She took a seat next to him on the ottoman, and he could feel her gaze boring into him. He took a deep breath. “What happened last night, there’s a possibility they were targeting me,” he said.

“I know. Leila told me.”

Traitor. “But we don’t know for sure.”

She glanced at him. “If not for this, then for something else. That is inevitable for someone who is trying to change the world.”

“That doesn’t mean I want to drag you into it.”

She smiled faintly. “God has blessed you with many gifts, though I often wondered why He blessed you with gifts that so often put you in danger. Why could He not have made you a gifted surgeon?” Kaveh cracked a smile, looking at her knowingly. “But these are the gifts you were given, and you have done amazing things with them. The life you have chosen means you will always have enemies. It isn’t your fault that the world is full of people who will hate you no matter what, just because of your name.”

He stared out into the backyard, shaking his head distantly. “But that is the world we live in.”

He felt her hand on his back, and she kissed his cheek warmly before going back inside, leaving him alone with his thoughts. That peal of nausea at the thought of Cora being a mother had not abated. She’d be a good mother here, if that was what she wanted, in a human society, not alone on some hypothetical New Earth a billion light-years away. But being the new Eve, or at least one of them? Oh yes, you get to be a mother, but only in the most hellish of circumstances, and you get to do it with me, who never wanted this.

How to go about it? Who gets to contribute their “genetic material,” and who doesn’t? He could let entire races of people go extinct. Really, he would have to. He couldn’t possibly get a sample from all of them, and no one would be alive to exclaim, Quelle éthique! Race and ethnicity would be a thing of the past. There would be no cultures left to appropriate. Divorced from human civilization, history was nothing but data, and culture was only what Kaveh, Cora, and whatever other poor unfortunate broodmares Nikola absconded with remembered. And what could that possibly mean to some child who had no concept of culture besides whatever one they built?