Cora nearly collapsed with relief when she saw Kaveh inside that cave seated a couple of feet from Enola, who was more or less welded exactly in the spot she had last seen him, still black as ebony but now a much cleaner ebony. “Yo!” said Kaveh, moving his little electric lantern and gesturing for Cora to sit next to him. “Fancy seeing you here. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“I quit,” she breathed.

“Whoa! Why?”

“I just . . . don’t think there’s any good I can do by staying there. If I’m going to effect any positive change, I can’t work for them.”

“Makes sense,” said Kaveh, gesturing to Enola. “Especially when you certainly don’t need government clearance to have access to him. He’s doing a lot better, don’t you think?”

Cora looked at Enola, perfectly still on the floor, and wondered if she and Kaveh were looking at the same creature at all. The thing that came to mind for Cora was a scene from The Last Unicorn, one of her favorite books growing up. Early in the story, the unicorn got imprisoned in a traveling carnival by a witch. In one of the carnival’s other cages, the unicorn recognized the harpy Celaeno had also been imprisoned, an evil, hideous, terrifying creature of incredible power. She was even more horrid in the film adaptation, the stuff of children’s nightmares. The harpy told the unicorn to free her, that as immortal, magical beings, “We are sisters, you and I.” And so the unicorn freed the harpy, and the newly liberated harpy exacted a reign of revenge-fueled terror, even attacking the unicorn that had freed her. Kaveh seemed to think he had tamed the beast, but Cora only saw a thing that, once it regained its power, would wreak unspeakable havoc on the world.

“Something I’ve been wondering,” said Kaveh. “Is Ampersand actually a ‘he’?”

“What do you mean?” asked Cora.

“I mean do they have a concept of gender, or are we using male pronouns out of habit?”

“Well . . .”

There was a long answer to this and a short answer to this.

The long answer had come up about six weeks ago when Cora had come out and asked Ampersand, and got the following answer: “I have a female karyotype.”

Cora was stunned that she’d been calling him— her— the wrong pronoun the entire time they’d known each other, save those initial seventy-two odd hours when she’d thought of him (her!) as an “it.” And never once had she been corrected. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It is a peculiarity of your language that gender is related to pronouns,” Ampersand responded. “Not all human languages have gendered pronouns.”

“Yes, but . . . it’s a respect thing.”

“Assigning gender to pronouns is just as logical as assigning race or height or any other physical attribute to them, and just as relevant to me.”