Without another word, Ampersand moved off the bed and glided toward the window. Cora followed him as he pulled a windowpane out, opening it like a door. Cora recalled the conversation they’d had in the hospital a few months ago, Ampersand implying that life wasn’t worth living if he didn’t have an express purpose within “a Superorganism.”

“Hey,” she said. “Enola told me he was here to die with you, implied he meant like now . . .” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “You aren’t considering it, are you?”

“I will consider how to handle Enola after the situation with Obelus is dealt with.”

Then, the shroud of invisibility washed over him like water, the window glass wobbled as he snaked himself outside, and the pane fused itself back into place. She stood there, soaking that in, hoping that he was just being difficult, or had perhaps misunderstood her.

“Did he . . . just teleport?”

She wandered back toward him. “No, they can’t teleport. He went out through the window.”

“But he can turn invisible.”

“Yep. That’s actually a pretty easy trick, as I understand it.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “What did he say?”

She sat down on the side of the bed, hunched over, one hand cupping the other. Ampersand wasn’t just hunting Obelus, he was avoiding Enola. He couldn’t deal with Enola, so he wasn’t. “Let’s just say he didn’t answer my question.”

“Are we, like . . . married to Enola Gay as a name?” asked Kaveh, sitting down next to her. “I kinda want to have something to call him that’s a little less associated with war crimes.”

She regarded him, suddenly struck by how eager he was to get involved in this. “What do you want, Kaveh?”

He considered, then gave her a cheeky smile. “A Pulitzer. I really should have won the last one.”

“What do you really want?”

“Full, natural personhood,” he said, growing serious. “Full human rights. No in-between. You are either a person, or you’re not.”

This surprised her. She had meant, what did he want for himself; she hadn’t expected such a broad political answer. “That’s very generous for someone who’s only just met them.”

“It isn’t about them.”

His growing seriousness shook her. “What do you mean?”

“The paradox of anti-government hysteria is it tends to lead to authoritarianism. The arrival of space aliens has not united humanity; they’ve only made us more tribal, more fractured, and it’s only going to get worse in the months and years to come. And now you have these proto-fascists arguing against the very idea of alien personhood and advocating for the creation of a whole different category of person altogether. One might almost say . . . three-fifths of a person.”

She curled her lip up in disbelief, almost offended by such a comparison.