“Well, once upon a time,” said Cora, smiling and not missing a beat, “when Jude first communicated with me, I offered to speak to other humans for him, so he’d be better understood. And for a little while, I was his voice. He’d tell me what he wanted people to know, and I told it to people in a way they’d understand. But he’s sick right now.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Ava.

“We don’t know,” said Cora. “Nikola is his . . . family. He followed Nikola to Pershing Square to protect him, but nearly got killed himself. The whole thing really scared him. Really messed him up. He’s kind of been in a coma ever since.”

“Will he get better?”

Her smile was still there, but now it was taking some effort to maintain. “We don’t know. I hope so.”

“Is he your friend? They said on the news that he was.”

“Yeah.” She said it in this wistful voice he’d never heard from her when talking about Ampersand. “He was my friend.”

Kaveh’s gaze darted between the two. It was obvious Cora was more comfortable with the child than she was with the curious-bordering-on-judgmental eyes of the adults of the family. He remembered her mentioning that she had a sister who was about Ava’s age. She missed her sister, she’d told him, but she was too keen on avoiding her mother to spend time with her. “Hey, Ava, you want to show her your garden?”

“Sure!” piped Ava, and Cora actually seemed relieved, shooting him a cute smile as she followed his niece down the hill to see her “garden.”

She was good with kids, he mused, and the thought that she’d make a good mother entered his mind. For the shortest of moments, the thought warmed him before promptly being replaced by a peal of nausea. If Nikola absconds with us, if he finds another habitable planet a billion light-years from here, she’ll have no choice.

He heard the patio door open and close and turned to see his own mother approaching. Apparently, she’d been waiting to get him alone.

“She’s very pretty,” she said in Farsi, looking in the girls’ direction as she approached him. Her Persian tenor was lower than when she spoke English.

“And very young,” he said, finishing the thought he knew she was having.

“You know what’s funny,” she said, “I had the same thought the first time I saw the Pershing Square photograph. She was so beautiful, in such contrast to those . . . What was the word again? The ‘almond’ word?”

“Amygdaline.”

“Yes, your aliens, they were so horrible to look at, but she was so beautiful. It almost looked staged.”

“A lot of people think it was.”