“You can sedate me whenever you want.”

“You will sleep tonight without sedatives.”

Cora’s eyes shot open. The light sedative he’d been using every night put her into such a deep sleep she didn’t dream at all, let alone have nightmares. “Oh.”

Sleep without sedatives. She hadn’t had nightmares in weeks because she hadn’t slept without sedatives in weeks. Now it was time to go back to normal, and that scared her a little bit. Shouldn’t that be good, though? Why be scared of normal sleep? Wasn’t she more vulnerable when he sedated her? This was the same being, the same body, that had captured human beings (including her) and played with them like toys, and here he was running the tips of his fingers over her head trying to soothe her, a stack of pillows she’d pillaged from her mom’s house propping up his giant head, his body all but cocooning hers. And yet sleep was the intimidating thing in this scenario?

“Sleep now, dear one.”

She felt a warmth in her chest at the sound of his pet name for her, what he called a hypocorism. “Do you ever sleep?”

“I sleep.”

“When?”

“When I must.”

She nodded and closed her eyes. What the hell was wrong with her? She was half-naked in bed with a thousand-year-old (or 650-year-old, depending on how you measured time), eight-and-a-half-foot-tall alien cyborg, and the thing she was afraid of in this situation was the act of going to sleep?

She released a breath, trying to push out her anxiety with it. Going off sedatives was inevitable. Nightmares were a part of life. This was fine. This was necessary to figuring out a permanent solution. “Okay . . . just . . . don’t make me stay in it.”

“I don’t understand your meaning.”

“I mean, don’t leave me alone in my head longer than you have to. If I’m having a nightmare, wake me up when you have the data you need.”

“I will, my dearest.”

Her heart did a little flip. My dearest!

From what she could tell, amygdaline names were less “names” as humans conceived them so much as labels that had to do with one’s relationship to the speaker and were very tied in with their caste system. One wasn’t addressed as “Steve” or “Karen,” so much as “Mom” or “bro” or “senpai.” At first, Ampersand had addressed her with an impersonal “you” or “interpreter,” but after the dynamic fusion bonding, it was “dear one.” Was “my dearest” an upgrade?

She felt the impulse to respond, “I love you,” because it was true. She had come to terms with that by now—love was the word for it, as it would be for any friend, only this friend happened not to be human. This was Aristotle’s philia, a dispassionate virtuous love of function. Not of passion, never of passion. But she knew he wouldn’t return the sentiment, at least not verbally, and that would ruin the moment. Instead, she closed her eyes and said, “Thank you.”