She tried to remember what normal breathing felt like. Reached back into her memory, her and Kaveh alone in the woods, four, seven, eight. One breath, not deep but deeper than a normal breath. Then two. Then five. She couldn’t remember how it worked. She couldn’t do it.

“Let him go,” said Sol.

She let go of Ampersand.

Sol pulled her body toward his, scooping her up into his arms and carrying her away from Enola and Ampersand. She couldn’t see Kaveh, but didn’t yet have the presence of mind to call for him, to inquire about him. She began to resist, to tell Sol that she shouldn’t be separated from Ampersand, that he needed her. She promised she would protect him. But she was still scarcely able to move.

Sol carried her to an ambulance and sat her down inside its rear entrance. “See? You can still see them. They’re right there.” He pointed back to where they had been, to where Ampersand and Enola still were.

CIA guys in hazmats—or maybe they were FBI? Military? Did it matter?—were in the process of loading them into an armored car. Why hazmats?

“Where’s Kaveh?” she asked.

“Kaveh?” She wasn’t looking at Sol’s face, but she could feel it grow stony.

She nodded, keeping her gaze forward, sliding into numbness, the wall growing thick as she watched the men in hazmats carefully loading Ampersand and Enola into black armored trucks. The LAPD and others had more or less cleared the immediate scene of civilians.

Except for one, the dead man, who had not been moved, but was now covered in a white sheet, spots of blood seeping through.

“Mazandarani is . . . here. He’s just been arrested.”

That didn’t make sense at all, but of course it didn’t make sense. Nothing did. “I need him.”

“I see.”

“Please don’t let them take him. Please. We need him. Enola . . .”

“Mazandarani got to Enola Gay first.” Sol turned to look at the men in hazmats hoisting Enola into a black van. “Fucking figures.”

* * *

They were taken to a military base in Los Alamitos. Sol left her in a room that he said was not an interrogation room that sure looked like an interrogation room and told her that Ampersand and Enola had been separated from each other for their own safety, which she told him was the right move. Ampersand seemed to have come around, but Enola had not. Sol told her to be patient, that he’s here, he’s fine, he’s okay, but she needed to wait. He asked her why she wanted to see Kaveh Mazandarani, and she told him the truth, that he’d known about Enola Gay as long as she had, that he’d been there when she’d found Enola Gay alone in the woods. Sol, who had been keeping up the pretense of being sympathetic, turned cold.