In her sleep, Park felt an alien presence watching the scene along with her with acute interest: she could not tell if it was Sagara, or Taban, or Jimex, or even something else entirely. But she felt its crowding, its curiosity: it wanted to know what had happened to Glenn.

He died, she thought. She remembered finding out the month before her uncle died. Remembered his small and yellow face on the wrist console screen, the dim lighting of her old apartment turned alien through the different lens. She nearly hadn’t taken his call, as she hadn’t for the two years she’d been at university—but some premonition, some flash of instinct, compelled her to pick up.

“I’m about to eat,” she’d said as a greeting. Which was true: she was sitting in her tiny dormcube, staring at a salad she’d bought from the market with strawberries in it—some backbred fruit she’d never seen before, repulsively heart-shaped things filled with giant pores. She wasn’t looking forward to the meal, but at least it gave her a way to impose a limit. An easy excuse for them both to leave the conversation at any point.

“Glenn is gone,” Park’s uncle had said. “I thought I should tell you.”

Park waited, but he said nothing more. A kind of cold anger scraped up her spine. “What do you mean?” she heard herself ask.

“He’s gone,” her uncle repeated. “The rioters . . . they recognized him as the bot with the gun. They caught him while he was out and tore him apart. They didn’t even leave a data cache behind.”

The room ought to sway, Park thought. Her knees should buckle—she thought she would have to put out a hand to steady herself. But she was already sitting down. She said dully, “No chance of recovery?”

“No,” he answered. “I looked. They delivered the parts to me in a box, but I couldn’t even sell it for scrap. I looked around the area where it happened—but there was nothing.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

The corners of his mouth turned down: a reproachful look, like a child who felt he’d been wrongly scolded by an adult. “It was him, Grace. There’s no doubt.”

“I see,” Park said, her voice oddly formal and brisk, even to herself. She could barely hear anything through the thudding of the blood in her head; her ears were ringing, as if someone had shot a gun. As if they were combatants, she a shell-shocked soldier, unable to speak over the rush of noise around them or rally herself in crisis. “Thank you for telling me.”

“I’m—” He hesitated. “I’m sorry. I knew it would be hard for you.”

“It’s not,” Park said. “Thank you. It’s not.”