“We see him, we take him back to Ariel and make sure they both get out of town. That’s the plan. If he gets past us there’s really nothing we can do.”

The wind picked up. There was one tree on the entire street—a spindly sapling on the lawn that hedged the sidewalk—and it bent before the storm like an arthritic pensioner. The restaurant’s plate-glass windows rattled.

Sandra found her thoughts returning to the scar on Bose’s body and the story of his father’s death in India. “Those thieves who broke into your father’s place in Madras,” she said.

He gave her a startled look. “What about them?”

“What were they after?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’m curious.” I’m entitled to be, Sandra thought.

Silence. Then: “Maybe you guessed. They were after the drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“The kind of drugs you seem to think they were after. Martian drugs.”

“Because your father wasn’t just an engineer, he was involved with Fourths.”

“He despised the people who were only interested in longevity. He hated the word. He used to say it wasn’t longevity that mattered, it was maturity.”

“Your mother knew about this?”

“My mother was the one who recruited him.”

“I see. So the scar…”

“What about it?”

“I didn’t get out of med school without a course in anatomy. Unless the knife that cut you had a blade under an inch long, it would have damaged major organs. Not usually a survivable wound, especially if you had to wait for help.”

She was so accustomed to Bose’s perpetual calm that she was startled when he wouldn’t meet her eyes. After a time he said, “It was my mother’s decision.”

Sandra had come to this surmise last night, but it was still slightly shocking to hear him admit it. “To give you the Martian treatment, you mean.”

“As a last resort. For the purpose of saving my life. It was a hugely controversial decision, among the people who knew about it. But I didn’t have a choice—I was comatose when it happened.”

Cellular technology engineered by the Martians from samples of Hypothetical debris, grown in bioreactors and injected into his damaged body, repairing it, working in him even now … She recalled something he’d said just a couple of mornings ago: Once the biotech infiltrates your cells, it’s there for good. Some people find that idea abhorrent.

This body she had touched: not wholly human.

“That’s why you care so much about Findley’s import business.”