He didn’t tell Cora, or anyone outside his family. He had intended to be more attentive where Cora was concerned, because he knew “I’m fine” was, at best, a lie of omission, but it was hard not to stay utterly preoccupied by the chaos outside. Things had changed so fast, and therefore, so had his story—he’d never been a part of a story that he reported on before, and he had no idea how best to approach it. But given that Jano Miranda and Todd Julian were ramping up their political rhetoric in a big way, to the point that his extended family was receiving bomb threats, the pressure was on. He needed to figure it out, and soon.

By this point, Nikola had twice tried to get Ampersand talking, but hadn’t had any more luck than any of the humans had. Nikola was both a blessing and a curse to his government caretakers, both engaging actively with whatever information they presented him in the form of restricted internet access, asking the kind of charming questions about humanity one would love to get asked by an alien, and dropping the occasional existential nugget about the end of human civilization.

Worse, he was very careful about only communicating through Kaveh, and there was no scenario that the Sol Kaplans of the world hated more than a journalist being the intermediary between the most cooperative of the ETIs, let alone a journalist who had worked directly with Nils Ortega several times. But whatever Nikola wanted, Nikola got, and it didn’t take long for Nikola to start asking to go outside.

This wasn’t met with a no, per se, but it did put Kaveh between Nikola and a flock of panicked bureaucrats willing to do anything to placate Nikola, but could he please ask for literally anything else?

“It’s more of a nature thing,” Kaveh told them. He wasn’t thrilled by the prospect, either, but he also figured it was better to give him an inch now than a mile later. “He can only learn so much about this strange new planet from Simple English Wikipedia.”

The bureaucrat he was speaking to, someone from DHHS named Shannon, sighed the type of sigh the messengers of despotic kings prone to beheading subjects must have sighed when they had to return to their lord with bad news. “Could you give me specifics?”

“How about it?” he asked Nikola. Nikola was not visible to him, was not even in the same building, but he was always available by earbud, of which Kaveh now had one for each ear, at least. “Where specifically did you have in mind?”

“I DESIRE PRIVACY.”

“Can you give me some more detail?”

“I DESIRE PRIVACY WITH YOU, DEAR CLEVER CREATURE. WE CANNOT SPEAK IN CONFIDENCE HERE.”