“Sometimes I wish I could take it all back,” Martin said softly, “and keep you away from UniCorp. But there were moments in the course of our workday when I’d be struck by some little familiar gesture you would make with your arm, and I’d be aware that I’d transferred some deep part of me to you. I’d feel like the luckiest father in the world, working side by side with my son.”

The picture on the shelf changed to an older scene: white sand dunes on the beach at the UniCorp Hawaiian Retreat. Martin held baby Ambrose, while Len toddled along, ankle-deep in the sparkling blue green water.

“Help me build the future of this company,” Martin said. “Come back home.”

“First look me in the eyes,” Ambrose said, “and tell me right now that you didn’t put me together from some instruction manual.”

Martin met Ambrose’s steady gaze. The whites of his eyes shone brighter than his teeth, blinding and terrible. Ambrose put his hand in front of his own eyes to shield them from the glare. The office plant rustled. The walls expelled an absorbed Thoughtstream like a gust of hurricane wind that sent him to his knees. A stray update passed through his mind.

Kelly Peterson is superpsyched to be getting a puppy today!

Ambrose shook it off and returned to his feet. The top of Martin’s head was a wavy strip of mahogany paneling connected by a thin strand to the wall behind him. His eyes were hollow black pits. His nose and mouth fused into a scaly, elongated snout.

The snout grinned. Rows of white teeth gleamed.

Ambrose heard the door slam behind him and turned. Mistletoe stepped into the office.

She had come back for him.

“Ambrose,” she said, joining him in front of the desk, studying his face. “Are you you?”

“I’m me.”

“And I’m his father,” Martin said. Ambrose turned to find Martin looking fully human again, slouched a little in his chair with his legs crossed at the knee. “Nice to meet you, Anna. I hope your journey here was nice. I did everything I could to make the place easy to find.”

Mistletoe glanced around, taking in the shelves, the plant, the picture frames. Then she studied Martin’s face while he tapped a fingernail on the desk. Ambrose counted six taps before Mistletoe spoke.

“We’ve met,” she said. Then she told Ambrose, “I had a dream we were tiny babies. There were more like us, but they didn’t work right or something, so he threw them in a big tub. They were all dead and just … floating. We were the only ones who made it.”

She turned back to Martin, and her blue pigtail brushed Ambrose’s face. He realized he would have come back for her, too.