Only days after the disaster in the Wilkes Basin, Isaac had mastered the ability to speak fluent Voxish. His motor skills improved to the point where he could walk unassisted, his body went from frail to remarkably robust, and the reconstructed portions of his skull began to look almost normal. The croaking, screaming creature Turk had known was gone. The newly and unsettlingly articulate Isaac had been released from medical care, though he still lived and slept in the rooms where he had been treated. Lately he had conducted vague but ingratiating interviews with scholars and managers, the contents of which were publicly broadcast. He praised Vox for its dedication and endurance; he expressed his admiration for the wisdom of the founding prophecies. For days now he had been traveling around the city like a tourist, sometimes mobbed by curious children whose equally curious parents hung back shyly and didn’t dare speak.

I had followed all this on the newsfeeds. Vox was listing toward insanity, and the abject worship of Isaac Dvali was just the latest symptom. I told myself to expect more of the same. “Expect the unexpected,” Allison had written in her diary. Not an original sentiment but always apt.

And I believed I was well braced for surprises … but I was shocked beyond words when Isaac showed up at my door, pale as a mushroom and bright-eyed as an infant, smiling and calling me by name: not Treya but, amazingly, Allison.

*   *   *

I was afraid of him, of course.

I didn’t know what he wanted and I was instantly terrified of the attention he would attract—must already have attracted—just by being here. Somewhere in the nearby corridors and walks his minders were surely hovering. The hidden ears and eyes of the Network were pricked and focused.

But all he said was, “May I come in?” And I nodded, mutely, and let the door slide shut behind him.

Somehow I found the courage to ask him to sit down.

He remained standing. “I won’t stay long.” He spoke in English. It was the language he had been born to, I reminded myself. Under all the layers of synthesis and reconstruction there was still at least some fragment of the Isaac Dvali he once had been, a boy raised in the Equatorian desert by people whose urge to make contact with the Hypotheticals had been almost Voxish in its intensity. He was, like me, like Turk, a divided and incomplete soul. He was also, at least potentially, a very dangerous one.

Apart from his pale skin, his eyes were his most striking feature. When he looked at me my first instinct was to wince. He told me not to be frightened and I said, “That’s not so easy.”

“You came to my suite when I was sick,” he said.

“You remember that?”

He nodded, smiling. “I’ve learned a lot about you since then.”

“About me?”