“That’s it?” I say, pulling the lanyard over my head. It gets stuck in my hair, and Poe reaches over to untangle it. His hand brushes my temple and sends a shiver through me. He’s ice-cold.

I think of Del again, and Sharon, and their three girls. For the oddest of reasons, I wonder who’s feeding the animals on the Rays’ farm.

Once, when he was more child than man, Steven asked me if animals had language.

“No,” I said.

“Do they think?”

“No.”

He’d read a book about bees in school and showed it to me one afternoon in the kitchen. That was when Steven, not Sonia, wanted hot cocoa every day at four o’clock.

“It says that bees can go find pollen and then come back to the hive and tell the other bees where the pollen is.” He read part of the chapter aloud. “The bee dance is like a language. So there.”

I checked over the book, examining the bio of one of the authors. She was an apiarist with a long line of credentials, none of which had much to do with linguistics. “So there, nothing,” I said. “Yes, the bees dance. They do a little ‘Hey, guys! Here’s the good pollen!’ sort of a jig. But that’s it, kiddo. Tie their wings down and make them walk back to the hive, and they’re giving directions to the nearest rock. What bees have is communication, and only a specialized form of it. That’s not language. Only humans have language.”

“What about Koko the gorilla?” His book was cowritten by a team of animal experts.

“Koko’s terrific and she knows a few hundred signs, but she still doesn’t do what your brothers can.” Sam and Leo were four at the time. Koko was forty-five.

Steven took his textbook and went to his room to sulk. Another bubble burst, I thought. It’s pleasant to imagine our four- and two-legged friends have a linguistic mechanism of their own. Maybe that’s why people keep searching for proof. But it isn’t true.

Here, in the elevator, I find myself wishing it were.

“That’s it,” Poe says when we reach the first floor. “You can collect your laptops. They’ve been scrubbed.”

Lorenzo and I collect our bags. He’s allowed to take his coffee maker, but nothing else, from his office before Poe closes the door and leads us out to security. Everything is the same: two soldiers, one X-ray machine for our bags, and zero smiles now that Sergeant Petroski is off duty. One by one, we’re frisked, our pockets are searched, and the soldier working me over spends an unpleasant amount of extra time on my crotch and cleavage. From the look on Lorenzo’s face, he’s getting the same treatment down below.