“They’re finally letting me go,” he said. “I’m going to go home, get some sleep. But they want me back tomorrow to babysit Nikola. The plan might be to put them together when they think it’s safe. Do you want me to give you a ride?”

“No,” she said reflexively. She didn’t want to go be alone in Riverside in her shitty apartment in an even shittier neighborhood.

He nodded to the inert Ampersand. “They’re going to try tomorrow to see if Nikola can get a rise out of him.”

“We’ll have to be careful. I don’t want ‘getting a rise’ to mean Ampe—Jude freaks out again.”

“Jude. That’s going to take some getting used to. It’s good, though. I like it.”

It was here that she put words to the hopelessness she’d been feeling, an echo of what Enola had told her out on that salt flat, a horrible but inescapable truth. There was no way to control this bond. There was no way to meter when one of them affected the other. The only way out was for one of them to die.

That can’t be. That can’t be all there is to it.

But it is, there is no other way.

It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

“Query,” said Kaveh. “He’s told you the end of the world is nigh, I assume.”

“Just that their civilization is likely to look at ours as a threat and will want to stop us before we advance to their level.”

“Right . . . did he give you any indication when that would happen?”

She shrugged. “Not in our lifetime. They’re a hundred light-years away.”

She looked at him, surprised to see a concerned expression on his face that bordered on confused. “Yeah, about that . . .”

“What?” she said, now on alert. “What is it?”

“Yeah, so . . .” He bit his lip, rolling on the balls of his feet. “I’ve got some bad news . . .”

* * *

If the Pequod Superorganism was not restrained by the speed of light, the same could be said about the Mazandarani clan, because the news he relayed got circulated to his parents as soon as he said it. His cousin Nasser began blowing up his phone immediately:

jendehhhhhh what the FUCK??

Some thirty-six hours later, Kaveh had gotten some sleep, caught up on emails, made some phone calls, and affirmed to his family that yes, that had been him on TV, and yes, he had been detained for a very long time, and no, he could not talk about it. But don’t worry! Really!