Ampersand hadn’t made room for her on the bed except for a small sliver barely big enough to sit on. But the moment he closed his eyes, the moment she felt him slip from consciousness, she felt a connection sever. A dull thrum of terror she’d been feeling for months, ever since he’d bonded himself to her, had desisted when he fell asleep.

That dull thrum of terror wasn’t hers. It had never been hers. It was his.

She pulled a couple of pillows and the comforter down onto the floor with her. All this time, she had been worried about how her post-traumatic symptoms were affecting him, it had never occurred to her that it might work the other way around. How much of her symptoms came from him?

No, not all of it. Not even most of it, that much she could tell. The feeling of being out of place in her own body, the body that had betrayed her by giving into such violence when Obelus had skewered her, that trauma belonged to her. But that wasn’t all there was to it.

We’ve been going about this all wrong.

Why had it taken her so long to see it? It was ironic that Sol and the others were even bothering to discuss the personhood issue at all. They didn’t see the Fremda group as people, victims of unimaginable traumas; they saw them as automatons to be mined for intelligence, as political problems that needed solving. Then there was the issue of their caste system—none but Ampersand and Esperas may speak to the hu-man, and Esperas was the gatekeeper to all the rest of the group. But the group was clearly unhappy. The group was suffering. The ones that were not committing ritualistic suicide were now in open rebellion. While she could advise the well-intentioned bureaucrats of the U.S. government, she couldn’t help the Fremda group if Esperas was keeping them under lock and key.

But she could help Ampersand.

She opened her laptop and began typing furiously. First and foremost, she had to get him away from Esperas, far away, preferably in a different country. Then they needed to create a living space he felt in control of. Cora, like so many, had taken for granted that “secret U.S. government compound” was the only place they could live, but there was nothing saying they had to stay there. And if Ampersand were to ask for asylum in another country, maybe the Americans would stop being such dicks about the extending-human-rights issue here.

Then they could formulate a real treatment plan, actually work toward healing. Not just for her but for both of them. He didn’t know how to help himself, and the experts on amygdaline psychology were a hundred light-years away, and even then their solution was apparently “euthanize the broken one.” But he was not a hundred light-years away, he was on Earth—a planet of belligerent, violent flesh-eaters, yes, but compassionate, empathetic problem solvers, too. Trial and error, probably lots of trial and error. But they would figure something out.