“You’ve known about Enola Gay the whole time, haven’t you?”

Her body was by now on strike against anything that bore even a passing resemblance to an emotion. “No. The day of the landing, I didn’t know anything more than what I told you. Ampersand didn’t, either. He was telling you the truth.”

“Until he wasn’t.”

She looked away from him, spied a dust particle hanging in the air, and concentrated on that. “He found Enola pretty quickly, not long after that big noise in Temecula.”

“Enola made the noise.”

“It was meant to flush out Ampersand, but Ampersand got to him first. He’s been keeping Enola in secret since then.”

“Why?” said Sol, leaning over the table that he said was not an interrogation table. “What’s he think we’ll do to Enola?”

“It’s not you he’s worried about,” she said, locating another dust particle to fix her attention on. “It’s Esperas and Brako. Enola is ‘damaged,’ by their standards. And so is Ampersand, for that matter. With no legal protections, they’re all under the assumption that they’re not beholden to our laws and that they take care of their own. And if might makes right, Brako is the most powerful, and there’s nothing to stop Brako and Esperas from killing Ampersand and Enola.”

Sol slid into the chair opposite Cora, crossing his arms in front of him. “Why in God’s name would Brako and Esperas want to kill them?”

“To put them out of their misery,” Cora stated flatly. “They have their own social mores, and both of them meet the Superorganism’s criteria for state-sanctioned euthanasia. They would consider it the ‘humane’ thing to do.”

She could feel him glaring at her like heat off a radiator. She didn’t look at him, refused to give him the satisfaction.

“I hope you’re happy,” he said. “Clearly, Ampersand has been doing whatever he wants. And he’s been doing that despite our surveillance, hasn’t he?”

She finally looked at him, but didn’t rise to his level of intensity. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. “Yes.”

“So while he’s ‘alone’ in his lair, we see whatever he wants us to see, whether he’s in there or not.”

“Yes.”

The two stared at each other, Sol’s expression dripping with poison, like every nasty suspicion he ever had about her was true. But she couldn’t feel guilty about this. Sol had no idea about the impossibility of her situation, and moreover, maybe Ampersand was right. The authorities were corrupt, and bureaucratic, and inept, and not worthy of trust even when they meant well. Their involvement would only make things worse. After all, the only way the Gadsden Line could have possibly known about the amygdaline vulnerability to energy pulses was if someone in the military or CIA had leaked it.