“Come on, it’s okay,” she said. “Get on the bed, it’s okay.”

He did as she said, but only just. He didn’t pull into his neat little roost like he usually did, but instead sprawled, curled away from her like an injured falcon backed into a corner, ready for a fight. His massive consciousness, the half-organic thing that controlled the unfathomably complicated machine of his body, had utterly collapsed in on itself.

The wall wasn’t thick at the moment, but it wasn’t thin, either. She sat down on the bed next to him, and felt an instinct prick her from the other side of the wall. Danger! Danger! Alien monster! His fingers curled, ready to attack.

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’re safe. It’s me. You’re in my apartment.”

Those eyes didn’t feel like the eyes of an intelligent being. They felt like the eyes of an animal. A prey animal looking at a predator. Monster. Flesh-eater. Pugilist. Militarist. Flesh-eater. Don’t eat me, don’t eat me, don’t eat me!

“It’s me,” she said, trying to keep her breathing steady so she wouldn’t slip into panic with him. “It’s me. You’re safe with me.”

She closed her eyes to steady herself, to gain some perspective, hoping that her attempts to calm herself might act as a flotation device for the drowning man. “You need to sleep.”

She didn’t know how she knew this. It wasn’t just his odd, seemingly random assertions, “I can’t sleep, they’ll kill me.” It wasn’t just the decades of trauma piling onto each other that had triggered this, it was exhaustion.

Do you ever sleep?

I sleep.

When?

When I must.

He needed sleep, same as any living thing did, but he didn’t. He had to stay vigilant. Earth was too dangerous, too wild, too full of terrors for him to allow himself to sleep.

“You need to sleep,” she said. “You’ll be safe, I’ll watch over you.”

There was a war going on in there, the prey animal afraid for its life against the intelligent being that knew he had pushed himself too far for too long and had collapsed into exhaustion. He would die if he didn’t sleep. Cora hugged herself, and sat down on the floor, giving him space. “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad,” she sang, leaning against the side of the bed. She closed her eyes, focusing on the lyrics, focusing inward. “Take a sad song, and make it better . . .”

He didn’t understand music, not really. Even the meaning of most lyrics was lost on him, but it wasn’t really meant for him; it soothed her, it helped her be the flotation device he could latch onto.

It took her several hours, the involvement of her guitar, and several repetitions of the Beatles’ kindest and gentlest repertoire, but eventually, she convinced him to sleep. By this point, it was long past dark, and her phone was still at work. No one had come knocking, so however he’d hacked the surveillance in his lair must have convinced the powers that be she was still in there with him.