiff, conscious of every word I say.

I can’t let him know how he affects me, or it will ruin everything. It’ll make things awkward at the very least, and my new kindred have entrusted me with this important role. I’ll be damned if I mess it up just because of a crush.

“Are you always so distracted after a workout?” Siaka asks as he grabs a stack of notebooks off a counter. Wedging them under his arm, he fishes for a set of keys in his jacket pocket.

“What do you mean?” I ask, immediately self-conscious.

“You’re so quiet.”

“Sorry, just, well...I’m used to being by myself most of the time. Or with Bran, which is practically the same.”

Laughing, he sticks a key in a door at the end of the lab and turns the knob. Switching on the light, he holds the door open for me, and I walk into an office furnished with two desks, a clutter of unmatching chairs, and shelves crammed full of books and papers. On the bigger, more modern desk sits a large, expensive-looking monitor and under it what looks like the latest, most powerful computer tower.

The smaller desk is an antique and holds a lamp, a stack of notebooks, and an ancient silver chalice crammed with a dozen or so sharpened pencils. A chunky black dial telephone and a bound book with Addresses printed on the cover make it look like the whole thing was teleported, accessories intact, from the 1950s.

“I think I can guess whose desk is whose.”

Siaka smiles widely, concentrating on typing something into his phone. In seconds, rap music is playing through a speaker system mounted near the ceiling.

“I’ve been pushing and shoving my uncle towards the twenty-first century, and he’s fought me the whole way,” he says. “He claims his system works for him and my system works for me, so we’re leaving it at that.”

I laugh. “That’s pretty much the same thing he said to me, word for word. But he was happy to set up an office for me in his house in Brittany and stock it with all the equipment I asked for.”