His face is scarred, but I don’t recognize him, not beyond the photo downstairs. His skin is pasty with ill health and pocked with acne. He glares at me from his bed, a tray in his lap with built-in controllers and keypads. The room is dark, lit only by several large computer screens facing his bed, where walls might be; they show sports games, video games, terminals overwhelmed by jittering numerals, and waterfalls of stacked browsers.

He lives inside an electronic world.

“What?” he barks. “Cat got your tongue?”

I gape at him and stuff my hands into my pockets. The same stained jeans. “You’re Mitso?” I ask at last. “Mitso Arakit?”

He blows the air from his mouth in an exaggerated way. “Uh, duh? Get to the point. I need to follow these.” His eyes never settle on me: They drift, flylike, from one neon portal to another, then back again.

His mother silently urges me inside, blocking the doorway and watching me with hooded eyes.

“I wanted to talk about your connection with Hero Ph—”

A pale finger flashes out, tapping a key, and a computer beeps with savage loudness, cutting me off. Mitso continues typing, speaking in a monotone as he does. “In the settlement, I signed an NDA, so I can’t talk about your family’s company. Even with you. I can’t even mention the company’s name. It’s hard, isn’t it? When the company name is the word for the good-hearted savior in the western world. Life can be a giant fucking joke, huh? If I ever feel too hyped up about anyone’s courage or their noble goddamn qualities, they’ll sue the shit out of me.”

I swallow, tasting something cheesy and rank at the back of my throat. “They?”

He shoots me a single look, a look to kill. “Get. To your point.”

“I read the letters you sent my mom,” I manage to say, fingers crimping the linty insides of my jean pockets.

His hands go quiet on the keyboard. “What letters?”

“The letters talking about meeting up with her, and—”

He shakes his head, cheeks flushing slightly. “Hold up, what?”

My fingers claw for purchase inside my pockets, scraping fuzz. “You were her … fan.”

He stops me with a sick scrape of a laugh. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your mother!” He convulses with silent laughter so deep that he starts to cry, and when he wipes away the tears with the back of his stained T-shirt, he exposes a hairy belly covered in gruesome slashing scars. “I wouldn’t even know who she was if it weren’t for…” He trails off, then shoots me a wicked grin before setting off another BEEP so loud that I almost jump out of my goose-pimpled skin. “I don’t give a single dingleberry of a shit about anyone in your whole family, except…” BEEP.