She turned, her rust-red hair bobbing as she did, as unsure what to do with him as he was with her. “Hey,” she said. She had such a strange aesthetic with her big bronze hoop earrings and too-big teal cardigan swallowing her up; she looked like she was on her way to her night job teaching adults how to use pottery wheels.

“Have you noticed her losing weight?” he asked. “Like, a lot of it, really quickly?”

“Yeah,” said Luciana, turning back to the mirror. “She’s probably lost at least thirty pounds over the last few months. At first I thought she was doing it on purpose, but . . .”

“How’s she been?”

“A mess, to be honest. I think we may need to drag her out of there. She’s really upset about this whole ‘Superorganism is on their way’ thing.”

He had to hand it to her, she had a knack for understatement. “What’s she been doing?”

“Lately, she’s been just angry. Like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me, why did you keep this from me, why do you keep doing this?’

” Luciana sighed. “There is really a lot about their relationship that I do not understand.”

You have no idea, thought Kaveh. “Does she know about the photo?”

“No, not yet. This situation with Scio, it’s—”

“‘Scio’?”

“It’s his Esperanto code name,” said Luciana, correcting her slipup. “Forgot we’re supposed to dump those.”

“What about names for the other ones?” asked Kaveh. “The other, what, twenty-four?”

“Twenty-three besides him. And, no idea. With the exception of the two that asked for asylum, they’re not as pressing, so that’s a—”

“A can kicked down the road, got it.”

By this point, Cora had begun to shake Ampersand at the place where his arms met his midsection that could most closely be described as “shoulders,” prompting Luciana to wince uncomfortably. Cora’s words were mostly unintelligible, but he caught at least one Why didn’t you tell me? in there.

“Where did ‘Atheatos’ come from?” he asked.

“It’s a family name,” said Luciana. “My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was Greek.”

“Oh,” he said, a little surprised. He’d thought both of Nils’s maternal grandparents were German; he didn’t think that Grandpappy Stahl, an officer in the army of the Third Reich, would be caught dead marrying one of those swarthy southern Europeans. Best to keep that observation to himself. It was a strange, uncomfortable truth that all of Nils’s colleagues knew about but no one talked about. He had to assume the same was true of the whole Ortega family, who only existed because an ancestor had decided to duck out on the Nuremberg trials.

“You know why she chose it? Atheatos?”

“No idea.”