“You want to act like you didn’t threaten to ‘suppress my memories,’ same as you did to Obelus. How is that protecting my interest? Then Enola tells me that you might just take it a step further, that if my condition worsens enough you would just . . . lobotomize me so you wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. That you’d alter my brain if you couldn’t figure out how to control it, so my sickness would stop leaking into you. Is that why you were ‘studying’ me at all? Is that what those ‘monitors’ are for?”

Her throat grew hard as she said those words, her tired eyes tingling with heat. How cathartic it had been when Kaveh had put words to what she had been feeling, that she had been thinking of her pain like it was other people’s burden, obligating her to keep it hidden. But that was exactly how Ampersand saw it, so burdensome he might erase parts of her personality altogether.

He looked at her for a long moment after she stopped talking, and the focus of his eyes dissipated like a fading firework, and the crest on his head relaxed, closing like a tulip at night. “I do endeavor to cure your sickness. It does frighten me that I don’t even begin to know why our bond has mutual empathic effects. It frightens me that I cannot control it. But my sickness is far more debilitating than yours. And I am separated from those with the tools to treat it; therefore, it shall go untreated. For you, at least, there is some hope of partial recovery. No, any benefit to me to altering you would be negligible compared to the damage I already live with, even if I were so cruel as to do such a thing. I would not disrespect your person like that, dear one. I would not alter you.”

She wanted to believe him. What she wouldn’t give for him to say he was trustworthy and actually live up to it. Without a word, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water from the Brita in the fridge. After downing one glass and grabbing a few Advils in the bathroom, she returned to Ampersand in the living room, his arms half drawn up to his sides, his head raised but looking at nothing, his eyes half-lidded like he’d been drugged.

She sat down on the floor next to him, turning on the TV to CNN but keeping it muted. The chyron read, PROTESTS LED BY THIRD PARTY ATTRACT THOUSANDS ACROSS DOZENS OF CITIES. The reporter appeared to be live from downtown LA. This must have been the thing Miranda had been talking about yesterday. She had to give him credit; he hadn’t undersold it.

“Where is Enola?”