That’s not my concern, Park wanted to say, but then he would ask what her concern was, and she wouldn’t know how to explain it to him. Wasn’t sure what it was herself. She felt suddenly shy of him, or guilty. Glenn commented, lightly enough: “He cares about you.”

“I suppose,” Park said in dismay. Watching her face, he added in a bland voice, “I’ll let you rest.”

Then, before exiting, he stopped and looked back at her. In the thin, watery light he looked too solid, like a sculpture or a rock. “If you require it, I can bake cookies,” Glenn said. “I’ve downloaded the recipes.”

“I know,” Park said, still staring at them. “But I don’t have any desire for them.”

“Then should I throw those away?”

“No,” answered Park. “I’ll use them as paperweights.”

She scanned Glenn’s face for a flicker of a reaction: sadness, amusement, jealousy, fear. Nothing, she thought; his face stayed as smooth as slate. If he had any thoughts about Dataran showing up at their door, he didn’t show it. He only said, “I understand,” and shut the door behind him again. The little folding screen felt like the door of a closing vault.

Dataran must have baked the cookies himself, Park decided later, trying to gnaw her way through one. It must have been his first time. The cookies were tasteless, crumbly, greasy—she felt as if she were swallowing sawdust. It wasn’t the right thing for such warm weather, or for treating sickness. The pieces scraped against her throat on the way down. There was a slow burn in her chest, a molten bubbling in her heart—probably from whatever fat he’d used. Eating more was liable to make her feel worse. She did feel worse. She felt poisoned.

She forced herself to eat every last one.

Then she slept.

—

New Diego was one of the only biodomes that was positioned on the water. Nearly all of the biodomes had moved out to the coast, where the claustrophobic press of the Comeback could be edged off by the sea, but few had managed to actually build a city on the waves. There were many advantages to having a floating biodome, but one factor Park suspected the builders of not considering was the fact that humans had always lived on land. There were natural anxieties, inborn agitations, that came with living constantly on the water—even if the biodome itself was as steady as anything, never rocking or moving with the waves. The inhabitants of the dome were surrounded by the vast loneliness of the ocean. The mind imposed feelings of paranoia, of unsafety, when it was confronted with so much boundless, unobstructed space. Everything was so penetrable and wide open. There was nothing to retreat to, to visually latch onto, aside from the distant shore. You could never really feel “at home.”