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For Claudius,
who sat in my chair and ruined my sleep

CHAPTER ONE

It feels good to wash the blood off her hands. It had dried tight to her skin, pitting the creases of her knuckles like rust. She is not sure how much of it is her own.

Stray strands of hair, caked in even more blood, come away in her fingers. Recently highlighted, it now drinks the blood eagerly as if to replenish its lost proteins, turning it gloriously red. The air smells of smoke and salt and the kinds of flowers now found only at fancy studios.

She had gotten her roots done before taking the trip. She had gotten everything done. Fingers and toes, legs and underarms and landing strip. Her mouth had filled with light as they gave her TV teeth and a Barbie cunt.

How many days ago was that? The crash makes it hard to remember.

She had emerged from the belly of the plane feet first; felt the sun on her toes. It had tingled, like a numbness receding. Then her grip slipped and she was sliding down and down and down the rest of the way, landing on a pile of battered luggage.

It was like being born.

Now she stands at the lip of the waves and wonders about sharks. They say most sharks kill people in only three feet of water. Pushed by hunger and desperation, they circle closer and closer to the splash patterns blithely made by foolish swimmers and snap them just above the ankle. Her boss said the same was true for startups. In the ocean and in business, it didn’t take a big shark to bloody the waters. All it took was one big bite in the right place, and the competition would bleed out while frantically treading water, desperate to stay afloat.

She walks farther into the ocean. Salt water stings her legs. It is warm. Bathwater warm. Blood warm. So, she is in a warm place. Palm trees. White sands. The sort of paradise they were promised. Their reward—a celebration.

Are the others alive?

The waves hit above her knees. Maybe they are dead. Maybe they are all dead, and this is Hell. Or Heaven. Or purgatory. Maybe this is her own unearned twist ending, the kind that makes no sense.

She wades up to her waist. Here she feels the current’s tug more strongly. She feels better semi-weightless, toes gripping the velvety sand, than she did standing on dry land’s cruel gravity. Bodies are always such a problem. She thinks this must be true for most women. No wonder so many girls fantasize about being mermaids.

She pushes herself deeper, the water up to her chest. Then her chin. Then her eyes. Maybe being dead would be better. More convenient for everyone. More convenient for her, especially.

Survival is work. Hard work.

Underwater, the hair slowly lifts off her scalp. She senses the crusted blood there dissolving, salt returning to salt. It feels like undoing the Velcro on a child’s sneaker. Some of the coders she’s met still wear those. Why would they waste their precious executive function doing something so banal as tying shoelaces? It was like cooking and cleaning and laundry and driving from place to place: things their mothers used to do for them, until they found quieter and more reliable automation elsewhere.

She sinks down lower in the ocean, until the sand hits her knees. Her hands float up without initiative. I surrender, she thinks. At her gym, that’s what the move is called. It is the motion of a soldier holding a gun crosswise, as though marching out of a jungle and kneeling before her captors. I surrender. I surrender. I surrender.

A hand brushes hers.

She rockets out of the water. She blinks blind, wet eyes into the dying sun. On the waves in front of her floats a body.

He is face up. Birds and bottom-feeders have been at him. He looks like a cake with swipes of frosting missing. The eyes are mostly gone. But she still recognizes the shape, the hair, what is left of the ears. It’s Craig. His sneakers are still on, their proprietary polymers now swollen with salt water just like the rest of him. How long has he been in the water? When did the crash happen? She has no memory of anyone trying to awaken her. Maybe the others had assumed she was dead.

Or maybe they just hoped she was.

“Kristen?”

Someone is calling her name.

“Hey! Kristen! Kristen, stop!”

She keeps looking at the horizon. She hears the splash that her boss, Sumter Williams, makes while jumping into the ocean. Her job is to know him well, so she recognizes his gait faster than any airport security system, and identifies the sound of his indrawn breath before she even hears his voice.

“Don’t move! I’m coming!”

He sounds exhausted. Hoarse. It’s his post-conference voice. His throat is dry. If they were at work, she would get him a water and he would have no idea where it came from. But they aren’t at work, so he embraces her from behind. Apparently he has been out of the plane long enough for the hair on his arms to turn golden.

“Stop.” He’s breathing hard. “Please stop.”

“Where did your watch go?” Kristen asks.

“What?” He spins her around. He doesn’t look too bad, considering: sunburn, chapped lips, a bruise near one ear, a scrape on his jaw. But he also looks surprised, the kind of surprised that means he’s about to be angry. He seems to want to shake her. “We survive a fucking plane crash and you want to know where my watch went?”

“You love that watch. The band—” The band was your father’s, she is about to say, when he wrenches her to him. The company designed a custom bezel just for you, to fit that band. That’s how much your brand is worth to theirs. But he is stroking her hair and digging his chin in her shoulder. So instead she says what all Canadians say when they feel awkward: “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad. I’m just scared. I was scared you were…”

“… Quitting?”

He chuckles. There’s a slight wheeze to it. “Yeah. Quitting. And I refuse to accept your resignation.” He pulls away and smiles. “I mean it, Kiki. I need you here with me. Between the two of us, you’re the only one who actually knows how to start a fire.”

Kristen remains silent long enough for him to realize his blunder. Perhaps the burn scars are less prominent now. Perhaps he didn’t even notice them when he ran his hand up and down her back.

“Oh, Jesus. Kristen, I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“We should take care of Craig,” she says.

So that’s what they do next. Towing his body across the water is easy enough, with Sumter there. It isn’t until they hit the beach that Craig really begins to feel like deadweight.

Sumter sinks into the sand beside her. “He’s heavier than he looks.”

“We’re in shock,” she says. “I think I have a concussion.”

“Let’s see your eyes.” Sumter takes hold of her chin. “This is probably inappropriate,” he murmurs, squinting into her face. He holds up his other hand to shade his view of her eyes. “Well, your pupils are decidedly un-Bowie-like. So that’s something. What was he even doing out there, in the water? What were you doing out there? Did you see him? Is that why you walked out there?”

Kristen shakes her head. “No. I just wanted to clean up. I have cuts…” She holds out her hands. “I thought the salt water would help.”

“Smart. But you still scared the shit out of me.”

She is going to be cold, soon. Entering the water with her clothes still on was a bad idea. “When did you get out?”

“Me? I don’t know. An hour ago? Maybe more? The sun was higher up, but…” He flicks the skin of his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand. There is a band of skin there where he is whiter than usual. “I remember my arms flying up; my watch must have hit something and fallen off. So I couldn’t contact anyone. That’s why I left you in the plane; I was looking for people. I’m guessing whoever else made it out is doing the same.”

Kristen blinks three times. Then she remembers she’d removed her HeartEyez contacts for the flight. Sumter had removed his, too. They had used them at passport control, and then to log themselves on to the flight manifest. But the lenses dry out during air travel. And they’re mostly useless midair, unless the user needs active monitoring for heart attack or seizures. She’d already turned the Wuv functions off by the time they boarded. She had been looking forward to never needing to use Wuv again. Had she put the lenses in her carry-on? Where is her carry-on? Where is her passport? Biometrics are useless without a reader. Kristen stares at her meaningless fingers, considers her meaningless eyes. Without supporting infrastructure she is nothing, no one—nameless.

It feels liberating.

“You checked on me before you looked for anyone else?”

He scoffs. “Uh, yeah? You were sitting right next to me, remember?”

She doesn’t remember. She remembers helping Sumter with his lenses, in the tiny airplane washroom. But she didn’t wake up in the washroom, so she must have returned to her seat. If the cabin pressure dropped abruptly, would they all have passed out simultaneously? The others on the plane, the dead ones whose corpses she’d crawled past, must not have buckled their seat belts in time. They would have been thrown every which way, if the plane went into free fall or rolled over.

“Do you remember what the plane told us? Did it warn us about a crash?”

Sumter shakes his head. “Nope. It just told us to sit down and buckle up. Turbulence.”

Kristen remembers her bare feet on plush white carpet, the delicate stem of a champagne flute in one hand. The champagne was dry and musky, not too sweet. Actual champagne. Actually French. Not a hint of wildfire on the bouquet. She’d had too much of it.

They’d had so much to celebrate.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“No. It’s a blur. A blur that hurts.” He looks over his shoulder. “There’s an airstrip. The plane must have found it, when it was hunting for a place to land.”

The plane. The plane had found an airstrip. The plane that had told them when it was safe to stand up and when they needed to sit down. Because, of course, they had opted for the easiest flight—the simplest, quickest option between acquisition and celebration. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, but an automated one. Sumter chartered the private flight himself. Their plane had no pilot.

“Do you think…?” She licks her lips. Even after her dip in the water they are dry, cracked. She tastes blood. “Do you think someone could have hacked the plane?”

Sumter stares out over the ocean. “What, like our being here is the result of some sadistic plot to strand all the principals of our company on a remote, desert island, where we slowly die of thirst, begging forgiveness for developing the world’s first emotional currency?”

He turns to face her. “Yeah, that thought crossed my mind.”

CHAPTER TWO

Neither of them has the strength to dig a grave for Craig. Kristen suspects that retrieving him from the water was a mistake. Wasted effort means wasted energy. And they don’t have energy to burn. When the nausea abates, if it ever does, hunger will replace it.

Leaving the beach means struggling back up to the airstrip. In the blazing orange sunset, the plane looks mostly fine. There is damage to the nose cone, and the landing gear is trashed, but overall it could be a lot worse.

“We’ll do a head count, later, once we find everyone else,” Sumter says. “God, there are so many to-dos here. We’re going to need actual clipboards. Do you think this place even has pens and paper?”

“I’m pretty sure you can draw an Eisenhower Matrix in the sand, Sumter.”

She’s surprised she can still remember productivity jargon. Tech is full of gatekeeper language—shibboleths and inside jokes and literal code-switching. On the plane, it had still seemed important to speak the language.

Their fingers trail along the plane’s white metal surface as they push themselves forward. A streak of blood follows their progress. She isn’t sure which of them left it behind, or if they both contributed to the long red trail.

Palm trees border the airstrip. No lights spring up along its borders; whatever signaled the plane operated on its own invisible frequency or network. This place might be a literal tax shelter. Sumter makes for the line of trees confidently, hopping off the airstrip and striding into the shadows. When she reaches the first palm, Kristen turns back to look at the plane. Suddenly it seems so far away. So small. Something of herself stretches between its cold metal skin and her damp flesh, like a tether between the life she’d been living in the air and whatever life there is waiting here on the sand. If she ventures too deep into the trees, that tether might snap, and her connection to her life in Toronto will vanish.

“Come on,” Sumter beckons. His posture is jaunty, boyish. He looks like the man who once developed covenants and branding for a Martian housing development, and then sent a marketing campaign—starring himself—to the fifteen largest real estate developers in the world. When asked, he insisted it was not a prank.

Dutifully, Kristen follows him deeper into the trees.

There is not much underbrush. The shadow cast by the palms likely blots out the opportunity for much other plant life. Under their feet, the sand hardens until it becomes a road. It’s blacktop; she trips on a crack in it. The shadows tilt and then her knees feel like they have caught on fire. She remains there in the dark on her hands and knees, breathing through the pain, until Sumter’s arms loop up under her own. Slowly, unsteadily, they rise to stand.

“Can’t take you anywhere,” he chuckles. He holds her hand as they pick their way through the dark. His palms are callused from the rowing machine in his office. She pictures it, the office, all raw beams and louvered windows and lights that dim with the twitch of a lip. Here the darkness is as thick and soft as the stuff of fairy tales.

“Hello?” Sumter’s voice rings out sharply.

“Don’t,” Kristen says. “You don’t know who’s out there.”

“Our people are out there.” He clears his throat. “Hello?!”

Far away, she hears something.

“Hello?”

An answering sound. A call. Or a groan.

“Come on.” Sumter tugs her hand forward. She remains still and tightens her grip.

“It could be an animal,” Kristen reminds him.

Sumter pulls up short. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Yeah.” This far from civilization and she is still playing the same role she plays in Toronto. Still keeping him from the peril of the unknown when he wants to forge boldly, stupidly ahead.

“Wait, do you think this is some kind of nature preserve? You think they have big game hunting?”

Kristen is grateful that the darkness covers her eye roll. “I think we’re the biggest game out here, Sumter.”

“There’s an airstrip for a reason, right? Be more optimistic. Hello?!”

From the darkness, something answers back. Kristen hears the rhythmic slap of skin on blacktop. Someone is running at them. Green light snaps alive suddenly, exposing the moving figure.

“Mason!”

The two men hug for a long time. Sumter is by far the stronger of the two; he lifts Mason a few inches up off the road and gives him a good squeeze. It helps that Mason, although much taller, is built like a particularly anemic scarecrow. Sumter spins him around and puts him down. Kristen isn’t sure how many CEOs hug their CTOs that way, but things are emotional, and Sumter is from California, where people have more feelings.

“You’re all wet,” Mason says.

“We found Craig. He was in the water.”

Mason pulls back for a second. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you were never close, but still, finding him that way, that’s … alarming.”

Kristen speaks up: “It was.”

“Kristen,” Mason says from over Sumter’s head. “You’re okay.”

She wonders if he’d crawled right past her unconscious body, back in the plane. Probably. “I’m like a rash. I come back.”

“Please, let’s all just be happy we’re alive, okay?” Sumter grabs for Kristen’s hand and Mason’s. He links the three of them together. “We survived. We’re survivors. That’s good news.” He turns to Mason. “Tell me there’s more good news.”

Mason points with the glow stick down the road. “There is, and it’s that way.”

Mason’s good news appears from behind a gentle hill like an animal lurking in wait.

In the shadows, the angular silhouette of the massive structure is a swatch of glossy black on matte. Only when they face it head-on does Kristen realize how ugly it is: a black box, at least three stories tall and obscenely wide, unbroken by balconies or decks or anything remotely human. The longer she looks at it, the more it offends her. It’s blunt and dull and stupid, with all possible architectural intrigue machined away. It’s the sort of edgelord faux-brutalist monstrosity that a real estate agent must have once charitably described as being “a bold addition to the landscape” when trying to earn their commission. But against the natural beauty, it’s a huge gleaming void surrounded by trees and stars and sea. A wound in the night.

The ascent to the home is clearly meant to emulate some sort of ancient pyramid, whether Mayan or Egyptian or latter-day Lloyd Wright, Kristen has no idea. But there are other people—at least, the shapes of them—clustered near the top. When she squints, Kristen can see the thin ribbon of what must be a glass terrace.

“Jesus Christ, these stairs,” she says.

“I know,” Sumter says. “Fuck.”

“There’s less wind on the terrace,” Mason says. “We can probably all sleep out there. Nora Mae tried the doors, but they were locked. Then we all tried battering it. Fawn even threw a rock.”

“Power?” Sumter asks.

Mason shakes his head. “Not yet. Possibly. There might be a grid we can turn on, tomorrow, when it’s light. I bet there are solar panels somewhere. A house like this, on an island like this, someone had to have them. But we haven’t found any generators yet.”

“Water?”

“There are some birdbaths and fountains that have been collecting rainwater in the back. We’ll have to do the same.”

“If it rains,” Kristen says. “If we’re lucky.”

“I’m sure your natural pessimism will be a real aid to us in this crisis, Kristen.”

“Mace? Kiki? Play nice.”

Finally they ascend the last set of steps. From here the rest of the island stretches out beneath their view. It forms a crescent, one side slightly thicker than the other, and breakages on the thin side like a glass jaw. White beaches ring both sides of the island. From this distance and in the dark it’s impossible for her to tell whether the tide is high or low, or how close the waters ever come to the trees. But given the spotty nature of the island’s other side, and the height at which the home has been built, she suspects it’s pretty high. Theirs is the thicker, more forested side of the island. The house is set deep in the hillside, high above the beach. There are no other houses or structures that she can see.

They are alone.

Kristen turns back to survey the remaining members of their group—the survivors of Wuv. They all huddled together, but still fell into smaller natural groups: Hari, Jong-soo, and Brock—the programmers (though Brock’s arrogance seems to push him to the front as usual); front-end designer Jasper standing alone; Pearce from trust and safety (though Kristen had always felt his position to be ironic) with Fawn from product image and brand; and off to the side, Nora Mae from wearables and quality assurance.

“Well, everyone,” Mason says, gesturing to Sumter, as if he was waiting for any morning meeting to start. “It seems our fearless leader and his chief of staff have survived.”

Scattered applause bursts out. Some of the others have trouble clapping; Kristen makes a mental note. She will need to put together a resource roster, and it will have to include physical capabilities, too—wrist and nerve injuries were already a concern with their industry.

“Thanks, everybody.” Sumter looks at them one by one. “It’s good to see you all.”

Kristen hears him wind up for the (surely) inspirational keynote that he’s about to make. Sumter strides to the center of the terrace. Even under moonlight, he seems to have found the best lighting for his angles. Sumter spreads his hands wide and begins.

“First of all, I want to apologize,” he says. “I chartered this flight, and so whatever happened is both my responsibility, and the charter’s. Airlines, right?”

Bitter laughter.

“Second, I have some bad news. We’ve lost some people. Kristen and I just found Craig, in the water.”

Gasps. They liked Craig. Craig was nice. Or at least, inoffensive. Most of the time.

“What was he doing out there?” Fawn asks. She’s raised her hand, like this is a goddamn summer camp.

“I don’t know,” Sumter says. “Honestly, I have no clue. I found Kristen in the water, too. She was cleaning off some cuts. Maybe he was doing something like that.”

“Wasn’t he allergic to, like, everything?” Hari asks.

As a unit, they shrug agreement. Craig had been a real bitch about the refrigerator, when he was first hired. Nothing they couldn’t handle, but it did make ordering lunch look like the Third Vatican Council.

“I mean, maybe he got stung by something,” Hari continues. “There are probably insects here, right? Weird ones?”

“He was kind of puffy when we found him.” Sumter turns to Kristen. “Wouldn’t you say? Kristen? That he was a little puffy?”

She’d thought it was water bloat, but maybe it wasn’t. And soaking a sting or a bite in seawater makes some sense. She tried cleaning her cuts that way, after all. “A little,” she says. “There wasn’t enough of him to…”

Fawn stifles a little gasp. “We’re off topic,” Sumter says quickly. “Before we continue, I think we should observe a moment of silence, for Craig, and for everyone else we’ve lost. By my count, that also includes Murphy, Nadine, Riel, and Bruce. Correct?”

“Correct,” Mason murmurs.

“That makes ten of us left,” Sumter says. “Now, I know it’s hard not to focus on the negatives of the situation, but a positive mindset is what’ll save us here. And one thing we should cultivate some gratitude for is the fact that we all actually know how our bodies and emotions work. Other people, in this same scenario, wouldn’t even have that. They’d just panic, and work up a ton of cortisol, and get inflamed and sick and brain-fogged. So let’s everybody take a deep, cleansing breath here. Our nervous systems are in a hyperaroused, post-traumatic state. We need to shift to rest-and-digest, even if there’s nothing to digest.”

He breathes.

“In.”

They breathe.

“And out,” he says, eyes fluttering shut.

“Okay,” Sumter says, and his hand slips back inside Kristen’s. Leaning over, Hari grabs her other hand. Soon they are all linked together. Sumter squeezes her hand. “We can organize something more, well, organized later on, but for now let’s just think about everybody we’ve lost. Let’s start processing this together.”

For a moment of silence, it isn’t really all that silent. The waves roll in, vast and dark. They sound like mouths opening.

Maybe Craig really was stung by something. Or maybe he’d gotten desperate and eaten something he shouldn’t have, some poisonous berry or toxic fungus. Maybe he’d stumbled out into the water, choking, tongue swollen, eyes closing.

“Now that’s behind us, I just want you all to know that the next few days are going to be hard, but they’re not going to be impossible. You are the smartest, toughest group of people I know. We wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t the truth. You all moved heaven and earth to get this company to this point.”

He chuckles. “Well, not this point, specifically.”

Rueful laughter among the survivors. Fawn wipes her eyes. Hari stares at the concrete. Mason keeps his features neutral as ever; he might as well be listening to the daily stand-up meeting.

“My point being, we were acquired because you all put in over a thousand percent. You worked incredibly hard. You believed in this, in us, in me, when Wuv was just this cute brand I’d invented with no value proposition behind it. You were there, through the sticky notes and the whiteboards and that crazy guy who tried to get us evicted from the loft on Spadina. You were there during crunch time. The late nights, the early mornings, the sleeping bags, the spray-on sanitizer showers, the whole bit. If I needed it, you did it. And I’m so grateful.”

“If we make it through this, do we get bonuses?” Jasper asks.

They all laugh.

“We’ll see about that.” Sumter clears his throat again. “But really, I just wanted to tell you that, if I had to pick anybody to be stranded with on a desert island, it would be you.”

There is a resounding awwww.

“And that’s how I know we’re going to make it through this,” Sumter adds. “We’re a great team. We can make it. Scratch that—we will make it. We’re survivors. We will survive. As long as we know how to love—”

“Oh, do shut up,” Mason interjects, and they all laugh, and for a moment Kristen forgets the pain in her skull.

CHAPTER THREE

With the sun now fully set, the remaining ten split into two camps, men and women. But Sumter grabs Kristen’s wrist before she can join the others. “I just need a sec,” he says, which means at least ten minutes. He follows the terrace and leads her past wall after wall of dark glass, around to the other side of the house. “I just want to say … holy shit.”

“What?”

Sumter has his head rolled as far back as it will go. Kristen follows his gaze, up and up and up, into the glittering cum-smear arcing high above them that is the Milky Way. It is huge, bigger than she’s ever seen it, grand and terrible at once, vast and hollow and cold and infinite.

“You miss it, in the city,” Sumter murmurs. “You just totally miss it. You just forget it’s even there.”

The last time she saw the stars this clearly, she was on the roof of her building. The attack on the northeastern power grid, three years ago. She had stared at the stars while waiting in line for a hot dog grilled over a neighbor’s illegal hibachi. It felt fun, all the buildings having rooftop parties, drinking and waiting for the hostilities to end, the ransom to be paid, the prisoners to be released, whatever. That first night, no one seemed to care. The retirees all talked about the same thing happening back in 2003, about neighbors stumbling outside in the early morning sheepishly asking how to boil water for coffee on a barbecue. But by the sixth night, after so many elderly and infants had died of heatstroke, they cared.

“Do you think satellites can see us?” Kristen asks.

“Probably.”

“Do you think anyone’s going to find us?”

“It’s the twenty-first century. Nothing’s ever lost. They’ll notice we’re missing, and they’ll find the route our plane filed, and they’ll start looking. If they can find the garbage at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, they can find us.”

She smiles. “So you’re saying we’re garbage people.”

“Hey, one man’s trash, and all that.” Sumter’s hand finds hers yet again. He squeezes them. “I’m really glad you’re alive, Kristen. Really, really fucking glad. Okay?”

“Okay.” Kristen looks at the darkness where their hands meet. She makes her hands go limp and heavy in his grasp, like a protester performing civil disobedience during arrest. He doesn’t get the message. If anything, he grips harder.

“I’m going to need you. Even more than I already do.”

“Well, I really doubt that poaching talent is going to be a problem out here, Sumter.”

“I mean it, Kiki. The whole team needs to keep their shit together. And that means I need to keep my shit together. And I’m going to need your help with that. Okay?”

Finally, she squeezes his hand. It seems to be what he’s looking for. “Okay.”

Kristen tries to avoid thinking of her destination as “the women’s shelter.” It is, obviously, a shelter against the elements, and it’s the one designated for women. But it might be better to think of it as a tree fort. They can make NO BOYS ALLOWED signs to keep busy. Maybe they won’t even be here long enough to get bored.

Or maybe they’ll need something more than signage.

“I wish we had mats,” Fawn is saying, when Kristen rounds the corner to the terrace on the other side of the house.

“You should try to sleep,” Nora Mae says. It’s her gentle New Brunswick way of telling Fawn to shut the fuck up. She rolls the delicate beading of her earrings between her fingers. She does this when she’s nervous. Or angry. Or not being listened to. She really does it all the time.

“It’s so weird, I can’t even feel tired,” Fawn prattles on. “I’m kind of excited? Like we’re camping? I mean I was excited about Singapore, but Singapore is so done. You know? But this, this is an experience.”

“It was a plane crash, not a carnival ride,” Kristen says. “People died.”

Fawn’s mouth makes a tiny moue of disappointment. “I know,” she says ruefully. “But accentuate the positive, right? We have to treat this like an opportunity.”

Nora Mae and Kristen share a look. Both of them have had enough real problems in their lives to be wary of this attitude. “An opportunity for what, exactly?” Nora Mae asks.

“I don’t know,” Fawn says, inspecting her nails. “Growth? I guess? I mean, I think we’re going to learn a lot about ourselves here. Figure out what we’re made of, and all that.”

“I’m sure it’ll be a real team-builder,” Kristen mutters, and stretches out on the concrete. It’s still warm from the sun.

They laugh. Below, the waves continue rolling in. Hunger spirals up in Kristen’s stomach. She dismisses it, imagines pushing it away like a badly timed notification. She hadn’t coaxed herself into her new bathing suit for this trip by succumbing to every tiny impulse. Tonight is no different. She reminds herself of that over and over: Tonight is no different. She is still the same person. She is who she has always been. She is a survivor.

“Do you think they’ll find us?” Fawn’s voice is much smaller now.

“Of course they will.” Kristen catches herself repeating Sumter’s words. “The plane filed a flight plan. They’ll notice we’re missing, do a grid search, and find the plane.”

“If Sumter even wants them to find us,” Nora Mae says.

Kristen faces her. “What?”

“Come on. You saw him. He’s getting off on this. He’s going to keep us here for a few days, then tell us it was all a joke. That he was trying to, I don’t know, push us on to greatness or something.”

Fawn flips over onto her stomach. “Oh my God, do you really think that?”

“Doesn’t it seem like something he would do?” Nora Mae asks. “Think about it. Remember the time he took us on the tour of the new loft? He said he would be right back and then he just locked the fucking door and left us. Four hours later he comes back and says it was a chance for Mason and Murphy to work out their shit.”

“And Sheila freaked out,” Fawn says.

“Sheila had every reason to freak out,” Kristen reminds her. “She was claustrophobic. And we couldn’t even open the windows to the fire escape. Sumter’s lucky no one sued.”

Not that anyone suing Sumter would ever win. He has the best attorneys money can buy. They have been on retainer since the death of his parents.

Nora Mae nudges Kristen’s ankle with her toe. “So? Is it a setup?”

“What?”

“Is this all a scam? Is it a game? He would tell you.”

Kristen shakes her head. “It’s not. I mean, he wouldn’t.”

“He was literally just talking to you.”

“We weren’t talking about that.”

“Well, what were you talking about?”

“Jesus Christ, Nora Mae, we were talking about rationing. And water. How we’re going to survive out here until we get rescued. You think he’d be discussing that kind of thing if this were all a game?”

Silence. Just the rush of waves. Kristen finds her lie invigorating. At least, it’s more pleasant than telling the truth about how tightly Sumter clutched her fingers. She decides it’s less of a lie than a mission statement. It’s aspirational. They will discuss rationing, eventually. They will have to.

“I guess it’s good that Sheila isn’t here, then,” Fawn says. “I mean, if she were alive, she’d really hate this.”

“I’m pretty sure she’d rather just be alive,” Kristen says.

“Oh yeah? Then why’d she kill herself?”

Kristen is up and off the concrete before she can think. She hears the other two calling her name, but she’s down the steps before they can say anything else. There are a lot of things about this situation that Kristen can endure, or force herself to endure. Talking about Sheila, about Sheila’s death, is not one of them.

Down the beach, Kristen hears hooting and hollering. The boys are out there, carousing. It sounds like a March break party, or another August long weekend up at Sumter’s designer cottage up in Haliburton: what they cannot achieve absent alcohol or drugs they are attaining through hunger and adrenaline.

She can’t think about Sheila without also thinking about Sheila’s body, about the morning she had walked right past it, carrying coffee, thinking about not spilling, about the cold creeping up into her skin past her stockings from the concrete floor, about how their boots-at-the-door policy needed a matching slipper component. Sheila—Sheila’s body—was right there, sitting at her desk. Her head was down. She looked like she might be sleeping.

Kristen had smiled at the sight of her friend. Sheila had been there the day of her interview at Wuv. Since then, they’d been comrades.

“Why is that bag over your head?” Kristen had asked.

Even with all the terrible things Kristen has seen—there was something about Sheila’s dead body, about the eerily lifelike quality of it, that still gives her pause when she forgets to block out the memory. Kristen can still feel the cold floor beneath her feet, and the hot splash of weak coffee across her stockinged toes, when the cup fell from her grasp. She can still remember looking for some movement, any movement, just the slightest hint of breath, within the plastic bag around her head. It had been the first time in a long time that Kristen had felt so aware of anything.

Or had felt so powerless.

The note was centered on the monitor display. It was written in a twelve-point sans-serif font, with no capital letters. Sheila had already reduced herself. Made herself smaller. Made herself into something less.

The night before, apparently, Sheila had stayed late and promised to lock up, then waited until the cleaning robot left. She typed up her note, used the washroom, and then brought out the tank and the bag from the building’s delivery station. It was over very soon, the paramedics had assured them. It would have been painless, thanks to the helium. Helium, they said, replaced the sensation of oxygen in the lungs. Anything else would have been torture. She must have really meant it, one of them had muttered, given the price of helium these days.

“The enemy knows the system,” Sheila often said. It was her favorite of Claude Shannon’s quotes, and she applied it to everything: traffic, surge pricing, how quickly a cute dress could fall apart after only two washes. This was the content of her note. The enemy knows the system. Nothing more, nothing less. Just that single sentence, as though it would explain everything.

Kristen has never understood Sheila’s decision to be rooted in anything other than burnout. Sheila worked as hard as she could right up until the moment she couldn’t. She hadn’t so much killed herself as retired. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to work for Wuv, it was that she didn’t want to work, at all, ever again. She didn’t want to wait for another breath-steamed streetcar in the freezing rain. She didn’t want to spend another second looking at screens. She didn’t want. Period. Death was the absence of desire. When you stopped wanting, you stopped living.

Not that Kristen said any of this, afterward, during her many interviews on the subject of Sheila’s death. As the Chief Emotional Manager, she helped the communications team make sense of the story for everyone who consumed it. She had said all the right words: This is a tragic loss of potential; this is a consequence of an underfunded system; we are making a donation to CAMH; women in tech need more support; women in tech need mentorship; women in tech need to build networks of mutual care; women in tech, women in tech, women in tech, women—

Before (1.0)

“Welcome to the Ministry of Wuv.”

Kristen watched as Sumter Williams checked from the corner of his eye to see if she got the joke. She smiled to make sure that he knew she had. Then the CEO smiled back, and with a sweeping gesture, parted the curtains of an elaborate tent Velcro’d together from children’s bedsheets printed with generative knockoffs of legacy cartoon franchises. The tent hung from butcher’s twine strung between the hard loft’s rafters. Inside were blankets, cushions, Rubik’s cubes, a quartz singing bowl, and an incense burner. It was the only shield from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The place reeked of synthetic agarwood.

There was a rumor going around that Sumter Williams, the orphaned billionaire and tech genius, was so paranoid about the existential threat of strong AI that he had protection grids of copper and elite shungite embedded in the floor of his company’s Quayside loft. There were even more rumors about what his next venture might be. There were prediction markets making bets. Based on his spotty academic history, his dissertation-length social media threads, and his likes, the markets predicted that it was related to space travel or exploration. He liked to call himself an “affective altruist,” which was what the current generation of future deadbeat dads of Mars called themselves after doing some therapy.

“Have a seat,” Sumter said, and Kristen sat.

“So. Kristen Howard. You go by Kristen, right? Even though it’s your middle name?”

Kristen was surprised. Not many people knew this, although the information itself was easy enough to glean from her court records. “That’s right. My mom wanted me to have my legal name for my own use, later on. So in public, on their socials and their feed, they called me Kristen. It was her godmother’s name. So I still use it, to honor them.”

“Well, in that case, your CV is super interesting, Kristen. Do you know why I found it so interesting?”

Because my parents are dead, just like yours, she thought of saying, and didn’t.

“Is it because I took one of the largest tech companies in the country to court for killing my parents—and won?”

He threw back his head and laughed. It was a short, sharp hah! of a laugh. “That’s definitely one thing that really drew me to your story. You were, like, sixteen years old, but you somehow had what it took to make those guys pay real attention. You were going through this terrible thing and you were still objective enough to know how to leverage it. You were really savvy, I have to say.”

She nodded. “They had killed my parents. Or, to be fair, their faulty system killed my parents. They died in a fire, because the smart home monitoring system they had installed was really pretty stupid. And that gave me something to focus on. I think if I hadn’t pursued that goal, my case, I might have fallen apart.”

“I know the feeling.” He looked away, and then back at her. “I remembered your name, when I saw it. That’s why I’m the one interviewing you, and not Mason. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I actually did an oral report on you, for my ethics in tech class in high school. I was in Canada for secondary—that’s where I met Mason—and it was all over the news here. I learned everything I could about you.”

This was not the first time Kristen had heard these words, or their equivalent. Even before the fire, her parents had streamed and spread and sold pieces of their lives online. Kristen had always had a lot of fans, for lack of a better term. Followers. An audience. To some extent, she still had them. But after the fire, her attorneys had encouraged her to shape them instead into a “community.” And she had, for a while.

Until the settlement. Until their sympathy curdled into spite.

“You probably sent an interview request, and I probably never replied.”

He grinned. “Maybe. But I won’t hold it against you. I know how it is. It’s weird when everyone assumes that just because your parents are dead, all you need is more attention.”

Kristen shrugged. She enjoyed shrugging. For years, it was too painful for her to move her shoulders that way. The scars had thickened into a straitjacket. Now her posture was perfect, and she luxuriated in tiny movements everyone else took for granted.

“You can’t blame them. Attention is monetized, so people treat listening to your problems like it’s a charitable donation.”

His laugh this time was softer and more genuine. “Yeah. It’s more about them than it is about you. What did that experience teach you?”

“My parents dying, or taking the company to court?”

“The latter.”

It was common for interviewers to ask the former question, though the answer to both was the same. “It gave me a desire to work in tech. I wanted to see the process up close, of how one person’s idea becomes a part of everyone else’s daily life.”

He smirked. “Most people just tell me they want to make the world a better place.”

“Better for whom?”

Sumter rocked forward a little on his meditation cushion. “You know what I like about you? You’re skeptical, but you’ve earned it. You have a reason for feeling the way you do.”

It was nice to know that her feelings rose to his standards of objectivity. “Most people have a reason for feeling the way they do. My reasons are just more obvious than most.”

“What do you think about affective computing?”

Kristen listened to the sounds of the loft around her. There was the squeak of markers on a static surface, the hum of machines, the undertow of gossip dragging conversation down to some barely audible register of sleaze. Maybe they weren’t the rambunctious sort. Or maybe they were all hungover. She’d heard things about the companies that came to Toronto from San Jose and Austin and Miami, after all the real estate became impossible to insure or all their engineers stopped getting visas, when the laws changed about who could study computer science in America.

“Shouldn’t you be asking how I feel about it?”

He snorted. “You’re dodging the question.”

Kristen sighed. “I don’t believe in it. And I don’t know why you’re working on this type of tech, when you’ve talked about doing a space project for pretty much your whole life. I think you disappointed some people, searching the inner universe instead of the outer one. That’s one of the hurdles Wuv has to clear.”

Sumter blinked. He sat back a little. “You’ve got a set of brass ones, huh? I heard you’ve been interviewing all around town. Do you do this everywhere? Am I just a box being ticked off? Pun intended?”

Kristen smiled. He had no idea how accurate his assessment was. She did have a list. It was a growing, constantly evolving thing, and it changed based on how influential the people on it were—and how influential she believed their technologies might one day be. She wanted to do her work, to do the things she was best at, in a place where it would impact the most lives.

Occasionally, she drew a thick red line through the names on her list.

“Would you rather I lied?” She gestured at the interior of the tent. “For all I know, you have ambient affect detection sensors in here that are looking at my pupils and listening to my voice and adding up my truth score.”

His face dimpled. “That would be a reasonable assumption.”

“So you would know if I lied. Or you might, if the system controls accurately for the anxiety that comes with job interviews. Besides, if I did become your chief of staff—”

“Chief Emotional Manager.” Sumter offered a huge shit-eating grin. It made him look particularly American. “We’re an emotion analysis company. This is a job about managing other people’s feelings. Might as well be honest about the job in the title.”

“Well, as the chief emotional manager, I’d sometimes have to tell you things you didn’t want to hear. I might as well start now.”

Sumter began fiddling with a puzzle. It was a series of interlocking rings, like stage magicians once performed with. The rings flowed through his hands. His hands moved independently of the rest of his body, as though someone else were operating them. There was a deliberateness to his silence. He was waiting to see if she would recover some semblance of healthy impulse control and correct herself, make herself sound nicer, make herself sound less like a man, make herself sound less like him. She didn’t.

“Tell me why you don’t believe in affective computing.”

This was an easy one. “Ted Bundy.”

The rings stopped clicking together. “I’m listening.”

“Ted Bundy had everyone fooled. Ann Rule wrote a whole book about it. The Stranger Beside Me. They worked together at a crisis center, and he was so kind to suicidal people that she never imagined he could kill anyone. No one did. That’s an extreme case at one end of the spectrum, but it’s still a real human problem. There are plenty of destructive, abusive people out there who nobody thinks twice about, because they inhabit a layer of society that enjoys the benefit of the doubt. Bundy was a charming white guy and he got treated like one, even during his trial. He’s probably the most famous example, but there are hundreds of others.”

When he said nothing, Kristen added: “My mom was really into true crime, before the fire. Her documentary recaps always did the best numbers.”

Sumter was shaking his head. “Humans are distracted, though. Our devices aren’t. They see the whole picture. At Wuv, we’re developing algorithms that can monitor the tiniest changes, like even galvanic twitches under the skin, and extrapolate further by running the data through a neural net that’s always learning. Wuv sees more than the human eye can, and it makes assessments accordingly.”

“But isn’t it just as subject to algorithmic bias as those old facial recognition systems that thought Black people were gorillas? Or that a person in a wheelchair was a post office box? What if the guys who write your code don’t know how to recognize emotion in other people? Won’t they just reproduce their problems in any system they design?”

He frowned. “I thought this was supposed to be me interviewing you, not the other way around.”

“You asked me if I believed in affective computing. You didn’t ask me if I believed in you.”

His ears actually turned red. She wondered how the Wuv algorithms would chart his emotions at the moment: 50 percent surprise, 15 percent embarrassment, 25 percent delight, 10 percent miscellaneous? Was it a pie chart? A bar graph? Some amorphous collection of colors haloed around him in auras of red and green?

Sumter cleared his throat. He peered at her through blond eyelashes. “You signed an NDA for this interview, right?”

“Right.”

“I want to create an emotional currency.” He grinned. “People talk a lot about social capital, soft power, sentiment analysis, stuff like that. All those things are tied together, like this.” The interlocking rings jangled in his hands. “But what if we could actually quantify emotion? What if there were an algorithm that tied all your unconscious responses to a real, legal currency?”

“You mean tying cryptocurrency to affect detection?”

“I mean donating to refugee camps just by heaving a heavy sigh. I mean voting your conscience—literally. How many feelings do we push aside, every day? What would our lives be like if we could have an accurate accounting of our desires, rather than repressing them and projecting our shame onto other people? In the short term, I think this technology has the power to finally decouple advertising from content, once and for all. We can finally know how people feel about what they consume, what really interests them, and no one will have to depend on advertising or patronage or whatever. That’s real affective altruism.”

Sumter was doing the thing that Kristen counted on in interviews: talking about himself, and not asking about her. It was something that founders at this level tended to do. Watching his hands dart through the fragrant air of his blanket fort, she knew that if she simply left enough gaps in the conversation, he would extemporize a manifesto.

“So why currency? Why not a score, like in China?”

“Well, for one, fuck China. Not the people, I mean, but their government. Their government took a perfectly legitimate technology and turned it into the Spanish Inquisition. They’ve got boundless data and infinite computing power and they’re using it to decide if someone is really Muslim, or really gay, or really loyal to the party.” He made scare quotes with his fingers. “It’s playing small. And it’s fucking wasteful. You know how much carbon they’re burning just to do a paper bag test? It’s bullshit.”

He drew a deep breath. “For another thing, I’m part of the universal basic currency movement. I think the whole planet should be on one currency, period. Eventually, having one currency will facilitate frictionless trade between Earth, Luna, Mars, wherever else we end up as a species. And I see this project as another step in that direction.”

Sumter leaned forward, and spoke in a softer voice. “Because, I’m also a long-termist. I see the big picture. One day we’re going to need content on Mars. To keep people from going crazy. Now, obviously we’re not going to bring actors or creators or whatever. That’s too many mouths to feed. But even generating the content takes money. How are we going to fund that? With fucking ads? No. That’s not what technology is for.”

Kristen made sure she was looking into his eyes. They were a lovely sage green, with flecks of gold around the iris. The dim light of the blanket fort made that tough to discern, but she had spent enough time poring over his profiles the night before to remember. He’d been lean as a young kid, a featherweight wrestler who lettered long before becoming the much more solid man in front of her. It gave him a relaxed sort of confidence that other men in similar positions didn’t have. A lot of them got built later on, when they could afford it, or when they finally attained the discipline to pursue it. But Sumter Williams always had both in abundance.

“What is technology really for, Mr. Williams?”

Sumter’s pupils dilated significantly. It was like he’d had a hit of something he needed very badly. He leaned forward. She had him.

“Every piece of technology is really a prosthetic device,” he said. “The purpose of everything our species has ever designed is to free us from what we are, and what we are is a carbon-based life-form bound by gravity and oxidative stress. But we won’t be that way forever. A thousand years from now, we won’t even be the same species. Speciation happens in isolated habitats. And our habitats will be very different, and very isolated.”

Kristen’s father would have worshiped this man. He would have curated an entire video series about him. He would have obsessed over everything he said, judged everyone he slept with, bought whatever he sold. When someone criticized this man, Kristen’s father would have sniffed and said, “Well, at least he has vision.” But what he would have meant was that this man had the power to make his vision a reality, and that her father would do anything to maintain the parasocial, parasitic nourishment he received from watching this man do all the things that he himself could not.

“Is that where you see this company, in five years?”

He laughed. “Sure. What about you? Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“I never make plans that far ahead.”

His surprise was evident. “No?”

“I lost my family in a freak accident. My plan is to have no plan.”

“What are you doing for the rest of the day, Kiki? Does anyone still call you that?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

As they walked around the space, Sumter kept his hand at Kristen’s elbow, or the small of her back.

Sometimes companies brought random women, like extras from central casting, to in-person spaces when they were interviewing a woman they really wanted to hire. Or they did the same thing digitally, filling either the About Us/Our Team/Who We Are pages or the remote meeting backdrops with AI-generated images of women. Clearly, Wuv wasn’t interested in that—the gleaming eat-in kitchen was a sea of men. Kristen felt the travel of eyes over her body and face and could almost see their individual calculations generating like auto-captions over their heads: too fat, too skinny, too plain, too fancy. They said things about her handshake and how firm her grip was. Their eyebrows danced.

“We have more women, I swear,” Sumter promised, as if he was reading her mind.

“Where do you keep them?”

“With Bluebeard’s other wives,” he said, and, hearing no laughter, turned to Kristen and said: “That’s a joke, by the way.”

Kristen kept her voice even. “I know. But it was funnier the first time I heard it. Which was from the former CEO of Telo-MORE. So now it’s not so funny anymore.”

Sumter wrinkled his nose. “Shame about that guy. Did you go to the funeral?”

“We only met the once.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a reason we’re not in a tall building. Founders shouldn’t put startups in tall buildings. It’s in the lore.”

“Shorter buildings are worse,” Kristen said. “You don’t die. You just wind up in the market for a new spinal rig. It’s like jumping in front of the subway. You live. It sucks.”

“Well, either way, that guy was an asshole. I mean, you start up a life-extension lab, and then you off yourself. Way to kill your whole entire brand, jackass.”

They turned the corner into the kitchen. “I hope you like poutine.”

They stood at the back of a fast-moving line. As they shuffled forward, Kristen watched men wait for fryers to shrill, carefully popping them open and grabbing frites with tongs. Then they moved down the length of a table covered in steaming tureens, and spooned up all manner of things: cheese curds, gravy, fattoush, caponata, chana dal, toasted seaweed, spicy-roasted crickets. Young or old, brown or white, bearded or merely scruffled, they exhibited mostly the same shape: skinnyfat, with the occasional hollow-chested wraith.

“I’m just surprised you guys even eat potatoes.”

“It’s company cheat day.”

Kristen snorted.

“That’s not a joke,” Sumter continued. “I don’t pay for empty calories. You can eat junk food on your own time.”

Kristen turned. “Well, thank you for sharing your cheat day with me.”

“It feels more festive, with a guest.” Sumter tracked the progress of a tall, thin man across the room. His brows knitted together as this man sidled up to their table. The man ignored Kristen and bent down to murmur something in Sumter’s ear. Sumter tilted his head to listen. When the man pulled away, Sumter said: “Sorry about this, Kristen. Apparently someone is unhappy, and I have to deal with it.”

Kristen stood. She extended her hand. “That’s all right. Thank you for—”

“Oh, this isn’t goodbye. Stay. Hang out. Meet everybody. I’ll run into you later.” He snapped his fingers at the much taller man. “Mason, can you set Kristen up with a demo?”

“Will do,” said the man called Mason. But he wasn’t looking at Kristen. He kept his attention on Sumter until he’d turned the corner. He did something to his watch, muttered at her to wait, and left. Kristen waited. And eventually, the only other woman there arrived. She had lilac hair and a tiny, wispy frame. She plucked her way past the other tables like a deer delicately stepping over ferns, and melted into the seat across from Kristen.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Sheila.”

“I’m Kristen.”

They shook hands. Sheila’s was long and perfectly manicured and smelled of bergamot. They smiled at each other nervously.

“You’re here for the chief of staff position? Sorry, Chief Emotional Manager.”

Kristen nodded. “And you?”

There was just the briefest hesitation. “I’ve been here from the start.” And then she grinned. “I’m the one who wrote it.”

The demo involved Kristen thumbing yet another nondisclosure agreement, this time with a nondisparagement clause. Then they went into a room hung with blue velvet curtains, where Sheila could download WuvBeta onto her devices.

“We’ll uninstall it later, I promise,” she insisted.

Kristen handed her the dummy devices she usually brought to interviews. As she fussed with them, Sheila asked her a series of questions that Kristen suspected were meant to put her at ease, so as to avoid whatever the affective computing version of white coat syndrome was.

“Are you from Toronto?”

Kristen shook her head. “Krieger Lake. Northern Ontario. It’s okay if you’ve never heard of it.”

Sheila smiled. “Sumter has a place up in Haliburton. His parents owned it. It was a vacation home. We go up there for retreats sometimes. That’s the farthest north I’ve ever been, sadly.”

“You’re not missing much, trust me.”

“I’d really like to go to Resolute, though,” Sheila said. “See the lights. And the bears. If there are still any around.”

“I heard they’re all turning brown to match the landscape,” Kristen said. “Like those elephants without tusks.”

They shared a spontaneous moment of silence. Then Sheila held out Kristen’s watch and said, “Could you roll your sleeves back for me?”

“Sure,” Kristen said, after a moment. She rolled up the sleeve on her right arm first. The scars were thick there. She had thrown it up to protect herself from a falling bookcase, after she ran into the house for her mother. She wore long sleeves most of the year anyway; occasionally during the summer, the trad-dads hit on Kristen, supposedly because her dressing was so “modest.”

“There was a fire,” Kristen said. “You might find the readings a little hard to take.”

“The data from the watch is the important thing. If you were a confirmed member, and you wanted the full suite, we would install Wuv on everything in your place, too. Your mirror, your fridge, your vibrator, everything. And it would harvest all that data and put together a more accurate picture of you. But for now, we can just give you a pair of demo lenses, instead.” Sheila’s delicate fingers pecked at her device, and the Wuv logo bubbled up to the surface and bobbed there, floating. “Is that okay?”

“It’s fine.”

Sheila opened a soft blister case in a shade of lilac only slightly deeper than her hair. It too had the Wuv logo. The preservative solution smelled vaguely of semen. It stung just slightly less when it first hit her eyes. Sheila’s hands were cool as they tipped Kristen’s head back.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “This part is always weird.”

For a moment it was like having a migraine aura: a sparkling cloud of rainbows. Then it faded away like fog from a washroom mirror, and there was only Kristen’s regular vision.

“We’re working on a partnership with a vision provider,” Sheila said, before she could ask. “But don’t tell anyone.”

“How’s our new test bunny?” Sumter breezed past the blue velvet curtains and took hold of Kristen’s chin. He directed her gaze away from Sheila and back to him. “Gorgeous. Sheels. Fire it up.”

Within Kristen’s vision, nothing changed. But on Sheila’s device, a chart with various levels appeared on one side of the screen. On the other side was a balance sheet with nothing on it.

“Oh damn, you’re skint,” Sumter said. He made a fist and squeezed it six times. Kristen blinked rapidly. The currency was rather more than she’d expected to be given to play with.

“How do I grow it?”

“Mostly? By interacting with things. Things more than people. Interacting with people is a great way to reduce your total value.”

Kristen frowned. On the display, her currency dropped. Sumter laughed, clapped his hands, and pointed. “See? Right there. It happens in real time.”

“How does it know how I’m feeling?”

Sumter smirked. “Everything we gather from our users’ wearable inputs is pattern-matched and cross-referenced against real-time interaction and location data, with an AI assist. We’re using artificial intelligence to match physical reactions—feelings—to stimuli, and then our app nudges people in the right direction so they feel more of it. It’s like old-fashioned platform emotional contagion, but for…” He gestured broadly. “Everything.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he’d made the app version of You should smile more, but instead she said: “Total information awareness. For feelings.”

“Exactly. We don’t need people to talk about their feelings. We have real-time data about embodied, somatic response. We know their feelings. We know what they feel about everything they see, when it happens, without delay.”

Or context, she thought of saying. Or explanation. Or consideration. Or any opportunity for redemption and change.

“We’re going to know how everyone feels about everything, and it’s going to change the whole world.” Sumter was looking at her, but also through her. He was seeing something else, or possibly some distant future, or maybe he was just refining his pitch. “No more ads. No more polling. Shit, no more elections. No more swiping left. No more wondering how someone really feels about you. No more energy wasted deciphering a word or a glance. Just pure, uninterrupted truth.”

Kristen considered walking out. Wuv was an awful idea. She hated it. She hated it the way she hated a stranger’s hot, damp hand covering hers on the subway. She hated it the way she hated stupidity, or willful ignorance, or whatever else it was called when people tried to hack their way around basic observation and deduction and sensitivity and discernment.

“What does it say I’m feeling right now?”

He looked at the display. His head tilted for a moment, this way and that. When he turned back to her, he seemed almost surprised, and possibly a little unnerved.

“It says you’re feeling very calm. It says you’re probably the most stable person I’ve ever met.” He smiled. “You’re killing it.”

Kristen smiled back serenely. “So you’re saying there’s a hiring bonus.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Swiss Startup Robinson,” Sumter says. “That’s us.”

“TEDxDesert Island,” Mason says, “except you’re actually getting paid.”

Sumter’s brows lift. “We should think of it as practice, for Mars. Or wherever people are trying to land. We’re pioneers! Humanity can’t become a space-faring species without trying out experiences like this. Right? How did everyone sleep?”

No one answers. They already know how everyone slept. They each heard each other, all night, twisting and snoring and muttering and startling at the slightest thing that might be a spider. Kristen’s concussion seems to have abated. She feels more alert. And hungry. The others appear to feel much the same: there is a nervous sharpness to all their interactions that speaks to reality setting in. Kristen cannot recall the last time all of them were together in person this way. Usually at least some of them are behind the veil of remote work, their irritation as buffered as their images.

The remaining team—all ten of them—have gathered on the beach. Until Sumter spoke to the group, Mason was doing his best to listen attentively to their private conversation through visible annoyance. Brock, Pearce, and Jong-soo were performing elaborate stretches to compensate for sleeping on concrete. They were demonstrating for Fawn. Fawn listened and then let them spot her. Nora Mae was watching them from her position on the steps where there is still some shade. She had muttered something to Jasper sitting next to her, who rolled his eyes and laughed. Now that Sumter is speaking, Hari moves up two steps, closer to them. Of them all, Hari is the worst off. He’s taken off his shirt and rigged up a kind of sling for one arm. He says it’s probably just a sprained wrist, but doesn’t want to take any chances.

In the daylight, the structure is even more imposing: a giant black cube, seamless and impenetrable. They need to get inside the house. Hotel. Fortress.

Whatever it is.

“I slept great, actually,” Fawn chimes in, when no one else responds. “The ocean sounds just like my sleep stream.”

“It’s not a bad place to be stuck for a while, is it?” Sumter is clearly anticipating more buy-in than he’s actually getting. When Fawn nods dutifully, he treats her to one of his big smiles. He claps his hands loudly, then rubs them together. “All right. We have to stay positive. I’m going to stay positive. And I want you to stay positive, too. I’ve been talking with Mason and Kristen, and we’re putting together a plan to reboot the plane and call for help.”

Some of the tension dissipates, but not all of it. It will take more than a winning smile and a list of action items to soothe the anxiety gnawing at all of them. Besides, calling for help isn’t really their priority—not yet. Their first priority is staying alive.

“Now, I know you’re all probably pretty hungry,” Sumter continues. “And we’re working on that, too. The good news is that there’s probably supplies on the plane. We can scavenge it, take inventory, and start rationing. Then we’ll try to get the comms on the plane up and running, and use it to call for help. By now, people will have realized that we’re missing. There’s probably already a search happening.”

Kristen wonders when he’ll mention the bodies of their coworkers, and how exactly to handle them. The sun is doing the corpses no favors. And even if the team drags them out to sea, they’ll just wash ashore again. He’s right. They need to open the fuel tank, or find something else that will light a functional pyre. They’ll have to dig a hole either way.

“So, with those things in mind, I’m going to turn it over to Kiki, here.”

Of course. He’s left her with the hard part. Naturally. She steps to the front, and makes time to make eye contact, just like she would if this were any other stand-up meeting. They are hers to command, for the moment, and they will still be so if and when they get out of this sand trap. If and when they do, she will ask for a raise. Or possibly just sell the rights to her story as the survivor of two statistically unlikely calamities, and retire to a very similar beach. Perhaps even this one. It would be nice, maybe, to own it after all this is over.

“Generally speaking, we need to respect the Rule of Threes,” Kristen begins. “A human being can survive for three weeks without food, but only three days without water. We can survive for three hours in damp cold without shelter, but only three minutes without oxygen or during a major bleed-out.”

No one asks how she knows this. The guys look at Pearce. Pearce nods. That is how they all agree she isn’t just making this up.

“You’re going to work in pairs,” she continues. “Hari and Fawn, I want you to circumnavigate the entire island. Report back what you find. Trees, animals, more buildings, possible water sources, signs of infrastructure, anything.”

Hari nods. “Sure.”

“Nora Mae, I want you and Jasper to go through the plane and gather up whatever you think might be useful. Batteries, Band-Aids, food, whatever. Water should be your focus. Although to be honest, what I’m really looking for is toilet paper.”

An uneasy laugh rolls through the crowd.

“Does that include the luggage?” Nora Mae asks.

“Yeah, when do we get our luggage?” Brock asks. “It’s still on the plane. Are we just gonna live in these clothes for the duration?”

“No,” Kristen says evenly, “but there are other things we need from the plane first. Unless any of you need medication. I would have thought that would be in your hand luggage, and not your stowed luggage, but maybe I’m wrong. Is there anyone who’s missing medication and needs to get it off the plane?”

The rest of them look at each other, and slowly shake their heads. Then again, asking them in public like that is likely some sort of labor law violation, and they have every right not to answer. She herself rarely mentions her weekly anti-inflammatory infusion. There’s a clinic near the office and she can go during lunch. And she almost never mentions the quarterly autoimmune treatments that keep her body from rejecting the multiple cell edits she’s received over the years. The only people who know are Sumter and Nora Mae. And she only told Nora Mae because a research lab had approached Nora Mae’s reserve about taking part in a study on intergenerational trauma and inflammatory disease, and she wanted to know if Kristen thought it was a scam.

“We’ll deal with the luggage later. We have other priorities first. Which brings me to my next task. Brock? Pearce? I need you to start digging a latrine.”

“Excuse me?” Brock looks at the others, then at her. “I’m a fucking software engineer.”

“You’re on the all-star team at your gym. You’ve got the muscle.” She focuses on Pearce. “You were in the Forces, Pearce. Is digging a latrine part of setting up camp, or not?”

Pearce draws himself up to military posture. “Sure is.”

“Aren’t there toilets inside?” Brock asks.

“Probably,” Kristen says. “But we can’t get inside yet. And even if we do get inside, and even if there are toilets, we have no idea if the water is turned on, or if the structure is even connected to any water. For all we know it’s an abandoned project, and it was never serviced. Do you think you can hold it until we figure out all those variables?”

Brock is silent.

“I thought so. Moving on. Mason and Sumter, you two were the last who operated the plane, so I want you to try rebooting its comms. And I want you to try to access the black box, too. Maybe it can tell us what happened, or where we are.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Sumter says. He winks. Mason rolls his eyes.

“That leaves me, and Jong-soo.”

“Here,” Jong-soo says, as though there is somehow any doubt.

“You did robot reconnaissance during your mandatory service, right?”

He nods.

“The plane has a bunch of batteries, but there’s still a stash of fuel onboard for emergencies. And this is an emergency. I need you to get the fuel for us. Carefully. There should be tools somewhere on the plane itself. Autonomous planes are supposed to fly themselves to the nearest airstrip with everything they need to do minor repairs already onboard.”

Jong-soo nods once more.

“What do we need the fuel for?” Fawn asks.

“Cremation.”

Fawn makes a noise. Kristen focuses on her. “Can you…” Fawn looks to the others for support. “Can you just do that?”

“I don’t anticipate it being easy,” Kristen says.

“No, I mean, legally, can you just…?” Fawn at least has the grace to look as though she recognizes the absurdity of what she’s saying. “I mean, what if their families want their bodies?”

“They won’t want them for very long.” Kristen softens her tone. “It’s a sanitation issue, Fawn. It’s a public health problem. Think of it that way.”

Fawn’s eyes water. “But, they’re our friends…”

They were Fawn’s friends. They were not Kristen’s friends. They were Kristen’s responsibility. Their moods, their habits, their schedules and allergies and families and all their complaints and grievances, all their secrets—those were a job, not a relationship. An obligation, not an intimacy.

Kristen glances at Pearce again. “Pearce, what do you think? Is it important that we find a way to dispose of the bodies?”

Pearce clears his throat. “It’s certainly kinder,” he says. “Seriously, it’s the right thing to do. Just leaving them would be a lot worse. That’s what happens to people that nobody cares about, eh? They just get left out to—” He cuts himself off just before he can say the words left out to rot. A shadow passes over his face and Kristen wonders where he is now, what he is remembering, what he is trying to forget. What has this moment dredged up for him? What is it dredging up for all of them? “Nobody takes care of them. We’re taking care of them. It’s not ideal, but I think their families would feel pretty terrible if we just did nothing. If we just left them there. Like uncollected garbage.”

Pearce’s words hang heavy in the air.

One of Kristen’s anthropology professors always said that the first way any civilization became civilized was in dealing with its dead. That the sophisticated techniques for disposal of bodies was a sign of advancement. It required cleanliness, efficiency, and forethought: even having the ready fuel to spare for a pyre said something about a particular group, much as skeletons with mended bones spoke to the availability of care. She wondered what he would think of them here on this beach, arguing about how to handle the corpses on the plane.

Kristen was almost one of those corpses. What if she hadn’t woken up when she did? Would they have burnt her, assuming she was dead? Would she have awakened in flames, screaming, peeling her own skin off?

She remembers her mother, suddenly and viscerally, remembers her laugh and her smell. Then she remembers the smell: how it sank deep into her scalp and she caught whispers of it every time a nurse tried to wash her hair.

“It’s not that we won’t give them a good send-off,” Sumter says, after a long pause. He holds an arm out and Fawn sort of falls into him, as though some core part of her structural integrity has failed. Sumter watches Kristen from over Fawn’s head and mouths the words Thank you.

Kristen stares out at the ocean. At any other time, this would be nice. Pleasant. Idyllic, even. The palm trees surrounding the house rustle softly in the breeze. The water is a clear, beautiful green. White sand crumbles between her bare toes. It looks like the ads women get once they publicly change their relationship status to “engaged”: honeymoons, babymoons, bachelorettes, bucket lists, adults only, all-inclusive.

“Why would they leave?”

Mason pulls his gaze away from the sight of Sumter comforting Fawn, and seems to finally recognize that Kristen is still standing there, close beside him and Sumter. “What did you say?”

“Why did they leave?” Kristen gestures at the house standing tall behind them. “Someone used to live here. Or work here. Or something. There’s an airstrip, but no planes. There’s a building, but no people. But look at this place. It’s gorgeous. Why would they leave?”

Mason gives the island a once-over. “I don’t exactly see a lot of opportunities for career advancement. Maybe there was more habitation on the other islands. But probably not enough people to justify much infrastructure, much less a resort. I’m assuming that’s what this place is.” He gestures at the ugly black cube on the hill, wedged in the sand like a takeout container abandoned on the beach. “Or maybe the funding fell through once the investors saw that eyesore up there.”

“That, I can believe,” Kristen says.

“It’s hideous.” Mason is shaking his head softly, but there is a note of admiration in his voice. As though he respects the audacity of the black box’s design, if not the design itself. “Just hideous.”

Sumter twists his neck. His vertebrae crunch audibly. He winces. “Be nice. For all we know, whoever used to be here is coming back eventually. Maybe it’s a seasonal closure, you know?”

Kristen’s gaze meets Mason’s. It’s rare for them to agree on anything, but the hulking box almost demands to be made fun of. “What, like the Overlook Hotel?”

Sumter heaves a massive sigh. He nods at Mason. “Your stuff is still dead?”

Mason shakes his head. “Not dead, just deaf and mute. Which is to say, fucking useless.”

“Wow, nice ableism you got there, Mason,” Nora Mae says.

Mason clicks his tongue. “Oh, fuck off. You know I didn’t mean it that way, Nora Mae.”

“We should shut everything off,” Kristen says. “Save the batteries. Then we have to get inside the house. Or resort. Or whatever it is.”

“Maybe it’s a big sex dungeon,” Brock says. When they all turn to stare at him, he adds: “What? We were all thinking it.”

Jasper jumps up and makes a show of dusting himself off. “I’m headed out.”

Maybe it’s not a house or a hotel, but a fortress. Someplace to wait out the end of the world, or possibly just a statute of limitations, or the prospect of a guillotine. Kristen chews the desiccating skin of her lower lip. “There has to be a service entrance somewhere. A place this big had to have a staff. Someone had to clean it, right? Someone had to deliver groceries. You don’t build a place this big and forget to give the caterers a place to park.”

Mason and Sumter look at each other. “True,” Mason agrees.

“Do you want to go looking for that entrance?” Sumter asks. “I can go with you—”

“No.” Kristen shakes her head. “I can find it by myself. You two should try to reboot the plane.”

“You want us to fly that thing?” Mason sounds almost offended.

“No, I want us to access the black box and figure out what the fuck happened,” Kristen says. “And then if we can turn the plane on again, we can try to send out a mayday. There must be something manual left in the cockpit. A radio, or a satellite phone, or something.”

“Or maybe we could rig up two tin cans and a length of string,” Mason says.

“Don’t be a dick, Mace. We have to go back there and help Jong-soo open the fuel tanks anyway,” Sumter says. “We can’t burn the bodies otherwise.”

Kristen watches the others go their separate ways. Pearce is explaining latrines to Brock. They’re searching for dead branches or shells they can use in place of a shovel. Fawn is reluctantly giving Hari her arm. Jong-soo trails after Mason, Sumter, Nora Mae, and Jasper as they trudge in the direction of the airstrip.

Kristen shades her eyes with one hand and stares up at the house. It looms over the beach, a black glass mouth yawning at the tiny human figures scrabbling about below. There are no flags. No signage. No outward indicators of any identity or branding. It’s studiously blank. Just the steps leading up to the terrace, which connects to what must be the ground floor, and what look to be two additions, one for each side of the house, but which are likely part of the same structure. The great black void pointed at the sea—that’s the extension. It would seem almost spartan, were it not so huge.

“All right, you son of a bitch,” Kristen mutters, and starts climbing the steps again. The beach side of the house is likely the rear. If there’s a front door, it must be on the other side, which likely connects to the road leading from the airstrip. Any deliveries that came to the island would have come by plane, and anything offloaded from those planes would have needed a vehicle to get it from point A to point B. The existence of the paved track she and Sumter walked on last night points to that much. So there must be a service entrance somewhere, or at least a garage for that vehicle to park itself in. And if the owners of the building left in a hurry, it’s possible they forgot to lock that door.

Of course, it’s equally possible that the owners never came to the island. If the building is unfinished, then that’s more likely. But someone built it up enough to install the windows and doors and their locks. Someone stayed here long enough to complete the facade. That means there was a construction crew, contractors, staff. They would have needed power and water. Even a remote-operated construction crew, machine-only, would have needed to recharge their diggers and loaders. Somewhere, there’s a power grid.

Finally at the top of the steps again, Kristen cups her hands around her eyes and tries again to peer inside the black glass. It remains as opaque in broad daylight as it did at dusk. Harvest glass, probably, loaded with photovoltaic smog to soak up the island sunshine and keep the house cool. The locks—wherever they are—are equally impossible to find. No keypads, no cameras, no obvious place to tap a fob or a thumb, nowhere for a card or a key or a face or a finger to go.

Kristen can’t even see where the doors are. Her fingers go digging for a seam in the glass, for hinges painted Vantablack so that they would disappear into the facade, but there’s nothing to find. There is no place for the glass to open. It won’t even crack. At her feet are the stones that Mason said the others had hurled, in an attempt to break through. They’re scattered all over the terrace now. They bounced back. The glass must be riot-grade.

Whoever built this place designed it to be impenetrable. To survive an apocalypse. Or a solar flare. Or a popular uprising. It occurs to her that the building might not even be residential: maybe it’s a server farm or data vault. But that would also imply massive power usage and, crucially, a fire detection and prevention system. And she has more than enough experience with those.

She backs away from the black box and regards it anew. Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in; or I’ll—

“What did you just say?”

Kristen turns. Hari is there, anxiously twisting the steel bangle on his wrist. He looks a trifle uncertain, as though he’s afraid of interrupting something private. No, it’s more than that—he’s wary of her. She must have been talking to herself. That happens sometimes. It’s a consequence of having been left largely alone, back in the hospital while her burns were healing.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just trying to give myself a pep talk. What’s up? Where’s Fawn?”

“Oh, she’s…” Hari gestures vaguely, which Kristen takes to mean that Fawn is squatting somewhere and Hari is trying to preserve some of her dignity. “Before we got going, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

Kristen winces. This is an Americanization of her speech that Kristen privately hates. Every American figure of speech not inspired by porn or sports is about guns. It’s as dull as it is ugly. And on some level it annoys her that her language has been colonized by Sumter and Mason’s verbal tics, but they haven’t adopted any of hers. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to default to Canadian spellings on all their software.

“Did you do something to our drinks?”

“What?”

“On the plane. The champagne. You served it to everyone.”

“Sumter opened the bottle,” she says. “I didn’t have access to the alcohol fridge. Only the charter-holder can open it, for insurance reasons. It’s biometric. Mason and Fawn had it delivered from the duty-free.”

“But you poured the drinks. You handed out the glasses. While Sumter was in the washroom.”

“That’s true.” Her concussion must be worse than she thought. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

“Don’t do that dumb-blonde thing with me. I know what you did.”

Kristen is suddenly and profoundly aware of being very alone here with him. She tries to gauge how high up they are. How far the fall from the terrace would be. What kind of damage it might do.

“What did I do, Hari?”

He steps closer. “You drugged us,” he says, with complete confidence. He steps closer again. “All of us, except for me, because I don’t drink. I was awake, Kristen. I was awake, for the crash. I saw everything. Those people were passed out.”

This is one of those rare times that Kristen actually wishes she had her HeartEyez in, or that she could check her Wuv score on one of her devices. Then she could see with granular precision exactly how much Hari believes this to be true, and what it’s costing him—literally—to say these words. But she doesn’t have her devices. All she has are her instincts. Her wits. Her experiences. “Feminine intuition,” otherwise known as “the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime spent watching your back.”

She steps forward. He steps back.

“Just so we’re clear,” she says, in the kindest, warmest tones she can manage, “you think that a bunch of jet-lagged, dehydrated people drinking champagne on empty stomachs fell asleep while flying back after an all-hours work weekend because … I drugged them?”

He tries to check behind himself without taking his eyes off her. It doesn’t work. “They didn’t fall asleep. They passed out. I know the difference.”

“Oh? Do you have a lot of experience with sedatives?”

“No, but you do. You have access to pain meds the rest of us don’t. Everybody knows that. And everybody knows you were the only one with those drugs on the plane. Everybody saw you go through customs with them.”

She can’t fault his logic. If she were him, she would suspect her, too. Assuming they were drugged—and it might explain some things—Kristen definitely had the means and opportunity to do it.

“But why would I do that, Hari?” She leans in. Clasps her hands behind her back. Keeps her chin up and her shoulders pinned back. “Why would I waste my precious anticonvulsants, the drugs—ones I have to take a regular piss test to keep getting—on all of you? What’s in it for me? Where’s my upside?”

She watches him decide to brazen it out. “I don’t know. All I know is what I saw.”

“Because here’s the thing, Hari: if I did what you say, if I drugged everyone, that would mean that five people are dead because of me. It would mean I killed them. And that would mean that you are standing out here, alone, with a murderer, making accusations. Is that what’s happening right now?”

To his credit, Hari says nothing. But he doesn’t back down, either. He keeps staring at her. Kristen remembers that he has one brother in the Canadian Armed Forces, and another in the Mounties. He’s doing what he sincerely believes to be his duty in this situation. And he’s doing the thing Wuv pays him to do: working the problem. Spotting the vulnerabilities. Flagging possible threats. The only thing he’s forgotten to do is imagine how someone else might respond to a threat that’s standing right in front of them.

“I’m in pain,” she says. “And so are you. We all are. We’re scared. We’re lost. Of course you’re trying to figure it out. That’s normal. We all want things to happen for a reason. That doesn’t mean they do.” She shrugs. Lets her arms go. Swings them high and wide. The palms of her hands flap against her thighs. “Sometimes things just … happen.”

And it is at this moment that the door clicks open.

CHAPTER FIVE

“How did you do that?” Hari asks.

“I didn’t,” Kristen says. “Quick, get inside before it closes!”

Hari jumps inside. Kristen follows. Then she picks up one of the rocks that bounced off the glass last night, and uses it to prop the door open slightly.

And then, she is in the house.

Her guess about the number of stories was correct: there are three, and the top two have glass catwalks that stretch between the two other wings of the house set back from the extension. Under each catwalk are mounted UV air filters. The extension, walled in black glass, protrudes a good fifteen feet out at least: it’s the type of huge open multipurpose space that was once called a “great room” by overeager home interiors specialists. From the polished concrete floor to the ceiling is at least thirty feet of unbroken space. Hanging from the ceiling is a massive skeleton. From below, it looks like some sort of giant prehistoric tortoise. For all she knows, that’s exactly what it is.

“Marco,” she says, and her voice reverberates against the glass.

“Polo,” Hari groans, from somewhere that sounds like a washroom. The sound of his piss echoes hollowly throughout the entire room.

The house wakes up.

The lights flicker on first. They fizzle and pop and then come on all at once, a sudden constellation of tasteful LEED-certified illumination, throwing the giant tortoise in relief. Most of the light comes from the kitchen directly behind Kristen: it’s the only warm detail in the house. There are copper countertops that complement the French appliances and Japanese knives. When she pushes inside, she sees that there is a subtle tilt to the counters.

She stands at the sink and feels her fists opening and closing. Her hands refuse to touch the taps. So much is riding on whether they’ll actually work. They should. They might. And even if there is no water, she—they—can figure out how to turn it on.

Probably. Possibly. Perhaps.

Kristen grabs the taps with both hands. Nothing. She swallows in a dry throat. They have shelter. That’s important. She must remember to be grateful for this much. Grateful for having survived the crash at all, and grateful for this ugly insult of a house, appearing as it has like a gingerbread cottage for children lost in a fairy-tale forest.

“What are you doing? Turn it on!”

Hari reaches around her and flips the taps like he’s lived there all his life. The faucet hisses. Water pours out, white and lukewarm. Kristen says something like Oh thank fuck, but then she’s scooping water into her mouth and swishing and spitting and gulping down as much as she can from her cupped hands. She pulls a nozzle free of the faucet and hoses the water directly on her face and down her throat. It’s like the first glass of water after an especially awful hangover. She thinks she can feel her own brain cells rehydrating. Hari is already carrying a full glass of water—a perfectly anonymous, stackable borosilicate drinking glass, the kind often set out in washrooms for guests.

For some reason, she thinks of another fairy tale, the one where the castle and everything inside it is alive.

A wave of dizziness almost overtakes her. She clutches the sink with both hands. It’s a huge sink: deep and angular, separated into three compartments, each big enough to brine a turkey in. They might actually survive this. Hari has an arm around her shoulders. He’s saying he’s sorry. He’s opening all the cabinets.

“Oh, wow. Come look.”

He’s slid back a door. Behind it is a whole other room. The lights blink and flutter on, exposing racks and racks and racks of food. On one wall is a display, with a map of the racks on it. It’s live: Hari tabs over multiple layers of the map until the words “vegan and gluten-free” show up. Then he beelines for a box two racks over, grabs a fistful of foil-wrapped packets, and pauses as the display chimes and the numbers on it tumble downward.

“It’s an inventory management system,” Kristen says.

He puts a packet in her hand. It’s some kind of calorie bar. “It’s food,” he says.

Kristen stares at it. When she does nothing, Hari rolls his eyes and tuts and clicks his tongue and rips the whole thing open for her. Inside is something resembling 3D-printed vomit. Kristen is about to say as much when she notices Hari is gone. He’s in the kitchen. He’s filling another glass with water: a huge beer stein, this time. He says something about bringing it to Fawn. They’ll circumnavigate the island, as Kristen suggested. But they’ll start by telling everyone the good news.

“That’s a good idea,” Kristen says.

When he’s gone, she sinks to the floor. She nibbles at the vomit-looking brick of nutrients. She has no idea how long she stays there. There is no now or then or next, merely an endless moment of still not being dead.

The concrete is blissfully cool on her skin. She rolls up her sleeves and her leggings and lets her bare scars touch the smooth surface. Already they feel stiffer, heavier, drier. She wonders if there’s moisturizer. She wonders if there’s enough moisturizer.

This thought is enough to get her up and moving again. She reaches for the refrigerator. How cool it is will give her some sense of how long she’s been there. But it won’t open. It doesn’t budge. She reaches for a utensil to slip into the seal of the door, but the utensil drawer won’t open, either. It’s like a cliché dream about running away and getting nowhere, or suddenly being in the passenger’s seat instead of driving the car. Is she asleep? Is she hallucinating? How hard did she hit her head?

Kristen stares out at the great room. The furniture is draped. When she plucks the white sheets off the chairs and sofas and coffee tables, it’s as though the lobby of a mid-range design hotel has been dropped inside the house. There’s a similar atemporal odorlessness about the place. It’s got the kind of ersatz worldliness that is only appealing to people who have never really been anywhere. The geometric tables and chairs are all single pieces of plastic with no joints, as though each of them were extruded in one go from the same machine. There is a harvest table along one side of the room, complete with benches. It looks fashioned of California redwood, like the heart of a thousand-year-old tree. She sees no nails or screws. There are no photos, no paintings, no souvenirs. The fireplace is burnished copper with a bench (also concrete, just like the floor) that people can sit down on. Beneath, there are black canvas tote boxes filled with toss pillows and blankets. They could all sleep in this room. If they wanted to. Which she doesn’t.

Something that a teacher Kristen hadn’t liked had once made her memorize now rings out clearly in her head: There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here, and we are dead.

The weather will not change.

Kristen crosses through the kitchen and into the foyer behind it. This is the front entry to the house, and through more black glass panels she can see the little paved track that must lead back to the airstrip. The foliage outside has overgrown the track and the concrete path; no landscapers have been here in the recent past. As with the extension, the foyer stretches up thirty feet. The fossil hanging from the ceiling on this side is some kind of shark. Its jaws hang open wide. There is a staircase to the left and an elevator to the right. Its burnished copper doors match the fireplace. The elevator has no buttons, only a black glass panel to the right with the words SAFE MODE scrolling across it at regular intervals.

She’s about to touch it when the pounding starts on the door outside.

“KIKI!”

It’s Sumter.

He stands outside the great room, back to the sea, banging on the glass as hard as he can. Mason is with him. They can’t see her at all, Kristen realizes. Not even with the kitchen lights on. The pigments in the glass must be some sort of smart privacy screen that adjusts to the ambient light. She stands watching them for a moment. Nora Mae and Jasper appear on the steps, each lugging two rollaway bags and backpacks. Jong-soo brings up the rear and has another one, plus a backpack and duffel.

Sumter looks like he might actually cry when she lets them in. She expects him to say something about the house and the lights, but what he does instead is launch himself at her. He throws his arms around her and picks her up off the floor. “Kiki,” he breathes. He doesn’t let her go. He strokes her hair while she pats him on the back awkwardly. Behind Sumter, Mason is rolling his eyes.

“I thought you were gone,” Sumter murmurs brokenly. What bristle he can actually grow has appeared on his jaw; she can feel the tickle of it on her neck when he buries his chin there.

“Where would I go?” she asks, and he only holds her tighter.

Nora Mae clears her throat as theatrically as possible, and only then does Sumter relinquish his grip a little. His hands—weathered, now; covered in tiny cuts—come up and hold Kristen’s face.

“Sumter, I can take care of myself, the—”

“It’s very triggering, Kristen.” His mouth forms a single line. His eyes are full. He blinks the tears away and one of them rolls down his face. “I just can’t lose any more people. You know that. You know that better than anyone.”

Of course. His parents. He loved them. Very much. He had lost them long before his relationship to them could become in any way complicated by a sense of self. “Of course,” she says, and slides her arms back up around him. The tension drains out of him in a single sigh. “I understand,” she adds.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know. It’s not your fault.”

An awful sound strangles in his throat. “I’m still responsible.”

She pulls away from him and stares at his red-rimmed eyes. “You need water. And guess what? We actually have some.”

“Hey, we have food, too, if anyone still cares about that,” Nora Mae deadpans.

She’s staring into the pantry that Hari left open. It’s stuffed to the gills with boxes, bottles, cans, jars, and pouches. There are also cleaning products in bulk sizes, multiple first aid kits, batteries, light bulbs, charcoal briquettes, and cans of jellied denatured alcohol for the chafing dishes in the kitchen. Every piece appears to be from the same unbranded brand. It looks like the high-end version of a store brand: vibrant photos; Helvetica; minimal instructions in the form of furniture assembly pictograms, with temperatures in C and F. Someone at any level of language or literacy could figure them out, provided they could see the labels clearly. There are no ingredient lists, only symbols to indicate allergens. The expiry dates are years from now.

“The water’s turned on?” Sumter asks, just as Kristen says, “That’s great news, Nora Mae. Thank you.”

Sumter pushes past her into the kitchen and Kristen goes to Nora Mae and Jasper. “Really. I mean it. Thank you for going inside the plane. I know it must have been difficult, with the bodies of our friends there. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not fucking going back there,” Jasper says. His face is blank. “You can get someone else for the rest of that shit. I’ve taken my turn. We’ve taken our turn, I mean.”

“What he said,” Nora Mae says.

“I remember it being bad, when I crawled out after all of you had left,” Kristen says, as neutrally as possible.

Nora Mae looks only mildly guilty. “Well yeah, it’s worse now.” Her eyes well up and she flicks the moisture away with her middle finger. She lowers her voice. “Honestly if we could just fucking burn it right now, I would. I don’t think Mason and Sumter were able to do much in terms of a mayday out. So maybe we need to keep it. I don’t know. But for my money, if we can, we should just douse the whole thing in kerosene and light a match. That’s a right signal flare.”

“Let’s table that idea for now. We may come to a point where that’s our only option, but I don’t think we’re there yet.” Like Kristen, Mason is still staring at Sumter. They watch as Sumter opens and closes cupboards in the kitchen. There are plates and bowls and champagne flutes and martini glasses and drawers full of cutlery and tools. There are immersion circulators, vacuum sealers, food processors, stand mixers, blenders of all sizes, stockpots, steamers, pans at every difficulty level of cleaning. Stainless, carbon, enamel, cast iron, copper. At any other time, Kristen would admire how well stocked it is. Sumter casually opens a cupboard above the sink and fetches a heavy, square highball glass for himself. Then he fills it with water.

“Is something wrong?” Mason asks.

“How did he open those?” Kristen points at the kitchen. “I tried checking the drawers that Hari didn’t, but they wouldn’t open at all.”

“What are you talking about? They open just fine.”

Kristen frowns. “But…”

“We were in a plane crash,” Mason says. “And you woke up after all of us. You probably have whiplash. And a concussion. Possibly even nerve damage. More nerve damage, I mean. Of course you couldn’t open the cabinets.”

“But why would it work like—”

“Kristen.” Mason has a particularly quelling tone when he wants no further questions. He’s using it now. “You’re missing time. You don’t even know how you got inside.”

Maybe Mason has a point. Maybe. Possibly. She can’t really answer the question of how she opened the door. Or, more accurately, how the door decided to open. Why the house chose that particular moment to finally open its black doors to her and let her hide away inside.

“Mace is right,” Sumter says. “You need to lie down. We need to get you upstairs.”

“There’s an elevator,” she says. They follow her into the foyer where the copper doors are waiting. “I was going to try it, but then you all came knocking.”

“Don’t,” Sumter says flatly. He’s staring at the elevator. It’s closed now. He seems to realize how dad-like and weird he sounds, and gestures to encompass everyone else, not just Kristen. “We don’t know if it even works. We could get stuck in there if the power cuts out. And it’s not like there’s a fire department to help us get anybody out. Besides, if the house is running on batteries, then running the elevator is just draining the battery. We should still try to conserve our resources.”

“Agreed,” Mason says. He turns to Kristen. “Did you go upstairs?”

“No. But I found blankets and pillows in the living room. Or great room. The glass room. Near the fireplace.”

“Did you open the flue?”

Kristen shakes her head. “No. But I did notice the air filters under the catwalks seem to be working. So I’m guessing there’s HVAC. We should look for the thermostat. It’s probably tied in with the security system. It might help us call out.”

“Smart.” Mason calls over his shoulder. “Jong-soo, can you find something to prop the door? I don’t want to go through a whole song and dance just to get it open every single time.”

A whole song and dance. It reminds her of something. She can’t remember what.

“I think I need to eat something,” she says.

“Of course,” Sumter says. “Nora Mae, let me have one of those things of almonds.”

“We should catalog those, so we can ration them—”

“Kiki. You need to lie down. Let’s go upstairs.”

The second floor has a gym with a view of the sea on one wing, and a library or office space on the other. The library floor is tiled in leather. It feels oddly pebbled under Kristen’s bare feet. In between, there are bedrooms. One is clearly a master bedroom: the ceilings have mirrors and the ensuite has a bidet. But there is also a bunkhouse seemingly intended for children: unlike the other rooms, it has some personality. It’s painted like a jungle. Or like jungles allegedly used to be. Others are more anodyne, but expensive looking. The beds have no linens on them, and the adjoining washrooms have no towels on the racks. But there are supplies in the closets: sheets and towels and toilet paper and economy-sized bottles of organic body wash with Korean labels.

Perhaps they’ll be rescued by angry holiday-makers, appalled at how a group of errant software developers have been sleeping in their beds. Goldilocks and the three hedge fund managers. Goldilocks and the three lesser members of some royal lineage steeped in human rights violations. Goldilocks and the three guys who bought an island address to use it as a tax shelter for shell corporations. Something like that.

“I can make up the bed if you want a shower,” Sumter says. “Or, maybe you shouldn’t be standing up. Do you want a bath instead? A bath might be better. Which uses less water? Do you remember?”

Kristen sits on the lip of the tub eating from an airplane-sized packet of Marcona almonds. It’s hard not to pour the entire packet down her throat, but she forces herself to eat them one at a time. She’ll be sick, otherwise. And now is not the time to lose discipline.

“Did you find the black box?”

“What?”

He’s trying to figure out the shower. As in all the best hotels, it’s absurdly complicated. Too many knobs and levers, too many shower heads. He even tries snapping his fingers and waving his hands to get motion detection.

“The black box. On the plane. Did you find it?”

He stands up. “No.”

“You couldn’t open the compartment? If the plane crashed, it should be pinging. Or something. I think.”

His eyes flick to the door. “We couldn’t find it.”

Kristen can feel various of her thought processes coming back online as she chews through the creamy almonds. The smoked salt, allegedly harvested from Spanish shores, is doing something beneficial to her electrolyte levels. Her thoughts are sparking.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Sumter licks his dry, split lips. “Stop worrying. You’ve done enough. We’re safe. We have water, and food, and shelter. We wouldn’t have those things without you.”

She lifts her eyes. “Sumter.”

He looks at the door, seems to make a decision, and shuts it. They’re alone in the washroom together. He kneels on the tile floor. Distantly she realizes that she will need a bath mat of some kind, eventually. It would be awfully silly to survive a plane crash and then die in a slip-and-fall accident.

He takes her hands. “You can’t tell anybody.”

Smiling hurts the cut in her lip. “I believe I’m already NDA’d to you.”

“I mean it, Kiki. Seriously. Mason’s the only other person who knows.”

“So, just like all your other secrets.”

He makes a noise that’s halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Fuck.” He looks away from her. Rolls his lips inside his mouth and then out again. His thumbs are stroking her wrists. “Fuck. I didn’t know this would be so hard.”

Ice pours down her spine. They cannot be having this conversation. Not this one. Not now. But why else would he bring her up here alone and shut the door?

“Sumter, I can’t—”

“There was no black box.” He looks her in the eye now. There are burst blood vessels in his left eye that make the green of the irises all the more verdant. “We found the compartment. But we didn’t find the box.”

Kristen blinks. “What?”

“The box wasn’t there. There was an empty spot where it should be.”

She shakes her head. “But autonomous planes can’t take off without—”

“I know. Which means one of two possibilities.” He holds up two fingers and wiggles one of them. “One, someone hacked the plane before we took off, so that it would take off without a black box.”

“Or someone took it after we crashed,” Kristen whispers.

“And that’s why you can’t tell anybody.” Sumter tucks a lock of her bloody hair behind her ear. “Because, Kiki, baby, you were the last one off the plane.”

Before (2.0)

Nestled atop the arching spine of Hollywood like a half-dug tick, on Mulholland Drive exactly between Wilacre Park and the Santa Monica Mountains, sat a house that Sumter said belonged to the most anonymous man in America.

“And we’re pitching him, tonight,” he added.

Ilyas Qureshi was the real reason they’d come to Los Angeles. They’d pitched everybody else worth talking to, and reconnected with old friends, but Qureshi was the whale. He came from diamond money. Then he’d leveraged the diamond trade into information trading by patenting a proprietary process of quantum etching each stone with terabytes of information per facet on lab-made diamonds. To demonstrate the technology, he’d encoded the entire contents of the Voyager Golden Record onto diamonds and included them in the gift bags for nominees of some award or another. The plan, he said, was to send these crystals out into the galaxy like dandelion seeds, where, if there were life to be found, they were statistically more likely to encounter it. Now there was talk of encoding entire Turing-capable AI brains onto their surfaces.

“He might make robots actually happen,” Sumter said. “Like, real ones. Not the bullshit kind.”

Qureshi was seventy-something, allegedly, although he looked younger thanks to veganism and retinoids. No one knew if he had a spouse or children, or if so, where they were. He wore iterations of the same white suit because he adored the short fiction of Ray Bradbury.

And he’d never been online.

“Never?” Kristen asked.

“Never,” Sumter repeated.

Ilyas Qureshi had never possessed so much as an email address. Allegedly he had a phone number, but it went to a series of assistants, human and otherwise. He had no online profiles. His family had followed a strict practice of eschewing social media, and in adulthood he did the same. Rumor had it that he didn’t do any banking or financial services online, and that his institutions needed employees nearing retirement to provide him with the level of personal customer service he demanded. They made house calls. From Switzerland.

“So, how does anybody even know he exists?” Kristen asked, as their ride climbed the winding roads that led high up into the hills.

“Well, there are stories.” Sumter had made Mr. Qureshi one of his obsessions. The man had more than just angel money. He had more than rocket money. He had more than “cure cancer” money. Ilyas Qureshi was wealth itself. It was as though some demigod of abundance and prosperity had touched down in the jasmine-scented hills overlooking Studio City and said, I shall dwell in this land.

“But, I mean, how does he function? In the world?”

“He gets the internet read to him.”

“Like a blind person.”

“Sort of. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. But what it means is, he invests based on his impression of an idea, not everybody else’s. He doesn’t follow trends the same way other people do. He really takes the time to think about the idea, instead of the same five buzzwords that are in every pitch deck from here to the Biennale.”

Naturally, driving there was an ordeal. The post-quake road system was supposed to be better, but Kristen considered Los Angeles’s traffic on par with Toronto’s. The ride was programmed for the new roads system, and performed admirably, but Sumter still couldn’t suppress little gasps and groans of frustration as it heroically made a left turn across three lanes of traffic, darting up into the laurels and weaving its way into the hills.

“Are you scared?” Sumter asked.

“Not really,” Kristen said.

“Me either.” He gulped, and adjusted his posture in his seat. “I just want you to know, I wouldn’t drive this way, if I had control of the car.”

“Okay.”

“Especially with a woman in the car.”

Kristen had no idea what to make of that. It was their first trip alone together. There had been others, of course: Vancouver and Calgary and a very weird trip to England, or the royals-and-rickets theme park that used to be England, wherein the retina scanner at Heathrow actually mistook Sumter for his father. They missed their connecting flight because Sumter had to explain that yes, he was well aware his father was dead, and no, he was not trying to use his father’s passport, just bring me a human being and let me show them my profile in Harvard Business Review.

“It’s probably best if you don’t talk about that in the rental. The car is listening. Your insurance is probably skyrocketing as we speak.”

“True.” He settled back in his seat. “So, let’s go over the pitch, one more time. If you get Qureshi alone, what do you say?”

“I thank him for inviting us to his party, and introduce myself, and say that we’re working on new forms of sentiment analysis and affective computing. Then I ask if he wants to know more.”

“Right. Good.”

“Then I pretend to open up a little bit more about the issues we’ve had finding funding. Let him think that he’s rescuing us. Give him the chance to be a hero.”

They had been having this conversation for almost a week. Sumter had learned everything he could about the man, much of which was little more than rumor. But it was important, he argued, to have some points of genuine connection with their mysterious host. It was a miracle that they’d even scored an invitation, and Sumter had no intention of squandering a miracle.

“And don’t let anybody flirt with you for too long,” Sumter instructed.

Kristen turned around to face him. He kept his eyes on the road. Her patience had lasted for approximately four days. By now, it had evaporated like every ounce of moisture this side of Monterey. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Sumter was American, and that he thought like an American. Which is to say, he thought about women the way that men from all failed states did.

“You know what happens if I’m too firm with guys like that, right? I never find another job.”

Sumter grinned. “Good. I don’t want you to.”

At last, the car pulled into the long drive that led to Qureshi’s house. At the gates, two very large men in very good suits gestured for their windows to go down.

“Walt sent me,” Sumter said.

They nodded. “Devices,” said the one facing Sumter. On Kristen’s side of the car, the other man held open a box that appeared lined with silver. A tiny Faraday cage, just big enough for a hamster.

“All of them?” Kristen asked, just as Sumter said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

“All of them,” the guard answered. “Phone, watch, scroll, shell, rings, lenses…” He stared a little too long at the stretch of Kristen’s dress across her thighs. “Whatever.”

“Nothing?” Sumter asked. “Really?”

His voice had the high quality it took on when he wanted you to understand how stupid you were being. The guards weren’t going for it. Kristen shut off her devices, and placed them in the box. She rolled her head back and peeled off her lenses. She put them in the little enamel case Sumter had bought all of them that Christmas, and put that in the box, too.

“What number am I?” she asked.

“2311,” the guard said.

“This is discrimination, you know,” Sumter groused. “Some people need these devices for their health. What if I had diabetes? Or epilepsy?”

“Do you have diabetes?” the first guard asked.

“Or epilepsy?” asked the other.

“Well, no, but—”

“If you have a medical alert device, you can show it to us.”

Sumter heaved a very put-upon sigh, and forked over the devices. He didn’t even ask about which box they’d been put in. The car sidled up to a parking position. Its doors released with a soft hiss. They decamped from the vehicle, and Sumter ushered her up the winding flagstones to the house.

“I’ve heard this is a feng shui thing,” he said. “The winding path. It’s supposed to be like a river of money, or something. Fortune finding its way into the house.”

“That’s very LA,” Kristen said. She pointed at the house. “And so is that.”

The house was a teetering pile of glass boxes stacked with seeming precarity atop each other at strange angles. Kristen thought she could see through them all, but as her gaze focused on individual panes of glass, the panes would fog over into glowing opacity. At first she thought it was an optical illusion, but no: she focused on one area of the nearest window and as she watched, it fogged. The windows were tracking and responding to her gaze in real time.

“Wow.”

“Wow what?” Sumter asked.

“Nothing,” Kristen said. “Just. You know. The house.”

The door opened for them, spilling light and sound out onto the quivering blue lawn. In the ribbon of indoor light Kristen saw that the lawn was not a lawn at all, but rather a printjob: the earth itself had been textured to look like blades of grass, but there was no grass there. The entire yard was camouflage.

Without their devices, finding Qureshi and pitching him would be difficult. If one or the other found him, they couldn’t coordinate with each other as to how to speak to him or what to say. They would each have to trust the other’s pitching skills, and hope that Qureshi was in a listening mood if and when they ran into him.

They parted ways, agreeing to meet at the same spot within the hour. Sumter immediately found some of his hackathon siblings: once upon a time, they’d all slept in the same ware-home, or summer camp, or juvenile rehabilitation facility for boys who made deepfake porn starring the girls who rejected them, or something. Kristen couldn’t keep the stories straight. The people telling them looked at her dress and not her face.

She understood the attraction.

Her dress had a zipper. Her mouth did not.

Eventually Kristen settled on doing a perimeter sweep of the house. It was a habit from childhood. Counting rooms, and paces within rooms. How many steps to the door? How many doors? How many windows? There was nothing wrong with knowing one’s exits, she told herself.

The rooms didn’t have themes, but they did have crowds. There was a very loud smoking patio, and a very quiet kitchen with catering staff silently orbiting a woman weeping into her watch, as two of her friends awkwardly stroked her shoulders. Near the pool was a sunken cuddle pit, full of pillows and mohair and the smell of blue lotus. As she walked past, a hand closed around her ankle. When she looked down at the person holding her in place, he seemed very young. But then it was so hard to tell, these days.

“Hold still,” he said. “I need to make sure I don’t fall off.”

“I don’t think you’re going anywhere,” Kristen said.

“Really?” He seemed delighted. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m perfectly sure. You’re going absolutely nowhere.”

She lifted her ankle from his grasp and watched him slip farther down into the cushions, seemingly ready for sleep.

Kristen finally found a group of other women outside. They were clustered under a jacaranda, in the light of some candles, and watching the pool. No one had gotten in yet: the party had yet to swerve hard in one direction or another. But Kristen could feel the potential for mischief in the glowing blue water—she could sense the way that someone like the boy from the cuddle pit might want to drag her or one of these other women down with them, beneath the surface.

“Oh, you’re new,” said one of the women. “I’m Cora.”

“Amethyst.”

“Ellyn.”

“Grammercy.”

Her real name would have fit in better here.

Then again, maybe by now the one she used was basic enough to be intriguing. “I’m Kristen. From Toronto. I’m the Chief Emotional Manager for Wuv, which is an affective technology company.”

“We know Wuv.” Ellyn rolled her eyes and gestured at the party. “What are you even doing here? If I lived in Canada, I would never leave.”

“When Sumter Williams asks you to go with him, you go.” She sat down and nodded at the facsimile of grass. “This lawn is making me dizzy.”

“It’s a pixel disruptor,” said Grammercy. “The texture’s designed to show up as trees, to machine vision. As far as they’re concerned, there’s not even a house here. That’s why you had to come to coordinates, not an address. The pin was at the gates, not the house itself. So what’s it like, working for Sumter?”

It was one of the questions she’d had to get used to answering. It was also the price of admission. Kristen nodded again at the lawn. “It feels like staring at that for too long.”

“Is it better, up in Canada?” Cora asked.

“Sometimes. I’m from up north, but I like Toronto.”

“Does it snow a lot?”

“Not as much as it used to.”

They paused as a group to hear the silence. No birds. No insects. No tree frogs. Just the sounds of humanity and their machines, emanating from the terrarium house across the fake lawn. The silence broke as Amethyst set her drink on the flagstones at her feet with more force than strictly necessary. “Wait. I know you. Are you…?” Her squint deepened. “Oh my God, are you Kiki Howard?”

“Holy shit, she is,” Cora said, eyes wide. “Oh my God, my parents were obsessed with your parents! That’s why I even asked about Canada! They wouldn’t shut up about it!”

“Sorry,” Kristen said.

“Oh my God, your accent is so adorable. Sore-y. You’re so cute.”

“I’m lost,” Grammercy said.

Cora sighed, as though her friend were too simple for words. “This is Kiki Howard. Her parents were streamers, and her dad was mining coin or whatever, but he chained too many mines together and caught their house on fire and she sued their ISP because the smart home system failed.” Cora smirked. “That’s about it, right? That’s the thumbnail?”

“Pretty much.”

“Fuck, I wish we had cameras. My mom is going to die. She’ll be so jealous. My dad, too.” Her eyebrows rose. “But not, like, in a creepy way! I swear! He’s not like that.”

“Were a lot of your followers like that?” Grammercy asked, glancing between Kristen and Cora.

Kristen made a noncommittal shrug. “Well…”

“Oh, wow, gross,” Grammercy said. “That sucks. You got the last laugh, though, right?”

Kristen’s drink went the wrong way down her throat. She coughed. “Pardon me?”

“I just mean, being here. This place. Doing this job.”

“Wait, is that why Sumter hired you?” asked Amethyst. “Because you’re both orphans? I mean, it’s not like being an orphan is like super weird or rare or something, given, you know, the world. But he knew who you were, right? He would have looked it up.”

Kristen was almost finished coughing. “Actually, in high school, he did a report on me. For his ethics in tech class. He did a diorama of my house. Digitally. Before the fire.”

“Holy. Fuck.” Ellyn’s eyes were huge.

“So he stalked you.” Grammercy raised her glass. “That’s what I’m hearing right now. He stalked you. And now he’s your boss. Yeah?”

Kristen demurred. “I just had a longer vetting process than most.”

“And it appears to have paid off,” said a voice behind her. Kristen need not have watched the precious few videos that Sumter had perused to recognize that voice.

“Mr. Qureshi,” she said, turning and rising to stand. “Thank you so much for your invitation.”

He was dressed in the white suit, just like in the stories. And he really did look ageless, especially in candlelight. “Let’s take a walk.”

“I’m not going to fund you.”

He’d brought them to another little sitting area by the pool, this one shrouded in palms and laurels and birds of paradise. They sat at a tea table facing each other. The moment they sat down, lemonade that was green with mint appeared at their elbows. Mr. Qureshi stared into her face while he spoke. It was the oddest sensation, receiving all that eye contact. She wondered if maybe he had affect detection lenses of his own, and the attendant AI was gauging her reaction as he spoke. Just because he wanted his guests to go analog didn’t mean he himself had done the same. In older people it was usually easier to tell—they got visibly distracted by onboard chatbots and layers. But that was no guarantee.

“I don’t like what your company is trying to do,” he continued. “Mr. Williams has a vision. Until now, it was a vision I supported. But I must be clear. I want no part of this project.”

“I understand. Thank you for being so honest. A lot of possible funders just string us along, without giving definitive feedback. So I’d rather give Sumter as much clarity as possible.” She laid her hands on the table, left over right, to cover the slight rippling of flesh there. “May I ask why?”

Qureshi plucked a silver lighter from his pocket. It was beautiful, inlaid with precious stones. It looked heavy. He flicked it open, then closed.

“Frankly, I was disappointed in his pivot to emotional regulation. He was uniquely positioned to do something very beneficial for humanity’s future in space. He had every possible partnership in place.”

Kristen nodded. “Sumter believes that Wuv will clear the way for a universal basic currency, which will eventually facilitate trade between planets.”

Qureshi waved one hand dismissively. “I’ve heard that story.” He flicked open the lighter again and stared into the flame. “But I have other doubts. Perhaps it’s because you’re a Canadian company. You don’t have the history that someone like myself has. You can’t imagine how this technology will be misused.”

Kristen couldn’t help herself. She rose to the bait. “We’ve committed our share of genocide, the same as our colonial forebears. And Sumter was raised in the States.”

“It’s more than that. Your generation can’t even comprehend the possibility of real dissent. You have no idea what dissent even means. It’s no wonder all of you have problems with boundaries. You can’t consent if you never learn to say no.”

Qureshi sounded like he gave this speech a lot. Maybe he did have children, after all. “You’ve all been raised by surveillance capitalism. Being watched instead of being seen. Someone reading all your texts but never reading you stories. So naturally you see nothing wrong with seeing everything.” The skin at his eyes crinkled. “Present company excepted, of course. Given your history.”

For some reason, a lump had formed in Kristen’s throat. “I wasn’t aware you knew my history.”

“Everyone who passes through those gates is vetted. The only safer place on the planet, at this moment, is where I keep my horses.” He chuckled to himself, at himself. Then his gaze landed on her. This time it was darker, heavier. “I speak a number of languages, Miss Howard. And all of them have a word for parents who charge money for a glimpse of their daughter.”

Something was happening in Kristen’s body. If she’d been wearing her HeartEyez, it would be showing her numbers and icons and alerts that measured what she already knew: the hairs on her arms stood up, the lump in her throat hardened, the dry prickle in her eyes was not distant wildfire but tears. She was grateful to have left the lenses at the door. Their entire function was to reorient her to her body, to stop her dissociation in its tracks, as though she hadn’t spent a lifetime cultivating it as a skill.

“I think in English that’s just called social media.” Her voice was pathetically small. She cleared her throat and wiped her eyes.

He looked almost sad for her, as he finally lit his cigar. It glowed orange. Its brightness cast him in brief shadow. The sharpness of the smell surprised her. She was so used to masks and vapors that the real thing, with actual dried plant matter, seemed almost obscene. But that was wealth. Wealth was the luxury of engaging with living things and not facsimiles thereof. Real meat and real meetings in real time, synchronous and organic and analog.

“You’re better than this, Miss Howard. And you know it.”

Kristen cleared her throat. “Can you make me a better offer?”

“You’re open to new opportunities?”

She considered Qureshi anew. He might be exactly the kind of man who needed her approach. It was hard to tell, given how little of himself he shared with the world. But maybe it would be worth it to find out. Maybe she could finally make up her mind about Sumter, if she had someone even more powerful to compare him to.

“I’m open to hearing about them,” she said.

“Well, you have a very intriguing skillset, to go with your history. I’m sure it could be leveraged in all sorts of interesting ways. I can think of several people who would love to help you do that.” He coughed delicately. “If you want to continue utilizing those skills, of course. You may be looking for a career change. Sort of a soft reboot. You might want to take some time off, after your time with Williams is finished. Get centered. Decide on your new narrative.”

She smiled. “It sounds like you already have one in mind.”

He rose to stand. She rose with him. “I’m definitely considering it,” he said.

Inside, Qureshi smiled at her fondly and thanked her for a most edifying conversation. Then he told her that if she took the kitchen lift—“merely a glorified dumbwaiter, I assure you”—it would take her directly to the residential floor. There she would doubtless find a less crowded and more private washroom, if she wanted to fix her eye makeup. Taking this to mean she resembled one of Toronto’s infamous raccoons, Kristen thanked him and bid him a good evening.

Having escaped upstairs, she quickly discovered the best room in the house—or at least the one with the best view. It was the only one left unlocked, at the end of one hall. One entire wall was window, and it looked out on all of Los Angeles visible from Mulholland Drive, with a moon that was fatter than any woman in town was ever allowed to be. She tiptoed up to the window and carefully rested her fingers there. Nothing activated. She laid her forehead against the blissfully cool surface. She listened to her breathing. It was shaky. The conversation—both conversations—had unsettled her more than she’d imagined was still possible.

“Are you all right?”

Kristen turned. In the dimness cast by golden hall light and blue city light, she saw a bed, and on it a man. When she turned around fully, she felt the room light up with his smile without even properly seeing his face. It was as though his whole body had smiled, and that smile had answered a grin of her own, hidden somewhere inside herself.

“How did you get up here?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’ll go.”

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.”

He sat up. A mohair blanket fell away from him. He was barefoot and very mussed, with dark, glossy hair. His skin and features reminded her of Nora Mae’s, although she rather doubted he was Mi’kmaq. She had a feeling he might be related to Mr. Qureshi. But it would be wrong to presume. There were plenty of men who looked like younger versions of Qureshi in Toronto, and the overwhelming majority of them were born in Canada. Besides, Los Angeles had one of the largest Persian diasporas in the world. She thought of those things as he strode over to her and blocked out the light from the hallway. And then his eyes—warm, brown, framed in impossibly long lashes—settled on her and she saw the resemblance again.

“What happened?”

“I just came up here to fix my eye makeup.”

“Well that’s good, because it’s a disaster,” he murmured. He reached in one pocket and shook out a pocket square. He held his hand up, raised his brows, and Kristen tipped her head back into his open palm without being asked. He started dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the pocket square in his other hand. “It’s a total loss, I’m afraid. You can’t possibly leave here looking like that. People will think I did something terrible to you.”

He was standing very close now. Close enough for her to pick up his heat and the fragrance it activated. It was warm and tinder-dry, like a field of dead roses set aflame by summer lightning.

“I doubt it would be terrible,” Kristen said, and felt his fingers spasm briefly across her scalp. In that same moment, she heard her name being called down the hall. She flinched. Her voice froze in her throat. Sumter. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t know what to say. Or rather, she didn’t know how to explain. Had not yet successfully crafted a narrative about how their loss was really a win.

“Kiki,” Sumter was calling. “Kiki?”

Her new friend’s eyes were searching hers. She watched him add things up: her eyes and her flinch and Sumter’s voice. And she realized that it had been a long time since she had been in the presence of someone else who did that kind of math as fast as she did. He jerked his chin at the bed. She scrambled under it. He slid back under the covers and draped the blanket over the edge just as Sumter entered the room. Kristen watched his shoes striding across the herringbone floor.

“Have you seen a girl—woman—come through here? Blond, short, white leather dress with long sleeves and a zipper?”

The man on the bed above her yawned magnificently. “Nah, mate, sorry. I’ve been asleep. Jet lag. Flew in from Afghanistan today.”

“Oh. Wow. So you know the family.”

“Doesn’t everyone, here?”

“Right.” She saw Sumter lean forward. “Sumter Williams.”

“Antony Bruno.” The sheets whispered together as he moved to shake Sumter’s hand. “Sorry about your friend. What did you say her name was?”

“Kiki. Kristen. Well, that’s not her real name. It’s just the name she does business as.”

“I see,” Antony said evenly.

“Oh, no, I don’t mean it like that. She works for me.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“No, for real! She’s my Chief Emotional Manager.”

Antony remained silent, as though Sumter’s words were simply too ridiculous to merit a response. The silence stretched. Kristen watched Sumter shift his weight back and forth on his feet.

“Right,” Sumter said finally. “Well. I’ll keep looking. Without phones, you know, it’s twice as hard. She could be anywhere.”

“Happy hunting.”

Kristen watched Sumter’s shoes leave the room. She didn’t breathe until he was gone, and she heard him move down the hall. Antony silently crossed to the door. He shut it firmly and flipped the deadbolt. Then he knelt on the floor alongside the bed and pulled the blanket up to look at her.

“Chief Emotional Manager? Seriously?”

“Antony Bruno? Why didn’t you just tell him your name was Hitchcock? Or Highsmith?”

He beamed, seemingly delighted to be caught in his own joke. “There was a chance he might have heard of those.” He pinched his thumb and index finger together. “A very small chance. Disappointingly small. A micro-chance. Are you planning to stay there all night? Because the bed is more far comfortable than the floor.”

Kristen stretched her right arm out from under the bed. With her left hand, she unzipped her right sleeve. The burns were not as bad there, but they told the story more eloquently than she could. And from this angle, she could avoid watching his eyes and face as he took in the damage.

“There’s more,” she said, when he said nothing. “It gets worse. It’s not pretty. It’s better now than it used to be, but I’m on enough immunosuppressants to make it very dangerous if I get sick. And we can’t pair our implants here, so we’d have to trust each other. But my shots are up to date and I don’t want kids. I didn’t even let Sumter freeze my eggs, and Wuv was doing it for free. I can’t have kids now, anyway, because the anti-inflammatories I’m on would give them birth defects. But I doubt it’ll ever be an issue, because I’ve seen my GirlfriendorGrenade score. I’m only like sixty-five percent Girlfriend. And that’s with a filter.”

His hand reached down to cover hers. She was babbling. But it was true. She had averaged the scores of her face and her body together on her last birthday. It was something of a tradition for her.

He turned her hand palm up, leaned down to kiss the center. “Maybe you just don’t want to give people a chance. But I don’t think your boss gives you time to ever see anyone. I don’t think he lets you out of his sight, if he can help it. I think he runs you ragged, taking care of him, just so you can’t take care of anyone else. Or yourself.”

“And you want to take care of me?”

“What I want to do is keep you here until he begs me to give you back.” There was movement in the shadows. Possibly him unbuttoning something. “What I want is to wipe that smug smirk off his fucking face. I want him to offer me everything he has. Patents. Shares. Palatial family estates. And I want him to do all those things while you watch. I want to break his heart for you.”

Kristen swallowed in a dry throat. Her cunt clenched so hard it ached. She stood up, unzipped the dress, and stepped out of it. “Your idea of dirty talk is really something.”

“What’s your real name?”

She swallowed. “Mara. They named me after a river. It means bitter.”

His chuckle sent goosebumps across all the places where the skin was still her own. “No, it doesn’t. It means fun.”

Later, after It’s been a long time? and her mute nod, so full she couldn’t speak, as though he’d pushed the air from her lungs, and That’s all right, me too, when he was tracing the scars on her back, she said: “What’s your real name?”

“Antonin Kashif Almasi. Anton, most of the time. You see, Antony isn’t so far off.”

“Antonin?”

“My mother was Kazakh. From a line of shamans, actually. But she’s a geophysicist. Was a geophysicist. From Astana. Her French was good, so she went to school in Beirut. Then Texas A&M—the one in Qatar—for her PhD, and Dubai for her post-doc. She said we were a new generation of itinerant scholars. My grandmother came with us. They raised me together. And then she was the token woman on a bunch of extraction projects, all over. Even Canada. We lived in Calgary for three months.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughed. “It wasn’t that bad. I still miss the beef. You people don’t know how good you’ve got it over there.”

“Are you plotting to marry me for my access to fresh water?”

“If you know how to make Calgary-style ginger beef, I’ll definitely consider it.”

She reached down and pinched him. He yelped, grabbed her hand, and rested it over his heart. “What about your dad?” Kristen asked.

He went still. She felt him take a deep breath. His thumb rolled over her knuckles, absently, like he wasn’t really aware of it. He was quiet for so long she wondered if he was deliberately trying to freeze her out, in the hopes she’d leave. She started pulling away, but his grip went steely. “He hated her,” he said curtly. “And he hated women like her. All of them. He…” Anton swallowed. “He believed a lot of things that a lot of guys said online. And he thought getting her pregnant was worth some kind of merit badge.”

Kristen shuddered. “She didn’t marry him, did she?”

Anton shook his head. “She told everyone her husband was dead. Certain things were easier for widows, at the time. But he showed up later. After she died. Lebanon Lung. She got too much of the smoke once. She was deaf in one ear. We never talked about it.”

Kristen blinked. “I’m sorry. That sounds … dramatic.”

“It certainly wasn’t boring.” He winced. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually tell people this much of it. I’m a big fan of compartmentalizing. The last time I did something like this,” he gestured between the two of them with their interlinked hands, “it got complicated.”

Kristen understood. This happened, sometimes. Her personal tragedy, written across her skin, sometimes seemed like an invitation for others to tell her the story of their own. Inevitably, the other person felt embarrassed later and used it as a reason to withdraw. But she had told him difficult things, too. It wasn’t as though they were going to see each other again.

“My parents are gone, too.”

He burrowed more deeply into the pillows beside her. He seemed to be waiting for her to tell him the rest. Or for her to be ready to do so.

“There was a fire. I was on my way home from school. I turned the corner and saw the house burning. I ran inside to get them, but…”

He muttered something in another language. “Mara—”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. I don’t even really remember being burned. It happens with traumatic memories.”

This was only somewhat true. She remembered the fire—the orange glow of it against the night sky, her horror at seeing both cars in the driveway—and then she remembered being inside the fire itself, the way it almost seemed to want to merge with her, to marry its rage to her own. She remembered the pain. And the smell. But then there was a siren, and ketamine, and then nothing. For a long, long time.

“So you and your boss have that in common?”

Kristen stretched. She could recite this from memory. By now it was part of the company lore. The mythology of the great Sumter Williams, the Boy Who Lived Well, the boy genius who had done the affective computing and sentiment analysis version of pulling a sword from a stone.

“Our stories are different. He lost his parents a lot earlier than I did. So he gets more of the narrative for himself. He gets to forge his own silver lining. Like how if they hadn’t died, he might never have left school. They might not have let him. As it was, he had to sue the executors of their estate for emancipation so he could gain access to his trust and use it for starter capital. But if he had never left school, he might never have started his own companies. And they mean a lot to him.”

“So if they were alive, you might never have come here?”

She rolled over to face him. “And we might never have met.”

“Mashallah.”

Kristen arched an eyebrow. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if he was observant; if he was sowing oats and ticking boxes. But his relationship to any particular tradition was much like his other relationships—not her business. And maybe Qureshi was right. Maybe mystery was a thing you let other people keep, to make up for all the dignity they lost elsewhere.

“You know that this is all a matter of public record, right? He’s given multiple interviews about all of this.”

Anton propped himself on one elbow. “I’m not a journalist.”

“So what do you do?”

“I’m an investor. Or, I help investors. I spot projects that I think need more development and I connect them with people who can help.”

Her eyes drifted closed. “Like a matchmaker.”

“Not exactly. I work for the investment arm of an intelligence service,” he said blandly.

Her eyes snapped open. “I slept with a secret agent?”

“It’s not a secret. I’m on LinkedIn. And technically, I believe what we did qualifies as a soundproofing demonstration.” His fingers traced down her neck to her collarbones. “It’s very boring, actually. I do what the guys at In-Q-Tel did for the CIA for years. I’m sure CSIS has their own version, in Canada. Or if they don’t, they wish they did.”

It occurred to her that she should ask if she should inform the authorities that he’d reached out, as a foreign agent. Then again, she doubted he’d say so if that were the case. “Well, could you put in a word with them? Because we need the money. Qureshi just turned us down.”

He scoffed. “You’re better off.”

“I think he was trying to offer me a job.”

Anton laughed. He pressed her knuckles to his lips. “What job?”

“I don’t know. He said he was thinking about it. Then he told me to come up here and fix my face.”

Anton’s smile evaporated. He reached up, hesitated, and then let his hand close over the part of her ear that was melted to her skull. “There’s nothing wrong with your face,” he said, and pulled her under him.

The next morning Anton was gone. Kristen found Sumter waiting downstairs on a chaise beside the pool. He was not alone: Qureshi was with him. He was wearing a fresh vanilla-ice-cream suit. And he looked like he’d just had a very expensive facial treatment. They both did, actually. They looked like they were suddenly the very best of friends.

“Kiki! Where were you?” Sumter asked, as she took a flute of orange juice and a packet of B12 from one of the caterers. He sounded confident. Pleased with himself. Delighted to see her, because it would mean showing off. Her gaze flicked over to Qureshi. Standing behind Sumter, he winked.

“Upstairs,” she said. “I got stuck helping another girl in one of the washrooms. She got really sick. I thought if she fell asleep she might choke. So I dragged her into a bedroom and stayed next to her. And I couldn’t reach you, so…” She shrugged elaborately, willing her shoulders to tell the rest of the story.

Sumter blinked very rapidly. “What? Really? Wow. I leave you alone for two minutes and you go full Hollywood.” He nudged Qureshi. “I can’t take her anywhere.”

“Did you sleep well, Miss Howard?” Qureshi asked.

Kristen kept her voice remarkably even. “Extremely. Thank you. For asking.”

“Actually, it was all for the best.” Sumter took the orange juice and vitamins from her hands. He shook the packet a few times, opened it into her juice, and handed it back to her. “It gave Ilyas and me time to come into alignment on some things.”

The sun seemed very hot, suddenly. The shadows stretching long over the ridge seemed bluer, colder, harsher. “Oh?” Kristen asked.

“Don’t be so modest, Kiki!” Sumter looped an arm around her. “Ilyas told me all about it. You totally sold him, stud.”

Adrenaline lanced through her. She stared at Qureshi. “Pardon?”

“Best investment I ever made.” Sumter flicked the edge of her champagne flute with his thumb and index finger. It sent a crystalline ringing sound over the pixel-poison lawn. “Drink your juice. We’ve got a plane to catch.”

“Let your friend sit down and have some breakfast at least, Sumter. She hasn’t been in a blood-purification chair for hours like some of us.”

Sumter made a noise that indicated he could be magnanimous if his funder wished him to be. He pulled out a chair for Kristen. Then he frowned, and checked his watch. “I suppose I do owe you a present. You want to go shopping? I hear they’re selling the Sowden House.”

Kristen had trouble swallowing. “The what?”

“We need a crash pad out here, anyway. I should never have sold the place in Calabasas, but…”

He was already making the gestures necessary to call someone. Kristen tried to stand, but someone was setting down a plate of scrambled eggs and stewed fava beans and yogurt drizzled with honey. They unfolded a napkin across her lap. And Qureshi was already walking away, with a spring in his step. When she looked at Sumter, his head was still cocked toward his call. He stood with his back to the sun, and pointed two fingers at her, gun-like, and pulled the trigger of his thumb.

CHAPTER SIX

When she wakes up the next morning, Kristen feels as though she has been run over by a truck. It’s all the worst parts of a flu and a hangover and a major injury, all at once. There is a borosilicate carafe of water by the bed with a small drinking glass perched atop it. She can barely grip the carafe; water spills out over a clear Lucite nightstand.

Maybe Mason is right about her possible nerve damage, after all.

She makes herself finish the whole carafe, even though halfway through she suspects she might get sick. The best place to store water is in your body. Anton had told her that. He had spent his share of time in the desert, he had said. He never said which desert. It was implied.

Kristen wonders where he is now. What he’s doing. They haven’t seen each other in over a month. He knows about their trip. When she doesn’t send her customary check-in texts and photos of meals she promises to finish, will he be concerned? Will he even notice? He’s one of the few people who will maybe miss her if she doesn’t make it off this island. But it’s a big maybe, given how they left things. If he tries to contact her and she doesn’t respond, he may simply think she’s done with the whole arrangement. Years from now, he’ll tell the tragic story to another woman at another party: “I thought she had ghosted me; I didn’t realize she was actually dead.”

The whole team is going to be so famous, she realizes.

They’ll be part of startup lore forever. Some weird business archetype or rule or aphorism will be named for them. Something about pride coming before the fall, or how you should never use automated airplanes. Whether they live or die, they’re going to be on the keynote circuit one way or the other. She imagines slide decks featuring their emaciated bodies in stately repose, laid out like dead cultists, the icons of their shoes and watches carefully erased to avoid brand contamination.

Beside her, Nora Mae stretches. The bed is so huge Kristen almost doesn’t notice the movement until the sheets covering them shift and twist. Nora Mae doesn’t seem very eager to get out of bed. Not that Kristen blames her.

“I wondered when you’d wake up. How are you feeling?”

“Not great. You?”

“Same. Although the shower was revelatory.”

“Should we be using that much water?”

Nora Mae grins. “So, good news: Brock and Pearce found a mini desalination plant while they were trying to dig the latrine. It started making noise when they were digging; it probably woke up the moment you woke up the house. And then Sumter found a water tank. So we’re good. For now.”

Nora Mae reaches over to her nightstand and hands Kristen a gold foil packet with the airline logo on it. It’s labeled “artisanal protein spheres” in the kind of font no one has used un-ironically in decades. When Kristen opens them, there are tiny falafels inside, press-formed in the shape of ancient Egyptian scarabs.

“It’s a joke,” Nora Mae says. “Because they’re crickets.”

Kristen smells one first. It’s like a bad approximation of a falafel. The salt stings her tongue. The cumin warms her throat. “Crickets.”

“There’s cricket flour in the ingredients. You settlers will eat crickets, but you won’t eat seal flipper pie.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t drink screech, either, and I think boiled dinner tastes about as plain as it sounds.”

Kristen forces herself to chew slowly. The cricket flour has a slight metallic aftertaste, but that might also be too much cumin. That, or she’s bleeding from somewhere. Her hearing is a little better now; the sound of her own chewing doesn’t bother her as much, and she thinks she might finally be able to hear the ocean outside. She thinks to ask what time it is, but realizes that Nora Mae won’t know the answer, and moreover that she doesn’t truly care. Time means very little here. There are no emails. No deadlines. The only clock that matters is how much food they have left, and how long they’ve been gone. How long before someone starts looking for them. How long it takes them to be found.

“Do you still think this isn’t a game?” Kristen flinches. Nora Mae is looking at her steadily. She looks as though she is trying to be as patient as possible. “It’s too perfect, Kristen. This house. All the supplies. The water. The power. The food. It’s too perfect.”

“Five people dying in a plane crash is too perfect?” Kristen makes quotation marks with her fingers. Her fingers hurt. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t open the drawers yesterday. “Do you even hear what you’re saying?”

“If it is a game, or some kind of test, or something, you could find out,” Nora Mae presses. “He’d tell you. He brought you all the way up here yesterday and he drew you a bath and tucked you in.”

The he here doesn’t even need a name.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Kristen lies, thinking about the black box. Maybe it’s not a lie, per se. Just because Sumter and Mason couldn’t find the black box doesn’t mean that it isn’t somewhere else on the plane. Maybe it’s in some other location, some different spot from where it would be normally. “He could barely figure out the shower.”

Nora Mae sighs. She leans forward a little and lays one of her hands over Kristen’s. Nora Mae has a bruised middle finger; the fingernail is almost black. Kristen wiggles her own fingers in sympathy. Nora Mae is bigger and thicker and stronger than most of the women who make it this far in their world. She can dance for hours in full regalia. The tech industry weeds out all the ones who don’t look like Fox News anchors or magical girls. There are some women who get to look like themselves, who get to have natural hair and natural waistlines, but they’re always elder stateswomen: women with their names on the portfolio masthead. That’s real success: the freedom to be yourself. To have a private life. To not fear judgment. To get fat.

“I’m only going to ask you this once,” Nora Mae says, and Kristen feels her stomach lurch. She knows what Nora Mae is about to say before she even says the words.

“It’s not like—”

“Is something going on, with the two of you?” Nora Mae’s eyes—they’re beautiful eyes, Kristen thinks, looking at the perfect round brightness of them, how they make Nora Mae’s whole face open up—are full of sympathy. “I won’t judge you. You’re an adult. If you want to be in a relationship with your boss, that’s your business. But if he’s pressuring you into something…” Nora Mae trails off, uncertain. Then her mouth firms. So does her grip. “We have to focus on survival here. You can’t waste your energy covering for him.”

Kristen finds herself choking up a little. The emotion in Nora Mae’s voice is so genuine. She really would help Kristen, if there were anything she could help with.

“No,” Kristen says. “There’s nothing going on.”

Nora Mae blinks. “Is that the problem? That nothing’s going on?”

Something crashes downstairs and they both freeze. Their grip on one another’s hands tightens a little. But then there’s laughter—someone has broken a dish, probably—and they both relax, each breathing out the same slow sigh.

“Why would you think there’s a problem?”

“Because there obviously is. Sumter is crazy twitchy. You were asleep, I guess; you didn’t see it. Last night he didn’t hang out with us downstairs, didn’t help us make a fire or anything—”

“You made a fire?”

“Hey, that fireplace is huge. And it made Brock feel like a man, I guess. He took forever to build it, though. That’s not the point. The point is that Sumter is acting weird. Why wouldn’t he hang out with us?”

“Possibly because he feels guilty for getting us stuck out here?” Kristen gestures vaguely at the ocean outside with her other hand. “Maybe he wanted to give everyone some space so they could vent? Don’t tell me that none of you complained while he was gone.”

“Actually, they were all laying bets on whether or not he just escaped upstairs to fuck you.”

Kristen frowns. “Them? Not you?”

“Definitely not me. I’ve heard enough stories from my aunties to know that when a man sneaks anywhere to do something, he’s not up to anything good. But I think it looked … interesting … to them that he was so insistent that he put you to bed.” Nora Mae looks disappointed. “I told them to quit, but Pearce made a joke about it and then Brock said Sumter would never get with a girl who bossed him around like you do, and Jasper said that was probably the whole attraction, and then Mason totally lost his shit. Like out of nowhere he went zero to furious, and told everyone to shut the fuck up. For once, we agreed on something. It was weird.”

Kristen has no idea what to say. It doesn’t seem real. None of this seems real. The whole situation. It feels like a sort of punishment. Like divine retribution. Or at least some kind of karmic trolling.

“And then he told me to come up here. Mason, I mean. He said I should check on you. To prove that nothing was happening, I guess. So I came up here, and you were asleep, and I went downstairs and told all of them that you were totally passed out and that there was no one else in here with you.”

Kristen frowns. “And then you came back here to sleep?”

“Well, after all that, I thought we would be better off sticking together, just the two of us.”

Kristen looks around the room. “Two?” Her eyes narrow. “Where’s Fawn?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“They didn’t come back,” Sumter tells her. “We even went looking. Well, I mean, Pearce went looking. And Jasper. They called, they shouted, the whole bit.”

They’re sitting in the library overlooking the sea. It smells of leather and also of Sumter, his sunburnt skin versus the artisanally tanned hide under their feet. Sumter has set the room up as a de facto office. He already has yellow legal pads out. There are rough sketches of the island in black marker, with X-marks going down the beach. He’s drinking a tiny espresso that once lived in an airtight pod. The room smells so much like fresh coffee that Kristen actually salivates. She ignores the sensation. What coffee there is won’t last. Best to start the withdrawal process early. She wonders if he’s even slept at all. Something about the vague depth of his focus and the tight set of his shoulders tells her he hasn’t.

“Did Jasper or Pearce see any evidence of something else on the island?”

Sumter scowls. “Like what?”

“Like an animal? Or other people?”

His face softens. “If they did, I think they would have told me,” he says. “Kiki. Fawn and Hari probably just passed out somewhere. Everyone’s still exhausted. Or maybe one of them sprained an ankle or something. Or they just got lost once the sun went down. It gets dark pretty quick out here. They’ll probably come back now that it’s light outside.”

He drums his fingers on the teak desk. “Who knows? Maybe they’re fucking.”

The track of his mind is so similar to Nora Mae’s that it’s a little alarming. “Sumter. Please.”

“Hey, near-death experiences do things to people! Do you know how many kids are conceived at or after funerals? It’s a lot.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Am not. I saw an infographic once.” He sticks out his tongue at her. For a second she sees the person he is at parties, in interviews, speeding his way through a pitch deck. That boundless confidence, that effortless charm, as though he just sauntered off his prep school campus yesterday and decided to change the world through sheer force of will.

Something else occurs to her: “Do you think they could have the black box?”

“No. What? Of course not.” Sumter frowns. “They went walking in the other direction. They’d have had to double back pretty quick to get to the plane before we did. And even then, I’m not sure either of them knows how to find the black box, much less remove it.”

“You said it was easy to find. The place where it was supposed to be. They have to make it easy to find. It’s the law.”

“Well, yeah, but why would Hari or Fawn even want it? It makes no sense.”

“Sumter, why would anyone want it?” She watches him reach for his tiny espresso so he won’t have to answer, and deliberately moves it across the desk and into her own grasp. She turns the small, warm cup in her fingers. Three times in rapid succession, clockwise. “Do you think this was really an accident?”

He startles. When he looks at her, his eyes look somehow even more bloodshot. “What?”

“It’s something Nora Mae was asking me. She’s worried. And if she’s worried, the others are probably worried, too. She keeps asking me if this is some sort of elaborate escape room.”

He buries his face in his hands. “If I planned this, do you think I would have planned for people to die?”

“No. Of course not. But trauma does things to people. They look for explanations and start seeing connections where there aren’t any. It’s always more comforting to believe in conspiracy than chaos.” She sets the cup down on the desk and slides it back to him. A peace offering. “You have to lead, right now.”

He lifts two legal pads and drops them loudly to the desk. “That’s what I’m doing!”

“You know what I mean. You have to be there. You can’t just hide from everybody.”

Sumter chews his thumbnail. She can hear him ripping the skin away with his teeth. That’s the thing about the relative lack of technology. The silence. It’s everywhere.

“Is there Wi-Fi?”

He shakes his head. “First thing we tried. Pearce still had his phone on him. The house has its own network, but we’re locked out.”

Kristen looks at the library. There are books. Real ones. Hardcovers, arranged by spinal color. Even if it is just a glorified hot desk for people who can afford their own private islands, it’s still a desk in a room with a door that closes. So it’s at least a place to watch porn—or create it. That means internet access. And almost everything else about the house has been so easy, so frictionless, so user-friendly. Why isn’t its internet access the same?

“Have you found the router? If this is a rental—”

A knock sounds on the door. Mason doesn’t bother waiting; he pushes inside. There’s blood on his shirt. “They’re back,” he says.

From downstairs, Kristen hears the sound of Fawn sobbing.

The crowd parts a little for Sumter and Kristen as they enter the great room. Fawn sits on one of the impossibly slender sofas, crying so hard it seems she might throw up. One of her legs is soaked with blood. The only thing keeping her alive, as far as Kristen can tell, is the multi-way travel scarf she flew with. It’s tied above the knee.

The others stand back at a slowly expanding distance, arms folded or hands thoughtfully clutching their stubbly chins while they edge closer to the opposite wall. It’s as though they believe Fawn’s display of vulnerability might somehow be contagious. They avoid looking at her tragedy mask face. Even Sumter can’t quite look at it. It’s as though her pain is too bright for them to look at with the naked eye.

None of them asks where Hari is.

Kristen looks at the leg, then at Pearce. “Is there an Israeli bandage in the kit?”

“We’re not supposed to call them that anymore,” Pearce says, but he’s already moving toward the kitchen.

Kristen pulls up the nearest ottoman, a useless tuft of upholstery that looks like a Muppet fucked a sea urchin. She sits at Fawn’s feet. “Fawn? Fawn. Can you look at me?” Fawn’s bleary eyes roll wildly in Kristen’s direction and then back again. “Fawn, I know you can hear me. Now I need you to tell us what happened, so we can help you.”

Nora Mae hands Kristen a pilsner glass full of water. When Fawn doesn’t answer, Kristen takes her hand and brings the glass of water to her lips. Fawn drinks without focusing her eyes. When Kristen lets go of her hand, the glass falls from it and tumbles down Fawn’s front. Kristen rushes to catch it, and sets it on an end table.

“Do you remember what happened?” Kristen asks. “It’s okay if you don’t remember, but we need you to try.”

“We got stuck. The tide. It rose. At low tide it all looks like the same island. But at high tide…” Her hands climb up her neck. “We decided to wait until it was light.”

“Is Hari—”

“Hari’s dead.”

Fawn’s voice is flatter and duller than Kristen has ever heard it. There is no uptalk, no fry, no likes or ums. It’s the clearest, most confident, and most declarative statement that Kristen has ever heard Fawn make.

And yet, still, Brock asks: “Are you sure?”

It’s at this moment that Fawn appears to have what Kristen’s therapists sometimes called a breakthrough. First her mouth opens, and she draws breath to answer, and her brows knit with self-doubt. But then something happens in her bloodshot eyes: something wonderful and terrible, a dawning realization casting harsh light over a heretofore undiscovered landscape.

“Am I sure?” She whispers it, almost as though she is asking herself. Then she stares up at Brock through her wet eyelashes. “Am I fucking sure? Sure, I’m sure, you fucking idiot, I was there! I saw it happen! You think I did this to myself, you…” She seemingly struggles for the right word, then lands on something she knows he’ll understand. She looks delighted, radiant, more beautiful than she has ever been. “You useless fucking pylon?”

Fawn is laughing now. It’s high, shrieking, squeaking, sobbing laughter, the kind that makes people think you’re crying. She bends over. Clutches her ribs.

“Dude,” Jasper says. “You broke her.”

Mason nudges them aside and kneels beside Kristen. When he speaks, his voice is softer than Kristen has ever heard it. He reaches for Fawn’s other ankle, the one with less blood on it. “Fawn? Fawn, I need you to—”

“Don’t you fucking touch me.” Her mouth turns down at the corners, but she is slow to move her leg. Kristen glances at Nora Mae. Nora Mae’s eyebrows are raised. “You don’t get to touch me, you—”

“Fawn, please don’t—”

“Sheila was right about you.” Her lower lip is trembling. She casts her baleful glare over the rest of them. “She was right about all of you. And now she’s dead. Just like Hari’s dead.” She’s crying now. “We’re all dead. We’re all gonna die here.”

“No, we’re not.” Something in Kristen’s tone causes Fawn to focus on her. “We’re not going to die here. Now tell us what happened.”

But before she can, Pearce comes over with a bright orange box. It’s a first aid kit. He unfolds it like a tackle box. There are shelves and cubbies inside bristling with gear: pads and wipes and gels and wicked-looking scissors. Pearce holds up a blister pack. “Hey. Fawn. Focus up. I need to cut off your tights, clean off your leg, pack the wound, wrap it, and splint it. It’s gonna hurt. Like a motherfucker. So I need you to take this. Check?”

Fawn looks at him warily. She glances at Kristen. Kristen recognizes the drug name on the label; she nods encouragingly. Then Fawn leans forward. Pearce pinches open the blister pack between his fingers and holds it to her lips. She opens her mouth and he smears the inside of her lower lip with the contents of the pack.

“Good. Let that marinate for a bit.” He leans over to Kristen. “I’m assuming you have better-than-average wound-care experience, and an actual stomach for this.”

He has no idea. “That’s a big ten-four.”

“Then I need you to scrub in. Under your nails, up to your elbows. Use the dish soap. While you do that, we’ll get her on the table. I need her legs elevated.”

Kristen nods, and rises. She’s making for the kitchen when Pearce asks Jasper and Brock for help lifting Fawn. She thrashes, slaps them away. Mason says something. Kristen can’t hear it over the sound of running water and scrubbing bristles and lather. But he loops both of Fawn’s arms around his neck while she shakes her head like a child insisting she’s not sleepy. And he slips an arm under both her legs, and stands, and she tucks her head under his chin and lets him. He carries her to the table. Nora Mae sweeps it clean of any decoration. Pearce unfolds a shimmering emergency blanket. Mason lays Fawn down on it with surprising tenderness. Fawn is reaching for his hand when Sumter reaches around Kristen and shuts the taps off.

“Kiki, honey, you’re burning yourself,” he says.

She looks down at her hands and arms. They’re livid pink. “I have to sterilize my hands.”

“Well, job done.” He tries to hand Kristen a towel, but she backs away from him, holding her forearms close to her chest. She can’t get tea towel germs in Fawn’s wound. She’s leaving for the dining room when Sumter asks: “Do you know what he gave her?”

“It’s a biphase sublingual muscle relaxer and sedative.”

“What does it do?”

“It does what I just said.” She breezes past him.

“Could it make her forget what she saw?”

Kristen stops short. She turns around, slowly, still holding her arms tucked in close. “Pardon me?”

“We need to know what she knows, and if Pearce gave her something that—”

“Ready for you over here, Kristen,” Pearce calls. He’s wearing a reflective headband with a headlamp. He waves one hand over it and it comes on.

Kristen turns her back on Sumter, and marches over to the table. Mason is straddling the bench opposite Fawn’s wounded leg, holding one of Fawn’s hands in both of his. Her head is turned fully toward him, away from where Pearce is cutting away her clothes with a pair of shears. The flesh beneath is faintly purple. There are multiple puncture wounds. They pulse blood faintly as the fabric peels back.

“Okay, you’re up,” Pearce says, and ushers Kristen to sit. He’s thoughtfully left cleansing antibacterial wipes on the emergency blanket, where Kristen will need them. He moves behind her and keeps the light on the wound. He picks up Fawn’s leg at the ankle and rests her foot against his shoulder. She moans and twists a little.

“Try and stay still for us, Fawn. Kristen knows what she’s doing, but she can’t go any faster if you don’t help.”

“I hate you,” Fawn whimpers. Kristen rips open the wipes anyway. But as she begins wiping away the crusted blood, she realizes Fawn is speaking to Mason. “I hate this job. I hate this company.”

“I’m sorry,” Mason says. He sounds like he actually means it.

“Tell us what else you hate,” Kristen says as she tosses one wipe and opens another. “Things hurt less when you’re angry. It’s science.”

“I hate that these tights are ruined.”

The light from Pearce’s headlamp trains over the layers of fabric exposed by the shears. They’re curiously swollen. “Are these hydrocolloid compressors?”

Fawn nods. Kristen picks up a can of packing foam and shakes it. “Well, you should pitch the company on a campaign; they probably saved your life.”

Before she can answer, Kristen sprays a layer of foam over the wound. Fawn mewls; her body arches off the table. Kristen hears Pearce tell Nora Mae to hold the other leg. But what she hears most sharply, most clearly, is the wet squelching sound of Fawn’s body coming back to rest on the table. Kristen takes hold of Fawn’s thigh to help settle her leg back in place. Her hand comes away damp. When she flips her palm over to look, it’s red.

“Wrap it up, Kristen,” Pearce is saying.

Whether he means the wound or the whole process, Kristen doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. Something inside her has come online. She is running a different subroutine now. Calm settles over her like a shock blanket.

“What happened, Fawn?” she asks.

“Kristen, wrap it up!”

“How did Hari die?”

“Can’t it wait?” Mason snarls, just as Fawn says faintly, “The island.”

“What about the island?”

Fawn turns her head to look at Kristen. She is ashen. Sweat has broken out on her brow. “It ate him.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Pearce says, and pulls Kristen aside. He grabs a roll of bandages and starts unspooling it. With his headlamp’s light focused more directly over the wounds, Kristen can now see the faint seepage from the place Pearce stopped cutting off the tights.

“It tried to eat me, too.” Fawn reaches down to peel back more of the fabric. Her hand is shaking. Her breath is shallow. “See?”

The tights come away with a sucking sound. Blood leaks free in a hot red gush. The room erupts in curse words. There is a chunk of raw, fatty flesh stuck to the inner lining of Fawn’s tights. It folds and rolls back just like she’s peeling her own skin off to show them her subcutaneous tissues. Blood pulses underneath. The smell of it hits Kristen harder than the sound of it pattering to the floor below. She tastes it in her sinuses, on the back of her throat. Pearce picks up Kristen’s hands and crosses them directly over the gaping hole in Fawn’s thigh. She compresses. Blood oozes between her fingers. She feels Fawn’s heartbeat rising frantically, struggling to keep up.

“Sorry about Vegas.” Fawn’s eyes flutter closed.

“It’s okay,” Kristen and Mason say, in the same breath. They glance at each other. When they look back at Fawn, her skin is gray. Her lips are blue. Under Kristen’s hands, the blood is slowing. The pulse is weakening.

“Not you,” Fawn mutters.

Pearce jabs two fingers under Fawn’s jaw. He looks at his watch. He’s the only one of them who still wears an analog model. He keeps the watch face on the inside of his wrist. It’s a military thing, Kristen remembers. He starts chest compressions. Then he rolls her chin back and pinches her nose shut and exhales down her mouth. Kristen watches her chest rise. He does more compressions, in perfect rhythm, and then more breathing. Kristen hears Fawn’s ribs crack. Fawn’s body twitches under his: tits bouncing, legs falling open. Her skin is the color of clay, or mortar, or something else you grind up to build walls.

“She’s done,” Kristen says.

Pearce backs off like he’s been waiting for someone else to say it. He checks his watch again. “I don’t even know what time zone we’re in. Fuck.” He’s still breathing hard. He picks up the roll of bandages and throws them. They bounce soundlessly off the fireplace, unfurling as they fall like the flag of a colonizing country. “FUCK!”

The others flinch. Not Kristen. Kristen feels calmer when men scream. It’s the moment in which they reveal themselves most. The men themselves always think it’s when they’re crying, or coming, or when their dogs die or their teams lose. But in fact, they are never more predictable than when enraged. Their explosions of anger function much like depth charges. Each blowout allows for recalculation, reorientation, and the plotting of new escape routes or attack vectors. And Pearce’s anger speaks well of him. He wanted to save Fawn. He thought he could. They all did. Even Fawn.

“What do you mean, she’s done?”

Mason is still holding Fawn’s hand. It’s probably still warm, although the blood loss—which is somehow still happening—is likely hastening the chill spreading over her. Mason examines Fawn’s face. Kristen watches him make the decision to see something that isn’t there. It’s not unlike the blind optimism one has to work up to look at a too-good-to-be-true business plan, and invest anyway.

“What are you saying?” He’s addressing Kristen, but it’s Pearce who answers: “She’s gone, Mason.”

“No, she isn’t.” When neither Pearce nor Kristen bothers contradicting him, he looks over Sumter. Sumter is chewing a hangnail. “People survive worse than this all the time! Tell him! Tell him we can figure this out!”

A common complaint among computer scientists—among everyone in tech, really—is that once they learn the basics, every layperson around them thinks they can do magic. But it isn’t magic, it’s just knowing the rules and occasionally spotting loopholes in them. It’s not a miracle. There is no god in the machine. But like all paper, cash is one of the world’s best insulators. It cushions. It protects. It absorbs. It filters. Kristen had heard a conspiracy theory once that the systematic serial killing of newspapers by venture capital was really just part of a plan to kill more homeless people, since they so often used newsprint for warmth. Staring at Fawn’s body, she can’t for the life of her remember who told her that, or when. Or what she said in reply. What she knows for certain, though, is that Mason has always had more than enough of it to keep warm.

He’s soft, her dad would have said. A bender. Dusty. Rides the pine. Her dad used a lot of hockey slang for a guy who quit playing the moment he started noticing girls.

“Tell him,” Mason says. “Sumter, tell him.”

“Mace…” Sumter crosses over to him. He wraps his arms around Mason from behind. “Buddy. Come on.”

“But you know about this stuff!” Mason twists in Sumter’s grasp. He’s still indignant, annoyed, like Fawn’s life is just a package that hasn’t shipped soon enough. He wants to speak to a manager. Sumter is the next best thing. “You know what to do. You know how it works. You’re invested in three different life extension startups.”

“We can’t.”

“Bullshit!”

“Even if we had access to that kind of technology,” Sumter says evenly, “which we don’t, there’s been too much damage. She’s lost too much blood. Too much tissue. She’s been dead for too long—”

“Death is a lie.” Mason breaks Sumter’s grasp on him. He stands up. “You’re the one who told me that. You. Do you even remember saying that? Or was it just more Messianic mama’s boy—”

“Mason. Stop. This isn’t you.”

“You’re goddamn right it isn’t. I used to have a life. I used to have ideas. My ideas. My goals. Now I just have whatever you’re obsessed with lately. Christ.” He’s shaking his head. He rolls his head back and stares at the massive prehistoric tortoise skeleton hanging overhead. The bones cast a strange shadow over Fawn’s body. “Fawn was right. Sheila was right. Sheila was right about everything.”

Slowly, Sumter folds his arms. He has a way of carrying himself so people don’t notice his muscle until he wants them to. But with his arms crossed over his chest this way, they’re subtly stretching his shirt when he arches a brow and says: “You think so?”

“I know so.”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

Mason pales. He swallows audibly. “I wish we’d all died on that plane,” he says. “Then I’d know for sure we were in Hell.”

Now we are eight, Kristen thinks, as she watches him trudge up the stairs.

Before (3.0)

Despite the bombing the year previous, E-M0TN was still the premier affective computing trade show in Las Vegas. When the visas got difficult, years ago, there was talk of taking it global. But the show was buried in the city like the shrapnel in its residents’ limbs; it would not budge. Kristen had heard a rumor that the casinos and the shadier interests behind them lobbied hard for this; affective computing was fundamentally a security technology, and there was no town more tightly secured than Las Vegas. And so there was no better place to showcase the Wuv technology. Everyone would be there, from potential clients to competitors to possible investors. Sumter had a tip from the board that some of the whales on Wuv’s wish list were scouting at the show, in part because it was taking place alongside the big “hacker summer camp” in the same convention space.

In fact, the only reason Sumter wasn’t going himself was the lunar development conference he’d been invited to in London the very same weekend. He was a panelist on how affective computing might improve the coworking dynamics of people trapped alone together in a small space for months.

Fawn told Kristen she’d asked Murphy to develop an agent just to pounce on the registration window the moment it opened up. It was a tweak on the one Sumter used each year for getting hotel space at Comic-Con, before the big shooting in San Diego.

Mason told Kristen she was going by way of asking her if her shots were up to date.

“Pardon me?”

“We’re going to the show. You and me. Are you good? Medically?” He frowned. “Wait, when you go through security, what happens? Does your skin show up like real skin, or something else? On the scanner, I mean. Or is it like with amputees? Do we need some kind of pass, or something?”

The fact that these were probably innocent and well-meaning questions did nothing to allay the sting of irritation that Kristen felt at hearing them. Nor did it help that on some level, Mason was right to ask. There was a flag on Kristen’s passport. Because she’d had so much gene splicing, she was on the cross-border list as a possible data mule: the multiple additions to her RNA could be used to store massive amounts of information. It meant she had to show up an hour ahead of everyone else. It meant showing her scars to dead-eyed, flat-affect customs officers. It meant waiting for them to decide—with all their medical training—whether she had suffered enough, whether the torture of her youth made her more likely to tell the truth.

Kristen thought of all this, but what she said was: “I thought Fawn was going.”

Mason’s lip twitched. “No. Fawn isn’t feeling well. They won’t let her in. New temperature readers at Pearson.”

Once upon a time, before Sumter convinced him to be more than just a silent cofounder, Mason had moonlit at a company called Thermbient. Thermbient made ambient temperature sensors for government buildings and airports and the luxury bunkers of the super wealthy. They could sniff out contagious disease at six paces, or so they claimed. He still had contacts there. They kept him posted on where he should and shouldn’t go.

“Those things can never read women,” Kristen said. “She’ll be fine.”

Fawn had seemed fine the day before. Although she had spent the day working from home, she was turning things in on time and without any loss in quality. Her emails and posts were just as chipper as ever. She was not sick. She was simply not allowed to go, for some reason. Kristen had no idea how Fawn had managed to piss Mason off; usually they got along. Mason had told her of this change in plans only that morning, while Kristen tried to finalize the travel details with the concierge bot that Sumter had make all the corporate travel arrangements. It would have gone faster if she’d done it herself. And if Mason would quit changing his mind about who was going.

“And you could still take Sheila,” Kristen added.

“Sheila is too specialized to deal with the general public,” Mason said. “We need someone relatable out on the trade show floor.”

He meant it as an insult, and she knew he meant it as an insult, and he knew she knew he meant it as an insult. What he didn’t know was that Sheila had told Kristen the real reason she wasn’t going. Or wasn’t being allowed to go. And it had nothing to do with being relatable. It had much more to do with how she answered a question about the ethics of emotional surveillance, at her last public event. Mason hadn’t liked it. Neither had Sumter. They had spent the entire trip back raking her over the coals for it: hours and hours of grilling, asking her why she’d said what she said, demanding to know what else she’d said elsewhere to other people. She’d borne up admirably, according to her own recounting of the story. She’d been proud of her answer. It was nuanced and respectful of the caliber of research done by the members of the institute she was speaking at. Mason and Sumter didn’t care. When the interrogation was finally over, Sheila had called Kristen in tears.

Another thing Mason didn’t know was that Kristen never felt insulted when she was reminded of her lack of technical prowess. She was perfectly fine not being perceived as an engineer, programmer, developer, coder, technician, specialist. It didn’t bother her in the slightest. If anything, it made her feel freer. Safer. Less likely to be the target of gatekeeping. So, now Kristen was going to Las Vegas.

“One question: Is it the kind of hotel where they check to see if you’re married?”

“It’s Las Vegas.” Mason’s mouth was a thin line.

“It’s America,” she countered. “Remember what happened to Sumter and me in Atlanta? We thought we were fine checking into our hotel, and then wham, suddenly the concierge is explaining some weird anti-trafficking law that won’t allow him to pay for my room unless we can prove we’re related somehow. I had to pay for the room myself and invoice it later.”

We should have said you were my sister, Sumter had said as their elevator rose up through the retrofuturistic hotel atrium. You look like you could be my sister. Maybe the old man got around, you know? Maybe I really do have a secret sister somewhere. I bet she’d be just your age, or thereabouts.

Kristen had reminded him that, at the behest of his family’s executors, he regularly had his genetic profile checked against known databases in order to disprove exactly that kind of claim from impostors.

Maybe you’ve had enough gene therapy by now that the system wouldn’t identify you as being related to me, he’d said.

That’s not how it works, she’d said. And besides, if I were your sister, you’d tell me. You’d gloat.

Maybe, he admitted, grinning, but I’d sure as shit make everyone else sign an NDA.

The rest of the ride was silent.

“Anyway, you’re keynoting,” Mason said.

“What?”

“Yeah. They had a last-minute dropout; Sumter volunteered you. Just bring your usual bag of tricks. Nobody’s expecting you to win a Tony up there, or something.”

“They don’t give those for keynotes.”

“Yes, they do. Creative nonfiction soliloquy. I thought they cultured you at that boarding school.”

“I must have missed that module, between skin grafts.”

It was Kristen’s first time in Vegas. With the exchange rate, Canadians had no business gambling in American casinos. “It’s America, so remember to dress like a girl,” Sumter had joked.

(Well. “Joked.” He was laughing when he said the words. Somehow that made it into a joke. Or at least, it made it into a thing she was supposed to laugh at. Kristen considered it a major failure of early childhood education that students were encouraged to learn the difference between laughing with and laughing at, without ever learning about laughing for, or how often in life they would be asked to laugh for someone else.)

What Sumter meant is that Kristen would be on the trade show floor, and that while booth bunnies were still technically considered gauche in polite society, it didn’t hurt to attract attention. When you were a woman in tech you could either emphasize the woman or the tech, and the founders of Wuv clearly favored the former. A woman could do the whole jeans and ironic T-shirts thing, but the jeans had to be skinny and the woman had to be even skinnier. The wing of her eyeliner needed to be angelic in its perfection. Her watch could never be bigger than a man’s; it made them feel inadequate. Her highlights could only exist in soothing fairy-tale pastels, no jewel tones, nothing too strong. The more anime she looked, the better. Big eyes, small mouth. This was how Sheila presented, back when she was still making presentations.

In Canada this was less of an issue: whether wearing the Vancouver uniform of tactical yoga gear or the Toronto uniform of unrelieved black, ostentation was considered a symptom of tall poppy syndrome. Plainness was considered a virtue in a city where everyone wore the same black sleeping bag for much of the year. On the subway, color was viewed with the same vague suspicion traditionally reserved for self-promotion, self-esteem, and self-care.

But very little of that mattered to Kristen when she stepped outside the airport and hit the wall of heat waiting there. It pulled her up short. It felt like a punch to the solar plexus. It stole the breath from her lungs. When she inhaled again it felt like the heat was trying to force its way down her throat.

“People live like this?”

Mason shrugged. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

E-M0TN wasn’t the only show in town that week. The other one, much bigger, was basically a summer camp for hackers. Once upon a time there were two such shows, but they’d since amalgamated into one monster convention. It commanded the biggest casino, the biggest floor. Sumter had briefly toyed with the idea of getting a table at that show, too. He’d gone there with one of his other businesses, and he still stayed in contact with regular attendees. It would be a good networking opportunity, and possibly an opportunity to get some red-teaming done on the Wuv system. A lot of the investors their board pointed them at were concerned about hacking—some of them honestly thought that hacking Wuv would hack human emotions. The others actually understood how the technology worked, but were still nervous about the precedent it set, and how to message it effectively. Nadine convinced Sumter that showing up at the hackers’ show would not only dilute Wuv’s core messaging, but also give their critics more material to work with.

“People are already suspicious of our motivations,” she told him, during their final meeting on the matter. Kristen had coached her on how exactly to present the information so that Sumter would hear it properly. What that meant in this case was appealing to his sense of grievance at how the general public thought of Wuv, and therefore how they thought of him, without letting him think either Nadine or Kristen agreed with what Sheila was saying.

“We don’t want to make it worse,” Nadine had continued. “If anything, staying at this show and only this show positions us as the kinder, gentler kind of currency mining operation.”

Sumter had nodded slowly, almost as though preparing the press release in his head. “We’re not like the others,” he said. “Right? That’s the idea?”

“Exactly,” Nadine said, and offered one of her best smiles.

Sumter had pivoted to glance at Kristen. “Can you sell that, in your keynote?”

Kristen smiled. “Of course.”

Sumter was still the keynote of choice when it came to their company, though Sheila was the one who made them look benevolent and forward-thinking. But public and motivational speaking was one of Sumter’s very first jobs. He started in junior high school, a year or two after his parents died. He talked about their loss. He talked about driverless cars. He talked about responsible tech. He talked about how he was going to enter tech himself, and use the enormous trust his parents had left him with for good, to develop software that would make the world a better place.

A lot of other founders spoke about exactly these sorts of things at their own keynotes: how with great power came great responsibility (cue the Spider-Man slide), how innovation required nimbleness and flexibility (cue the Bruce Lee slide about “being like water”), how all the tools they needed to improve the world were right in their hands this whole time (cue the nearly century-out-of-date concept art slide: Syd Mead, Jodorowsky, the original EPCOT designs). What had set Sumter apart from these other men was that he was still only a boy, that he was already rich, and that he was ridiculously good-looking. He was not some awkward nerd lacking communication skills. He was a unicorn: a genuine genius who still spoke well, dressed well, made eye contact, and agreed that women should vote. Not least because, given the opportunity, many of them would vote for him.

But, according to Sumter (and according to some sentiment analysis that he’d commissioned), what made him cute at fifteen wasn’t so attractive at thirty-five. By thirty-five he was just another overprivileged straight white male tech bro asshole, and while that might have clicked with their board, it didn’t click with the public. Unlike the majority of founders his age, Sumter had the humility to admit this and act on it. For the public, Wuv needed another face. Another name. Someone relatable, bright but human, pleasant to look at but lacking the kind of looks that engendered envy, someone with a story that consumers and investors and the media could sink their teeth into.

Enter Kristen.

Kristen had a story that could beat even Sumter’s. Kristen had not come from wealth. Kristen did not quit private school and then university in a huff because they failed to “respect” her “vision.” When Kristen’s parents died, she was not the beneficiary of some massive trust that gave her the luxury of making the world a better place.

“You’re good,” the technician clipping Kristen’s mic into her dress said. It was nice of them to give her a woman technician; too often the process involved a sheepish, scruffy man in a tip-code T-shirt reaching tentatively down her collar. Once upon a time, she had thought she needed to wear trousers in order to wear a microphone; the batteries had to go somewhere, and there was nowhere to clip them on a dress. But over the years she’d learned that if the dress was tight enough, the mic could sit in the gap between her shoulder blades, above her bra band. It only worked if she stayed within a certain weight parameter. She needed the gap between her bones.

“Thanks,” Kristen said to the technician.

“Watch the stairs,” the tech said, and gave her a hand up the steel steps leading to the backstage wings. Kristen was better with heels than she’d once been, but it was nice to have a human moment of kindness between herself and another woman before she had to face the crowd. The woman gave her hand a little squeeze just as Kristen took the last step. Kristen gave her a little smile in return. They were in it together, in their own way. And Kristen had done production assistant work, before all this. Being a chief of staff—a Chief Emotional Manager, as the host onstage was explaining her position at this very moment—wasn’t all that different.

She entered to polite applause, and took a read of the crowd. She gave the sensors feeding the Wuv app in her HeartEyez a moment to gather up what data they could on the audience’s feelings in the moment. There were colorful auras that indicated which brainwave patterns were dominant; arousal to fear to disgust; whose heartbeat ticked up and who checked out. It was a common enough technique these days, and one of the “thin end of the wedge” use cases that broadened adoption of affective vision. Presenters and speakers with stage fright preferred to work with affective prosthetics in order to get an accurate portrait of how their keynote or workshop or pitch was going down. The auras and their assorted colors were so popular now that there were collaborations with cosmetics companies and paint manufacturers.

But Kristen preferred to work without a net. She found the interface for most affect detectors to be nothing more than an expensive distraction. If she really wanted to watch the audience change colors, there were drugs for that. Her instincts were rarely wrong. And it helped when the audience thought she could see less of what they were thinking. It made them reveal more. It made them sloppy.

Granted, she knew by now how they would react when she opened with her usual question: “Who here wants to see me naked?”

The reactions varied based on the size and composition of the crowd. Snorts. Gasps. Laughter. Uncomfortable adjustments in seats. But this was a Las Vegas crowd. They were all as fried as the brunch buffet of coconut shrimp currently lining their colons. They had paid a fortune to be here, to be one of the chosen few who forked over all their data to the vetting process and allowed the algorithms that ran Vegas to decide whether or not they were worthwhile risks to take on. Some of them had been up for a good forty-eight hours, losing money and gaining experience points on the Strip. They barely reacted. They had come here for a show.

“There I am.” She gestured at the screen behind her. “I’m fifteen, here.”

She watched some of the men in the audience sit forward.

“This is a deep tissue scan of my body,” she continued. “Those purple blotches? Those are my burn scars. They covered almost twenty-five percent of my body. I spent my sweet sixteen in the hospital, in an iron lung designed to keep antibiotic-resistant bacteria and fungus away from my skin grafts.”

She swiped over to an image of herself in the iron lung, with pink crepe paper twisted over it, and a suction-cup plush toy hanging on the glass. She was waving at a nurse. She was covered in bandages cloned from salmon skin. “They even let me eat cake,” Kristen said.

Murmurs. Discomfort. Displays of sympathy. This was not a demographic that responded well to the idea of mortality. These guys were waiting for the nanobots or the deep brain implants or the CRISPR hack or the fasting diet or the blushing master’s student with daddy issues who would finally give them a chance at eternal life. They hated the idea of the body as a thing that could be penetrated, unless the goal of said penetration were to add some sort of shiny new toy, some microscopic device that would speak to their other devices and tell everyone just how well they were doing. They hated wounds. They hated vulnerability.

Kristen cued up the slide of her family home. It was an A-frame house built out of shipping containers, surrounded by evergreens. The mottled paint job was meant to obscure it from drone surveillance. “I grew up in Krieger Lake, Ontario, a few hours north of Toronto. It was originally a logging town, over a century ago. To this day, it still has under a thousand people, and it’s still unorganized, which is similar to being unincorporated.”

It was also still a popular dumping ground for all of northern Ontario’s unwanted pets, but she didn’t mention that. She gestured, and a logo popped up. “Dad moved us there so he could continue mining FujeeKoin, a currency aimed specifically at stateless people in Yemen, Armenia, Eritrea, and Sudan.”

With another gesture, she showed the audience an image of their basement. “Most of Ontario’s municipalities had smart metering that would have made it too expensive for him to power the rigs in our basement, but Krieger Lake didn’t.”

At the assorted gasps and jaw-drops of disbelief in the audience, Kristen smiled ruefully. “If you think this setup looks unsafe, that’s because it was.”

She summoned the image of the wreckage. “One day I came home from school, and our house was on fire. It was on fire because that week, FujeeKoin surged, and the increased computation was literally heating our house. It was also triggering the fire alarm at all hours of the day and night. So Dad took the fire detector offline.”

She showed an image of the marketing materials from the smart home software Dad had purchased from one of the three companies that had a license to provide it.

“When Dad took the fire detector offline, two things happened. One, he put our entire family at risk. And two, he voided the warranty on our smart home monitoring system. That means when our house burned down because of the ensuing electrical fire—”

She moved back to the image of the shell of their house.

“—I had to fight a telecommunications company with a monopoly on the Canadian market just to get an insurance payout. But before I did that, I had to heal. And that’s what I’m really here to talk to you about, today. Healing.”

She paused. This was usually the point at which she started talking about PTSD, the amygdala, stress hormones, and the relationship between shortened telomeres and inflammatory disease. She would mention adverse childhood experiences, and the ACE index, and how health outcomes were worse for children with high ACE indexes, even if they were otherwise affluent and well cared for. This was the part where she said that stress in childhood could repeat down through the generations, that a grandmother who had survived a genocide would pass along the changes in her telomeres to her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, and on and on. She would mention Gothic literature, and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” That the idea of a family curse was in fact not a myth at all. It was science.

But Kristen didn’t do those things.

She couldn’t.

She couldn’t, because she was distracted.

She was distracted by the man in the front row of her keynote with his hand down his pants.

The two front rows of the keynote were sofas. Kristen had no idea what this was meant to accomplish, aside from encouraging people to take their shoes off and stretch out, which was exactly what they were doing. But far stage left, there was a man taking distinct advantage of the situation. He had his left hand down his trousers, and his right stretched over the back of the sofa, where it was toying with the hair of a young woman on the other end of the sofa. The young woman studiously ignored him by pecking at her device. Whether she even noticed what he was doing was difficult to say. But Kristen had a feeling that the girl in question was likely texting her friends about the total nightmare of a human being to her left, the one who was fondling himself while he fondled her hair.

Kristen looked at her podium. She looked at her notes. She gestured through a couple of slides.

And then she made her move.

“As a recovering trauma patient,” she said, leaving the podium, “I’ve learned that the way I see the world isn’t the way other people see it. My hyperawareness of other people’s feelings is something I take for granted, but it’s something that other people struggle with. I came by these skills in a literal trial by fire. But what if everyone could learn how to be that perceptive?”

She descended the stage. For a moment she was in darkness, but then the spotlight found her again and followed her down the steps.

“That’s why I think what we do at Wuv is so important. It can be so difficult to find the right words for what we’re feeling. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.”

She waved her hand and the image behind her rippled into Wuv’s latest emotional monitoring interface. It was pleasant and pretty and they had paid way too much money for it.

“Our algorithm learns your feelings over time. It presents you with reports: daily, weekly, monthly, even hourly. It can show you the changes in your baseline mood in color.”

Next slide.

“In sound.”

Next slide, with a jingle that sounded like a hockey-stick graph.

“And now, with haptic response technology that sends emotional information directly to smart textiles embedded in your clothing, so you can literally give yourself a hug.”

And with that, she stepped directly in front of the guy touching himself. The spotlight followed her. He sat up immediately. His hand flew out of his pants. His fly popped open. He was sweating. He gave her a flat, hateful glare. Kristen looked over at the other woman on the couch, and winked.

“Then again,” she said, “some of us are already pretty good at touching ourselves.”

Her devices all exploded in unison. The vibrations ran up her arms slower than the adrenaline. Her scalp prickled. Her alerts chirped. Kristen knew that once upon a time, moments of stress were indicated with pin-drop silence and not helpful notifications about pulse rates and blood pressure. She wondered, as she left the stage, what it would be like not to have a whole room hear the cheerful automated signaling of one’s own mortification.

Within minutes, there was news on all the feeds about what she’d done. How she’d taken matters into her own hands. (As it were.) Journalists were pinging her for interviews. Women were piping up and saying that the same thing had happened to them. Men were saying that the guy had no business being there, no matter what his name was or what company he was with, and how guys like that were the whole reason for “tech-lash,” and how if they’d been there they would have broken his nose, or broken his hand, or broken his dick, or any number of small tortures they had learned from eternally looping GIFs.

Kristen had her narrative established: how she had been distracted and mortified by what the man was doing, and then frustrated at how no one was helping the woman on the couch, and she reacted. She’d even figured out a way to work Wuv into her answers: “If you could have been reading my Wuv score, you would have seen how frustrated I was.”

Frustrated. Never angry. “Angry” was the thing women got to be after menopause, and not a moment before. If they dared to dip a toe in the waters of rage before then, it would stain them forever. “Impassioned” women were successful. “Angry” women were bitches. Those were the rules. They were by no means fair, but they were easy enough to learn.

(“I just don’t think anger is a healthy emotion,” someone had said to Kristen once. Possibly in a group therapy session. Possibly after sex. “That sounds like a personal problem,” she had replied.)

“That was so amazing,” said a probable intern in a black bandage dress and tights that were just a shade off from her shoes.

“Thank you,” Kristen said sincerely.

Mason stepped up behind her. “Hello,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Oh, hello. This is Mason, the cofounder of Wuv.” The two girls gave each other a look. Then they looked at Kristen. They knew what was coming as much as she did. She winked at them. “See you at the tables,” she said.

Mason waited until they were in the elevator. He was gracious throughout the entire walk through the ballroom and out to the hall, past the coffee stations and the tiny muffins and the fruit platters and the washrooms wafting bubblegum-scented disinfectant. And he waited patiently with a smile on his face that was almost fond while other attendees stopped and congratulated Kristen on what she’d done. It took them at least forty minutes to reach the lifts, and even more people were clustered outside. But then the two of them were in the elevator and he made sure to press the “door close” button, at which point he turned around and said: “What the whole entire fuck, Kristen?”

The elevator was mirrored. This meant she could watch his anger growing and emerging from multiple angles. It felt like watching him on a buffering video. Each reflection of him was just a picosecond behind the others, as though his image, like his composure, couldn’t maintain resolution.

“I am going to ask you this just once. Are you trying to fuck the company, or are you trying to fuck Sumter?”

Kristen felt a pleasant rush of rage ignite under her skin. It felt rather like the times Sumter brought in illicit kegs of cold brew coffee—the real stuff, not the lifelike approximation grown from proprietary beans in the Uncanny Valleys of what was once Brazil. “Excuse me?”

“Because it’s pretty obvious to me that you want to do at least one of those things. I just don’t know which one it is yet.”

“I have literally no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, Mason, and I think you’re way out of line.”

“Bullshit. Why is Qureshi delaying his investment? Why does he keep asking for more data?”

Now Kristen was genuinely confused. “I don’t know. You’re the cofounder. Isn’t that your department?” When Mason didn’t rise to the bait, she said: “He’s probably wondering why somebody as loaded as Sumter actually needs his money. Isn’t that what every other prospective board member has asked?”

“Is that what he told you in LA?”

“No. In LA, he told me I was too good for this job.”

Now it was Mason’s turn to laugh. “So you fooled him, too. Good for you. But I know what you are.”

Kristen doubted that very much. After all, it was Sumter who had done the project on her in high school, not Mason. She smiled breezily. “What am I?” When he said nothing, she added: “Go on. You can say it. You think I’m … what? Crazy? A starfucker? A gold digger? Or just your everyday garden-variety bitch?” She made a mockery of widening her eyes, and spoke in a stage whisper through her hand. “Do you think I’m a cunt, Mason?”

“No. That would imply both depth and warmth.”

Kristen laughed like he’d made a joke. He gritted his teeth. She laughed louder. She laughed so loud it bounced between the walls of the glass box they were in. Her laughing at him was probably audible on other floors. If Mason were anything remotely resembling a decent human being, he would have been standing up for her. He would have been making sure she was okay. Making certain she felt supported. But he wasn’t a decent human being. His treatment of Sheila was proof of that.

“How exactly do you plan to punish me for defending myself, Mason?” Kristen made a show of calming her laughter. Smoothed her dress. Fixed her hair. “Will you ground me, like you grounded Sheila?”

Mason sucked in a single long breath in a steady rush, as though to cool something inside him. He turned away from her. She watched his face in the mirrored walls. She watched him take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out. The one thing about working at an affective computing firm was that everyone understood the cortisol cycle and how to suppress it. Mason was all about keeping his vagus nerve well toned.

“Any conversations between Sumter, Sheila, and myself or anyone else in this company that don’t happen in the context of an actual disciplinary action are none of your business, and you know it,” he said crisply.

“I can’t help it if Sumter pours his heart out to me, Mason.” She noted his jaw twitch with some satisfaction. Now it was time to go for the jugular. “But you know what’s not my business? What I legitimately shouldn’t know about? Something genuinely private.”

“You obviously can’t wait to tell me, so get on with it.”

“I really shouldn’t know that six weeks after your Vancouver trip, Fawn billed an appointment for her OB/GYN, and that the same day, she moved up her appointment at the fertility spa on the lake. The one where all the Americans go. To yesterday. When she was supposed to be on this trip.”

Mason waited a long moment before replying. When he did, his voice was very even. Almost bored. “You’re right. You shouldn’t know that. Neither should I. It’s a massive privacy violation. I could fire you right now, with cause, just for telling me.”

“You could try. But then you’d have to find a record of the thing I just told you. Only there isn’t one. Because I checked this morning, and the billing code had disappeared from our system.” Kristen stepped up behind him. She pointed her chin to aim her whisper toward his ear. “Which is either a security issue, or insurance fraud.”

Now he was whispering, too. “Then I guess you have no proof, do you? Of whatever you think is so nefarious.”

“That’s true. I don’t. But remember that cute little diamond drive they gave us in the swag bag? Well, I saved my screengrabs there and mailed it to a friend’s storage unit.”

Technically, he wasn’t a friend. He was actually a former professor of hers. And he hadn’t checked the storage unit in a very long time.

“The job description for my position did ask for someone with close attention to detail, after all,” she added.

The elevator doors opened, and Mason left without saying anything else. He didn’t even notice the other man entering the elevator. But Kristen noticed. And the man noticed her.

“Thought he’d never leave,” Anton Kashif Almasi said, as the doors chimed shut. He stepped forward, and took her face in his hands. He gave her just a second, a breath, a beat, for her to move first. She pulled him down to kiss her.

They began their descent.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m at the other show,” he said. “And then this blew up,” he shook his device, “and I watched the video of you interrupting my competitor’s keynote wank, and I had an overwhelming urge to come over here.”

They threaded their way past the tables and machines on the ground floor. Anton’s hand remained at the small of her back throughout. It felt vaguely like having her own security personnel, until they had to go through the decontamination doors to exit the hotel. Then she had to wait on the other side for him while security insisted on going over him a second time.

She’d had no photos of him from Los Angeles, but she did eventually find him lurking in the background of some tech-arts event in Turin, three summers ago. When she cropped it for a reverse-image search it turned up only the most banal of content. He was one of those rare people who went to all the events but kept a low profile—he didn’t keynote, he didn’t empanel, he didn’t moderate or present or host. She found no interviews, no features, no newsletters. No little tidbit she could feed into her usual research process. No clues about a secret identity: a fandom, a wallet, a handle, a troll-sona suspected of being a bot, the erstwhile husband of an AI waifu shared between thousands of others. She wondered if he’d paid to have his digital wake smoothed over behind him. He’d certainly done a better job of it than Sumter.

“Honey, we’re about to miss our time slot at the chapel,” she said finally, loudly enough for the guard to hear and in an anxious tone he could not possibly miss.

“I know, angel,” Anton answered, without missing a beat. “I’ll get you to the church on time.” He looked at the guard. Las Vegas was still a union town, which meant human personnel. If they’d been dealing with automated kiosks, there was a chance they’d never get out. “You’ll get me to the church on time, right?”

And that was how they exited the hotel, arm in arm.

Heads turned as they passed. Anton beamed. They emerged onto the Strip. He steered them in the direction of the other show. In full sunlight he was more golden than she remembered. She couldn’t tell if his glow was the Las Vegas sun or just his mood. He was only a trifle lighter under the portion of the linen shirt that she had partially unbuttoned during their trip down the elevator.

“Do you have any meetings tonight? Dinners?”

“Mason is furious with me. Even if he arranged something, I wouldn’t be invited.”

“And you the woman of the hour. Really has no sense of how to leverage a narrative, does he?”

“It’s not his strong suit, no.”

He gave her a speculative look. “Should we have your things sent here?”

Kristen frowned.

“I’m not being presumptuous,” Anton informed her. “Well. A little presumptuous. But it will be safer. And besides, I suspect you’ll like this much better.”

The other hotel was much quieter. It was full of people working on projects, not just selling them. Everyone still in the lobby spaces wore golf shirts or hoodies. They were either from three-letter agencies or had four-letter words tattooed on their fingers. But Anton was dressed in a bespoke seersucker suit with a pale pink tie. Kristen had not really thought about Anton having a lot of money before, but the fact that he could afford to look different from his peers, that he didn’t have to wear the same protective camouflage, that he didn’t have to assimilate, said a lot.

They rode the elevator to nearly the top floor, and emerged into what was a very dark, very quiet hallway, where the noise of the Strip down below had faded into nothing. He waved his fob over a nearby door and nudged it open. On the other side was an executive suite that was larger than Kristen’s apartment.

Much later, Kristen was answering messages and triaging interview requests in the bathtub when Sheila called. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” she said. “Are you okay? It’s okay if you’re not okay. But Sumter really needs to know if you’re okay.”

The fact that he was actually making a phone call happen when Kristen had already answered his panicked pings probably said something. “I’m all right,” Kristen said. “Thank you for checking on me. And thank Sumter for asking. That’s really supportive of him. And the company.”

“You sound relaxed.”

From his position over the sink, Anton sent her a profoundly smug look. Then he left the room. When he returned he was carrying a bottle of orange juice and a small bottle of something sparkling. She nodded at him, and he left the room to open both bottles.

“I am,” she said. She heard Anton pouring the drinks in his little kitchen: orange juice for himself, the sparkling wine for her. “I’m having champagne. Or something close to it.”

“Fancy,” Sheila said. There was a pause, and her voice lowered. “Wait, did you get laid? You sound like you got laid.”

“Sheila, we agreed to turn off the affect detection feature when it’s a personal call.”

“That’s good. You should decompress. What happened sounds like a complete fucking nightmare.”

“More so for the other woman than for me,” Kristen admitted.

What with everything, she hadn’t even tried to find that woman. She’d bolted, while Kristen shook hands and showed teeth and enjoyed a surprise round of scream therapy. It was an oversight on Kristen’s part. It wasn’t the kind of thing a girl’s girl should do. It was rude.

“What other woman?”

Kristen glanced at Anton. He looked as puzzled as she felt. “The other woman. The woman whose hair he was touching. She must have felt terrible, just sitting there while he did that, with no one coming to help.”

“What did she look like?”

Kristen blinked. She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t even really seen her straight-on, just the contours of a face silhouetted by the glow of a device, and the tight set of her shoulders, and the cringing curve of her spine as she angled away and tried to make herself smaller. Kristen knew the stance. The curl of the other woman’s body was like a crooked finger beckoning her. When the spotlight landed on Kristen she had sensed movement. Like a rabbit, narrowly skirting a snare. Kristen had liked rabbits to eat, growing up. Her mother said they were incomplete, nutritionally, but they tasted mostly like turkey and they often came for free, so it was best to take advantage.

“Tell me what she looks like, and I’ll check the video. The video is everywhere, by the way. But you probably know that already. Nadine and Fawn are freaking out.”

Kristen sat straight up in the water. “Fawn is at work?”

“Well, no, she—” Sheila gasped. “Wait, are you in a bathtub right now? Are you having a bath? Is that why the acoustics are so good on your end?”

“There was another woman there, I swear. He was touching her hair. But I don’t know who she was. Is. Who she is.”

“I haven’t seen anything about hair-touching. Everyone’s saying he was feeding the ducks because of your talk.”

Anton mouthed the words feeding the ducks? Shaking his head, he adjusted the tap on the footbath so it stopped dripping. Then he hung up his robe and entered the tub on the opposite side.

“It wasn’t. I saw someone. I think she ran away. Maybe she went to find security?”

Deep down, Kristen knew this wasn’t true. The other woman wouldn’t have run for security. Doing so would have only prolonged things. There was a reason she hadn’t simply gotten up and left earlier; Kristen had merely created a distraction and provided her an opportunity to escape.

“Well, don’t worry; Nadine and Fawn are on it. They’ll find out, either way. I think Sumter told them to send you flowers. Or he’s sending them himself. I suggested sending you some bear spray, but they were all sold out. The whole state. There’s a big shortage. Species collapse has come for hot peppers, apparently.”

“Well, thank Nadine and Fawn for me, and tell them I didn’t mean to make extra work for them.”

“It’s fine. Nadine said she wanted to stay late, anyway. I think she and her husband had a fight.”

“Again?”

“Right? She’s probably happy for the distraction.” Sheila paused. “Wait. Is he listening right now? Can he hear me?”

“Sheila, the entire floor can hear you. You’re very resonant.”

“You’ve got excellent taste, buddy! Our boss wants to fuck her, too!” Sheila rang off.

Kristen handed Anton the device. Anton set it on the counter, then took a moment to set it at right angles to the granite. He stared at the device for a moment, seemingly hesitant, and then looked at her from under his beautiful long lashes.

“Is Sheila right about that?”

“Right about what?”

“Is Sumter Williams in love with you?”

Kristen laughed. Against the washroom’s marble acoustics it sounded a bit like her laughter when she visited her parents’ marker in the mausoleum. Like a sudden yelp of pain. “What?”

“Your boss. Does he want to fuck you?”

“No.” Kristen swished a pile of bubbles in his direction. He ducked easily to one side. “Anton. Come on. Be serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious,” he said, and when she looked at him again, she realized he was. “I don’t see any point in ignoring the issue or pretending that it’s not important. Because if he can’t fuck you, he might just fuck you over, instead.”

Kristen frowned. “Are you jealous?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you mean envious?”

“No, I mean jealous. Covetous.”

“No,” he said, a little too quickly. “I’m not like that. At least, I try not to be like that. That’s not who I want to be. I just…” He drew a deep breath and then let it out, slowly, as though to give himself time to think. “I wish you didn’t have to deal with him. Don’t you?”

She shrugged. “Sure. I guess. But then I’d be out of a job.”

And I’m not done, yet.

Anton looked up. “Not done with what?”

Kristen wiped sweat from her brow. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “I have a secret superpower.”

He smirked. “It’s not so secret from me.”

Kristen pushed a wave of water at him with the flat of her hand. Anton sputtered and wiped his face. He beamed. “Okay, okay. Tell me.”

She sighed. This was difficult to explain. She barely understood it herself. “I have an eye for people. And ideas. Like you do. I can tell when someone’s about to do something really important. To the field, I mean.”

To her surprise, he didn’t disagree. “And that’s why you stay with Sumter?”

“Sort of. Sumter is the only one I haven’t been a hundred percent sure about. I can see him doing great things with Wuv—with all his projects, really—and I can see him doing terrible things, too.”

“And you want to stop it before it starts. If it starts.”

She nodded.

“I want to be the person…” She took a deep breath. He squeezed her ankles with one hand and reached for her hand with his other. “I want to be the person in the room who has the guts to say that something is a bad idea. I want to be the person who wasn’t there when they had the idea that eventually helped kill my parents.”

Anton kissed the center of her palm. He pressed his face there. “That’s a noble goal.”

“Thanks. I thought so, too. But lately I’m not so sure.”

Anton frowned. “Why do you say that?”

This, too, was difficult to explain.

On her good days, Kristen believed firmly in the transformative power of random acts of kindness: a little nudge here or there that made someone else’s life easier. She had seen it, on the burn ward. She had seen the connection between moments of personal generosity and measurably improved outcomes. So, Kristen could do things that benefited other people without expecting any reward or recognition. Often, it satisfied her in a simple and primal way, much the same as peeling a sheet of sunburned skin away from her calf in one long, slow pull had felt during childhood. There was a sense of rightness and completeness to it. It was one tiny win for order in the world’s battle against chaos. But then, increasingly, those tiny wins felt, well, tiny. She had wanted something bigger. She wanted more.

“I have poor impulse control. I do things—I say things—that I shouldn’t, sometimes. And it gets me into trouble.”

“I’m well aware.”

Kristen stuck out her tongue. Anton crouched down and leaned forward and climbed over her. He drew another breath that said he was trying to be delicate. She wondered when she’d picked up on that particular habit of his.

“Of course you’re impulsive,” he said. “You know that life is short. You’ve survived the kinds of setbacks that destroy most people. You’re lucky to be alive, and you know it, and you don’t want to waste any time…” He peered into the middle distance for a moment, then brought his focus back to her. “You don’t want to waste any time,” he said finally.

Kristen caught herself truly liking him in a way she didn’t like most people. Being with Anton felt genuinely good—in an immediate way, unrelated to how she perceived herself, or how she told the story of her life. People recognized where Kristen Howard fit into Sumter Williams’s world right away. It made sense to them. It made sense to her.

But Anton didn’t fit. If she didn’t know better, she might have assumed he was one of those too-good-to-be-true men who appeared out of nowhere in the various true crime stories her mother had once devoured. He was random. He was a surprise.

But he understood.

The whole planet was on fire; Kristen’s parents’ house had just burnt up earlier than most. And the world was full of cruel, stupid, selfish people. There was no time left to be nice to them.

Anton was a gift—and for now, Kristen wanted to ignore the price tag.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It’s when Kristen tries making herself a meal that she realizes that the cupboards don’t work for women.

Her hands are still working, contrary to what Mason suggested about possible nerve damage. It’s not vertigo. It’s not a migraine. She can stand on one foot without falling. She can pick up glasses of water. She can open and shut the taps; she can take a shower. She took a long shower. So long it went cold. That was her cue to finally strip off her clothes. They are drying now, spread over furnishings that have no branding.

To be fair, she can turn the lights on and off. She can operate appliances; she watches blue flame click into place under one darkly gleaming burner and shuts it off before anyone else can see what she’s up to. She can enter and exit the house—at least, she assumes so. Kristen hasn’t tried yet. Not really. Fawn’s body is gone now, but they all still remember what she had said.

The island ate him.

Any door in the house that dispenses food—the cupboards, the refrigerator door, the pantry doors—will not open for Kristen. It’s as though she’s an experimental animal. There is an action that must be performed for the food to appear, and she seems incapable of it. But as she watches the boys tearing into their newfound rations, she ticks their names off a mental list. Sumter, Mason, Brock, Jasper, Pearce, even Hari. She doesn’t recall Jong-soo looking into the cupboards, but she went to bed early the past two nights. As far as she knows, none of them has—or had—any problems with the cupboards, the refrigerator, or the pantry. They yank the doors open so hard they squeak. They slam the doors shut and the spices rattle on their rack as though startled.

It takes her a while to decide how to proceed. If she opens with her theory, it will go nowhere. She doesn’t need a PhD in gender studies to know that. What she needs is to run the experiment again—on one of her fellow animals.

“Nora Mae,” she says, when the other woman is breezing through the kitchen on her way to the beach. Kristen experiences a brief pang for the way she is about to ruin Nora Mae’s day. “There were cleaning supplies in the pantry, right? Bleach? I thought I could do something about…”

Kristen gestures vaguely at the table. Fawn’s blood has soaked in so deeply there will be no bringing it out of the ancient wood. But there is a thin sheen of it still left on the strip of floor beneath the table. And it has smeared on a surprising number of toss pillows and throw blankets. Fawn’s blood is like original sin, or microplastics. It’s gotten everywhere. It’s touched everything. There is no escaping it.

“Sure thing. I think I remember where it is.” Nora Mae goes to the pantry. She reaches for the door. Kristen realizes she’s holding her breath. Nora Mae’s hand closes around the handle and she pulls so hard she actually stumbles backward, into Jasper, who says, “What the fuck?” when she bumps into him.

“The pantry’s locked,” Nora Mae says. “Who locked the pantry?”

“It’s not locked,” Jasper says, and reaches over and pulls open the door like it’s nothing. “It’s not even stuck.”

Kristen watches the confusion ripple across Nora Mae’s features. Did she imagine it? Was the door really stuck? Nora Mae is still distracted when she reaches inside the pantry and grabs more of the cricket snacks from the airplane. She shuts the door carefully. Lets her hand rest on the pull.

She pulls. It doesn’t open.

“What the fuck?” Nora Mae jiggles the handle on the door. “What the fuck?”

“Is it stuck again?” Jasper asks. He reaches over and opens the door again. “You need to eat more protein, or something. Are you okay?”

“I get plenty of protein—”

“She eats lunch at the Y,” Brock says, and Jasper giggles along with him.

“Fuck you, Brock,” Nora Mae says. “I get more pussy than you do.”

This is not quite going the way Kristen had imagined. She stands up from her position on the sofa in the great room, and pads into the kitchen. “What’s going on with the door?” she asks, as neutrally as possible. “Is it giving you trouble?”

“Yeah…” Nora Mae is squinting at it. Kristen knows that look. Nora Mae is working the problem. She’s looking back along the user journey in her head: what are the touch points in the kitchen? What has she interacted with? How successful were those interactions?

What type of user is the kitchen really built for?

Nora Mae’s hand snaps out and pulls on the pantry door. It won’t budge. Now Jasper is watching her. “That’s fucked up,” Nora Mae says. “It won’t open.”

“I’m telling you, it opens.” Jasper reaches over and opens the pantry door for a third time.

“And I’m telling you it doesn’t,” Nora Mae insists. She shuts the pantry door and then tries to pull it again. It won’t open. “See?”

“What’s going on?”

Mason’s voice sounds the way it does when he’s interrupting a tense all-hands meeting. Which in a way, he is. He strides into the kitchen and stands a little off to the side. He casually opens the fridge, checks the contents, and nods. They’ve worked out a rationing system, but he’s made a show of checking on the inventory, just so everyone knows he’s doing it.

“The pantry door won’t open for me,” Nora Mae says.

Mason shoots a look at Kristen. “Really.”

“Really,” Nora Mae insists. She pulls on the door again. “See?”

Mason looks pissed. Kristen has no idea why it should make him so angry. Perhaps he’s simply frustrated that she might actually be right about something. It’s not outside the realm of possibility. He might be just that petty, after all.

“Didn’t Kristen have that problem, too?” Mason asks. He pitches his voice so everyone can hear. “Kristen, didn’t you have an issue with the cupboards?”

“You thought it was nerve damage,” she says, and nothing, not even that first glass of water when she woke up the house, has ever tasted sweeter than those words. “Nora Mae, are you having any issues with your hands? Loss of feeling? Symptoms of neuropathy? Sudden case of Raynaud’s?”

“We get it,” Mason mutters. “Nora Mae, try again.”

Nora Mae tries the pantry door. And she tries the cupboards. And the fridge. And each time, Jasper is able to open the doors that she can’t. Each time he opens the door and slams it shut, the silence in the great room deepens, and the ocean outside seems louder. By the time they’ve tried every possible cupboard door, Mason seems even paler than usual.

“All right, Kristen,” he says. “You’re up.”

Kristen tries the pantry, and every cupboard door, and the fridge. She pulls on the door handles, tries to slide her fingers between the door and the jambs. Nothing works. But each time, Jasper can do it.

“Well, that’s just weird,” Brock says.

“Super weird,” Pearce agrees.

Mason says nothing. Kristen can see him putting it together in his head. Mason is a lot of things. Stupid isn’t one of them.

“Isn’t anyone going to say it?” Nora Mae turns to look at all of them huddled in the kitchen. “The doors won’t open for women.”

As one, there’s a collective snort from everyone but Mason and Kristen. “Come on,” Brock says, just as Pearce says, “No way.”

But then they’re left with the doors hanging open right where Jasper left them, as though a poltergeist had gone through the house and decided to leave a particularly mundane trail behind. Or as though a thoughtless man had gone through the kitchen looking for snacks. It looks the same either way.

“That can’t be it,” Pearce says.

“Oh, you don’t think so?” Nora Mae asks. “Have you ever had a hand-dryer not work for you? Or a customs kiosk decide you need to be sent up the line for a secondary screening? Really? That’s never happened to you? I can’t imagine why.”

There is an awkward silence. Everyone in the room seems consumed with how best to ignore or rationalize the implications of what Nora Mae has just said. But Kristen can remember that the door to the pantry opened for Hari. Hari and Jasper look a whole lot different. From the perspective of machine vision, there are only a few things they have in common.

“It does seem pretty inefficient,” Jasper says. “To not have … To not allow…” Kristen watches him struggle to find the right words to use. If he speaks them aloud, the problem will become real. Then they’ll all have to consider it and deal with it. “I mean, you’d think…”

“You think what, that women are naturally supposed to be in the kitchen?” Nora Mae demands.

“That’s not what I said! Jesus Christ, Nora Mae, calm down—”

The magic words.

“Calm down?” Nora Mae’s accent is thicker. She sounds more like her wife. Kristen met her once at a Canada Day thing at Sumter’s family place up in Haliburton. Kristen remembers her being funny, and constantly hectoring both herself and Nora Mae to put on more sunscreen and sit under the sunshades. She made a really killer blueberry grunt. “The damn cupboard doors won’t open. How in hell are Kristen and I supposed to eat?”

“We don’t know it’s because you’re girls,” Brock says, in what he doubtless thinks is an objective, reasonable tone of voice.

Nora Mae levels a look at him that would, in a righteous universe, grant him the capacity to experience shame. “Okay, Brock,” Nora Mae says. “What else could it be?”

“Maybe it’s height,” he says. “Maybe you’re just too short. Maybe the kitchen thinks you and Kristen are kids.”

“Kids.” Nora Mae blinks. “Really.”

“I mean, it’s possible,” Jasper says, and he’s obviously warming to the idea. He holds his hand flat and finds the spot on his chest where Nora Mae stands up to him. “You and Kristen are kind of short. Not, like, freaky short, or anything, it’s not like a disorder or something—”

“Shut up, Jasper,” Mason snaps.

“But he’s right, though!” Brock stands next to Kristen and makes the same flat-handed you must be this tall to ride the attraction motion to measure her height. “People program their kitchens so their kids can’t snack too much, right? Like, for childhood obesity and stuff? That’s a thing, right?”

“That is indeed a thing,” Mason says evenly.

Brock looks absurdly proud of himself. “See? It’s not because you’re, you know, women. The doors aren’t locked because you’re women. It’s just whoever used the kitchen last didn’t wipe their preferences.”

“If that’s the case,” Kristen says, trying very hard to sound as though she hasn’t spent hours trying to figure out a way to make a man think this is his own idea, “shouldn’t the same rule apply to any man who’s roughly the same height as me, or Nora Mae? Or at least close?”

“I mean…” Brock looks at Jasper. Jasper looks at Pearce. Pearce looks at Mason. Mason is staring at the dining table. “I guess?”

“So who’s our height?” Nora Mae asks.

“Jong-soo,” say Brock and Jasper in unison.

“He’s not that short,” Pearce says. “If Jong-soo were that short, he’d have pulled desk duty during his mandatory service, and he didn’t.”

“But he is the closest match. As far as you can tell.”

“As far as I can tell, sure. Possibly. I guess. Where is he?”

“He took her away,” Mason says. He is still staring at the table soaked in blood. Now that Kristen is actually looking, she can see the streaks from where someone dragged Fawn out the door. The streaks are broken in places, as though someone tried to clean them and then gave up. “This morning. Early. Before dawn. Said he felt bad for not helping, earlier.”

It is well past dawn now. If the sun’s position didn’t give it away, Kristen’s stomach would be a sure indicator. She is hungry. She feels almost proud of that fact. Her body is not giving up. Her body wants to live. Even when it’s painful and ugly and inconvenient and expensive, even when it would be easier never to be seen or heard from again, her body still wants to live. Her body hungers in defiance of every balance sheet ever written about its care. What a miracle that is.

“Did he come back?” Nora Mae asks.

This is the moment when they all look each other in the eye for the first time all morning. This is the moment when they all know. Even Mason. They know it without saying a word. They know it from the silence of the house: no water running in the pipes, no footsteps high above.

Jong-soo is missing.

CHAPTER NINE

“Tell me one more time,” Sumter says. He’s dripping wet, standing in the kitchen, fresh from a swim. He had entered the great room, all smiles, and requested a big bowl of water to soak his feet in so he wouldn’t track sand into the house. He was confused as to why Kristen couldn’t get him one.

“Well, to test our hypothesis—”

“Hypothesis?”

“Our idea,” Nora Mae says.

“I know what a hypothesis is, Nora Mae. For fuck’s sake. I’m just saying, this is just a theory, this isn’t set in stone, there’s got to be another explanation—”

It’s like listening to a generated character in free-with-ads horror content. Sumter is the guy who doesn’t believe in quarantining the alien, the one who thinks the puncture wounds on the girl’s neck are just infected mosquito bites, the one who says that the house is just “settling” and there’s nothing to worry about.

“I mean, it can’t be because you’re women,” Sumter says. “That can’t be it.”

“We wanted to test Brock’s framework,” Kristen says. “Jong-soo is only a little taller than either me or Nora Mae. And if the kitchen is trained to keep kids out of the cupboards, it would probably still respond to him. He’s in the more typical range of adult height. For white men, anyway.”

“Don’t you start, too.” Sumter sucks his teeth. “So you wanted to find him, to test this theory. Okay. And he wasn’t in the house?”

“He’s not anywhere,” Nora Mae says. “He’s not in the house, he’s not on the beach, he’s not on the patio, he’s not on the path leading up to the house…”

“Well, then he must be somewhere else on the island,” Sumter says.

“Why would he go somewhere else on the island?” Kristen asks. “Hari is still gone, and Fawn came back mortally wounded. We have no idea what’s out there. The last thing anyone wants to do is explore.”

“You don’t know that.” Sumter looks around at the group assembled in the kitchen. “Does anyone know if he was—is—a strong swimmer? Did he go swimming with us up in Haliburton?”

“I remember he suggested skinny-dipping,” Brock says, and Jasper slaps him upside the head.

“He’s fucking missing, dipshit,” Jasper says.

“But it’s like Sumter said! We don’t know that for sure!” Brock’s voice, as usual, gets a little higher when he’s defending himself. He rubs the back of his head. “Maybe he did go swimming. Maybe he went swimming, and there was, what’s the word, undertow, and…” He shrugs. “I mean, that happens, right? And it’s not like there are lifeguards out here, right?”

“Craig,” Sumter whispers. “Craig died in the water.”

“And I found his body,” Kristen reminds him. “If Brock is right, wouldn’t we also have found Jong-soo by now?”

“This is too fucking morbid.” Nora Mae reaches for the fridge and then makes a noise of exquisite frustration. “Could we please move the fucking alcohol to someplace where the women can actually drink it?”

“I’ll make you a drink,” Jasper says. “Anybody else? Gin and juice? Stave off the scurvy?”

Kristen holds up two fingers. “Here.”

Kristen makes sure that Mason catches her eye roll. But he doesn’t roll his eyes back. He doesn’t smirk. He doesn’t even offer a rueful smile. Instead, he crowds himself back in his chair, staring, looking at the group in the kitchen as though they are some vast and terrible equation whose resolution is either fiendishly difficult or maddeningly simple.

Before he can say anything, Pearce jogs into the kitchen. He’d gone for a quick run around the perimeter, just to check if he could see Jong-soo anywhere from the terrace. He doesn’t bother with dipping his feet in the bowl of water Sumter placed outside before coming in. Kristen hears their boss make a tiny, annoyed sound in the back of his throat. She can’t blame him for trying to establish some level of normalcy here. But it’s clearly not going to take.

Pearce says nothing. He goes to the kitchen, effortlessly opens a cupboard, fetches a glass, and methodically fills it with water. Then he drinks it all in one go, throat bobbing and water trailing down his chin. He wipes his forehead with his shirt.

“Well?” Nora Mae asks.

Pearce shakes his head. “I didn’t see him.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I didn’t see him,” Pearce snaps. “I even went out to the plane. I thought maybe he was trying to get more luggage, or something.”

“That would make sense,” Sumter says.

“Yeah, except he’s not fucking there.” Pearce pours himself another glass of water. He drinks half of it and then leans over the sink to pour the rest over his neck. He’s breathing hard. He smells a bit like the ocean. Water drips off his nose and into the sink with a heavy plinking sound. “There’s something else.”

“Oh?”

“I followed their tracks. His footprints, and the track she—her body, I mean—made. In the sand. And the tracks go nowhere.”

Sumter frowns. “What do you mean, nowhere?”

“I mean the tracks disappear. They stop. They vanish. I didn’t find where he’d buried Fawn. Her body’s not with the others. It’s not anywhere. And neither is Jong-soo.”

“An animal. An animal ate Fawn. And then Jong-soo. That’s your theory.”

Mason’s voice could soak up an oil spill. Distantly, Kristen remembers that some of his family are English. A few of them needed to renounce their Canadian citizenship to take some sort of parliamentary position in England. And then they came crawling back after one scandal or another, and Mason was sent to a boarding school for people with those kinds of problems, and that was where he first met Sumter. Sumter’s trust had funded his education in Canada, when that was the thing all the wealthy American parents were doing for their children.

“She was missing a chunk of her leg, Mason. How do you think that happened? You think she just stumbled into a grain harvester?”

“I don’t know! But we haven’t seen any animals here either, have we?”

The others say “No,” just as Nora Mae says, “It doesn’t matter.”

Pearce raises his eyebrows at Nora Mae. “It doesn’t matter?”

Nora Mae looks at him like he’s suddenly confessed to never passing kindergarten. “It’s a predator’s job not to be seen. Bears, big cats, coyotes: they can follow you for miles without you knowing. At least, they used to.”

It occurs to Kristen that she has not heard any birds, since they got here. No insects. Just silence. Death.

“Christ save us from more Native wisdom,” Brock mutters.

“Hey fuck you, Brock.” Nora Mae gives him the finger.

“Don’t you have something useful you could be doing?” Sumter speaks over his shoulder to Brock. His tone is clipped. “Like leading a search party? Pearce can’t do all of them.”

“I’m not going out there! Not if there’s some big, dangerous animal out there. No way. And speaking of which: What kind of pantywaist zombie apocalypse bunker doesn’t have guns?”

Brock crashes into a huge, vaginal-looking armchair and burrows deep into its upholstered folds. He’s eating more of the cricket snacks. The crumbs spill down his shirt. He’s eating like they already know for sure that another of his coworkers is dead, and so there’s one less mouth to feed from the stockpile in the pantry.

“Tiger traps,” Kristen says.

Sumter looks up. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Tiger traps. That’s how you hunt big game without a gun. You dig a hole, fill it with spikes, and cover it over so the game—whatever it is that you’re hunting—runs across and falls in.”

“Nice.” Jasper sounds impressed.

“It’s cowardly and disgusting. All game hunting is cowardly and disgusting.”

Nora Mae pulls a face. “What else would you hunt?”

The two women are sitting on the concrete bench protruding from the fireplace. If the fire were actually lit, they would be one good shove away from a witch trial. The fireplace certainly seems large enough to stuff a human being inside. “I meant for trophies, not subsistence.” Kristen remembers something Sumter said the night they found the house. “But, if this island were a game preserve, then there might be some animals still left. Right?”

Pearce looks up at the skeletons hanging over them. “That would make this place a big hunting lodge, wouldn’t it?”

Nora Mae nods. “It would for damn sure explain the freezers.”

The freezers are enormous. Technically, one of them is a walk-in, like in an industrial kitchen. At least, that’s what Kristen has been told. She can’t open the door for herself. But Nora Mae is right: the walk-in freezers, the knives, and the sinks deep enough to drown a child in all speak to a capacity for butchery at scale.

“And whatever was left behind here, it would be hungry. There probably aren’t even enough prey animals here on the island to sustain it.”

“Until now.” Brock pops another cricket snack in his mouth.

Sumter turns around to face him fully this time. “Shut the fuck up. I’m serious.”

Brock gives him a huge shit-eating grin. “What are you gonna do, send me to bed without my dinner?” His finger draws a circle in the air. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but these aren’t our offices. We don’t work for you here. In fact, we just got acquired, so none of us ever has to work for you ever again. If we make it out of here we’re all going to sue your ass for stranding us on this motherfucking rock.”

Jasper steps forward, but Brock waves him off. In fact, Brock sits forward and looks Sumter straight in the face. They’re both so sunburned. Brock is even beginning to peel a little.

“And by the way, none of your boy genius bullshit has gotten the internet to work, or the plane, or any other goddamn thing. Jong-soo buried Fawn, or he tried to, while you were going for a morning swim. Like a fucking tourist. So don’t lecture me about what I should be doing.”

With that Brock stands up, crumples the wrapper of the cricket snacks, and throws it over Kristen’s head into the fireplace. It occurs to her that they have no real way of dealing with the garbage here. Where does it go? Do the island’s regular visitors just take it with them when they leave? She knows her mind has chosen this problem to work on so that she can avoid all the other ones sitting in the room with her, but she can’t help but wonder.

“He didn’t really mean it,” Jasper says, staring up the stairs to where Brock has retreated.

“Yeah, he did,” Sumter sounds exhausted. “And he’s right. You all could sue. Maybe you should, I don’t know. You certainly all have the money to buy the best lawyers now.”

“Even more, now,” Pearce says. He’s staring out at the beach through the black glass windows. His voice sounds as hollow and empty as the absurdly high ceiling.

Sumter frowns. “What?”

“The equity split,” Pearce says. “You know. Since five people died on the plane, the value of the split increases. Because of how we’re vested.” He gestures at Sumter and Mason. “I mean, nothing changes for you guys. You’re founders. The value of your and Mason’s equity doesn’t change, because your percentage remains the same. But for the rest of us, who get the split of what’s left, it makes a difference.”

“Holy shit,” Jasper says. “Holy fucking shit. I didn’t even think of that.”

“Do you mean…?” Nora Mae can’t even make the words. “Are you saying…?”

“He’s saying that the fewer of us there are, the more money we stand to make,” Kristen says. “And he’s right.”

CHAPTER TEN

The seven of them left tear the house apart—again. But like Fawn (and Hari) the night before, Jong-soo can’t be found. And he doesn’t answer when they go outside and call for him. He doesn’t appear to be on the road leading to the house, or the beach, or anywhere else.

“Maybe we need to do a more thorough search,” Sumter says. “Like we each take one piece of the island, like a grid search, and we do it that way. Maybe you missed something. Maybe…” He licks his lips. “Maybe they’re in the brush, or something. Did you search the brush?”

Pearce shakes his head. “I just wanted to cover as much ground as quickly as possible.”

Silence settles over the great room. Brock is back, but sitting at the top of the stairs. Jasper has poured more drinks. The juice in the gin smells like the kind of body spray a middle schooler would wear. Kristen can’t even discern what the fruits are meant to be. Guava? Dragonfruit? Mangosteen? The juice tastes like the house itself: exotic, but fake.

“Jong-soo wouldn’t…” Jasper sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. “I mean, he’s not that kind of guy. Right?”

“What kind of guy?” Kristen asks.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Kristen presses.

“He means the kind of guy who would do something to Fawn’s body,” Brock says. “That’s what we’re all thinking, right?”

“No, Brock, we aren’t, because not all of us are the fucking worst.” Mason crosses the room and starts to pour himself more gin, but then appears to think better of it. He just keeps staring at the bottle sweating inside the ice bucket.

Jasper raises his hand, half-heartedly. “For the record, I meant the kind of guy who would bail on us. Not some kind of pervert.”

Brock scoffs. “Bail on us? Where is there to go? The plane?”

“This isn’t helping.” Nora Mae gets up and stands next to Kristen before the massive fireplace. “There are only a few possibilities. He’s still with Fawn, or he’s not. He’s hurt, or he’s not. We’re not doing ourselves any favors if we burn even more energy speculating.”

“It does if he’s gone ’round the fucking twist,” Jasper says. “What if he, like, snapped, or something? Did he bring a shovel? Mason, you saw him leave. Did he have a shovel?”

Mason frowns. Since Fawn’s death all his reactions are on a kind of delay, as though some internal signaling mechanism of his has weathered one too many storms. Which, Kristen thinks, is exactly what has happened.

“I don’t…” He’s clearly trying to clear some mental fog. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Do you remember what time he left?” Pearce is checking his watch. “We can figure out how long he’s been gone, at least.”

“Does he have anything he could use to defend himself? Or, you know, hurt himself?”

He wouldn’t do that. Not anymore.

“What was that?” Nora Mae nudges Kristen with her elbow.

“What?”

“You said something. Mumbled it.”

“I did?” Pain needles under Kristen’s scars. It expands within her skull and behind her eyes. “Is there coffee? I need caffeine. My head is killing me.”

“On it,” Sumter says, just as Nora Mae asks: “What were you saying?”

Sumter makes for the kitchen. For once, Kristen wishes she were going with him. There is something mundane and comforting about watching him make coffee. He’s not useless in the kitchen, at least. Sumter’s never done that weaponized incompetence thing that her dad did, of pretending to not understand how to complete basic tasks that every seven-year-old girl in every prairie dress cult already knows how to do backward.

Kristen’s parents used to mine those moments for content: how to pack a lunch, how to make a dental appointment, how to send a thank-you card, how to be a reasonable facsimile of a functioning human being. Those videos always did extremely well. Her mother died sitting on a wealth of data about how unhappy the majority of heterosexual women were in their marriages. Kristen knew this because a grad student with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant had asked to look at their viewer stats, after their death. Kristen’s lawyers had already made large parts of the total dataset part of the public record, by entering them as evidence. Releasing the rest didn’t seem like such a big deal. The student wrote a whole chapter in her dissertation about how once, Mom had tried to start a conversation about why they’d only had one child. About how genuinely difficult motherhood was. She got death threats. It was one of Dad’s arguments for moving so far north, in 2020.

Conveniently for him, too, their move took Mom away from her family, and out of the reach of her longtime doctor. Dad suggested chatbot therapy, as a replacement. Then he walked away and started watching videos on how to harvest old washing machines for their chips.

“I can’t talk about it,” Kristen says. “It’s private. Jong-soo told me in confidence.”

Mason scoffs. The others glance at him, then at her, and back again. Nora Mae seems like she’s about to ask a question, when something in the kitchen shatters.

“Uh … guys?” Sumter sounds ten years younger than he is. “Can somebody take a look at this for me?”

Kristen knows that tone. She moves first. In the kitchen, Sumter stands with his back to the open pantry and supply closets. He’s pointing at the magnetic knife rack. There are multiple empty slots. At a glance, it looks like a cleaver, a utility knife, and one of the much smaller knives are all missing. There’s a shattered French press on the floor. Coffee drips slowly into the drain embedded in the concrete.

Wherever Jong-soo is now, he’s armed.

“I didn’t even notice they were missing, until I went for creamer.”

Kristen opens her mouth to say something, but Mason interrupts by picking up the nearest coffee mug and hurling it at the wall. It’s thick; it doesn’t shatter so much as split in half, exposing the quality of its manufacture. “Amazing!” Brock starts snickering. It’s a high, scornful sound. Mason picks up a salad plate and whips it at the fireplace like it’s a Frisbee. He gets some good air on it before it, too, breaks into multiple modern-yet-tasteful pieces. “Spectacular! I’m so glad we decided on this little jaunt!”

“Easy, buddy,” Brock says, resting a hand on Mason’s shoulder. “Where was this energy for Fawn, huh?”

Mason whirls and swings on him. His fist misses badly, hitting Brock in the ear and not the jaw or the eye, but Brock still howls with a mixture of pain, surprise, and possibly offended pride. He ducks, grabs Mason around the middle, and physically lifts him off the floor to slam into the wall. Brock’s right arm rears back to punch Mason, but Jasper loops his arms around him from behind and pulls him back, while Sumter inserts himself physically between Brock and Mason. Mason’s eyes are empty.

“Mace. Calm down.” Sumter holds his cofounder’s face in his hands. “We will find them. We will. I swear. And then we’re gonna get out of here. I promise you. It’s just taking a little longer than we planned. Okay?”

It takes a long moment for Mason to raise his eyes. “Sure.” He nods over at the bar cart. “Gin’s empty. Get us another bottle.”

Sumter pats his face. He grins. “Good man. Coming right up. You’re getting a plastic cup, though. No offense.”

Sumter breezes into the kitchen and makes for the freezer. Even the alcohol is brand-free; the labels simply indicate type, ABV, and year. The gin has infographics about botanicals. Sumter retrieves a bottle, cocks his head, and pulls a vodka while he’s at it. Each bottle makes a different chime as it leaves the freezer. He steps over the spilled coffee and shattered glass like it’s not even there.

Nora Mae and Kristen both look at the spill, then each other. They share a moment of silent frustration. And then Kristen goes through the propped pantry door to look for paper towels.

On the wall, the tally has changed.

This morning, a long list of items departed: one box fireplace matches, one pair poultry shears, one skein butcher’s twine, two gallons distilled water, one waxed tablecloth, twenty-four ready-to-eat meal pouches, three rolls toilet paper, one packet micellar wipes, one small recreational first aid kit, and two cans jellied ethanol. Jong-soo isn’t just armed, he’s dug in. Bivouacked. She imagines he put Fawn’s body on the oilcloth, covered her with gear, tied her up like a kit bag, and dragged her out the front door.

And suddenly the house makes a terrible kind of sense to her. Kristen knows exactly why the doors opened for her that first time. And she knows why they have to prop all the other ones. She knows it with the kind of bone-deep certainty she usually only feels when she’s found the right talent to work with. But this time, terror washes from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.

The doors will not open without a man present.

The house interprets anything else as a possible escape attempt.

This is why the entrance only opened for her when Hari was there, and why the house locked her in when he left. It’s why the house didn’t let Fawn in, when she had returned alone. The women in the house are not meant to leave.

Ever.

She’s seen this before.

“Kiki?” She jumps about a foot. When she turns to look at Sumter, concern is written all over his face. Somehow his tenderness makes it even worse: she has to restrain a sob. He ditches the bottles on the counter and marches into the pantry. “Kiki, oh my God. Come here.”

Kristen pivots just slightly, so his back will be to the pantry’s tally system. It works: he doesn’t even notice anything missing. Especially when she delicately wipes her eyes with her ring fingers, and says in a tiny voice that she’s sorry, she just needs a minute, it’s just a lot, it’s so much, she’s not sure she can take it—

“Shh…” Sumter folds her in his arms and sets his chin on her head. “What’s wrong? You’re shaking. You’re trembling. I’ve never seen you like this.”

Sometimes, honesty is the best policy.

“I’m scared.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounds like he truly means it. “Really sorry. For all of it. All of this, I mean. The way this all turned out.”

She is intensely grateful that he cannot see her expression. “We don’t know how it’s turned out yet.”

He chuckles. He presses a kiss into her scalp. It’s very quick. Almost shy. Just the far side of friendly. It would be so easy, she realizes. So simple. So convenient. So neat and tidy and obvious. It would be so easy to just let him.

Let him do what, she has no idea. But just let him. Let him give her whatever happy ending he’s dreamed up. He has good ideas, sometimes. Maybe she should let him make his pitch. Maybe she should take a look at his deck.

“You know I’d never let anything hurt you, right?”

Kristen squeezes her eyes shut.

She misses Anton with an almost physical pain. If it were a physical pain, she’d know how to handle it. What she has far less experience with is this bitter cocktail of sorrow and regret and terror and disgust. She can taste it now, on the back of her throat. Anton had never told her not to be afraid. He’d never had to tell her she was safe. She had simply never believed anything else.

She’d never had cause to believe anything else—and Anton had never given her any.

Until this moment, Kristen thought she’d understood what a luxury that had been.

Before (4.0)

“I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house,” Nadine said to Kristen, when she sat down for her appointment.

“Couldn’t find your fob?” Kristen asked.

“No, I mean I couldn’t get out of the house,” Nadine said. “The house—well, I mean, the condo—wouldn’t let me out. The door wouldn’t open.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. I thought it was stuck, like jammed or something, but it just wouldn’t open.”

Kristen examined Nadine. They were here to talk about her recent tardiness, her distractedness, the fact that she hadn’t delivered on her deliverables, hadn’t actioned her action items. Or something. Sumter thought something was up and had deputized Kristen to deal with it.

“Maybe she’s knocked up,” was Sumter’s contribution to the conversation.

“If she were, it wouldn’t be our business,” Kristen had reminded him. “Legally speaking.”

“Well, yeah, but you’re a girl; you can get it out of her,” Sumter had said.

Kristen had blinked, but otherwise allowed no other reaction to surface on her features or in her affect. “You want me to get her an abortion?”

“Jesus Christ, Kiki, no. Just ask her what the fuck is going on, and then fix it.” And with that he dismissed her from his office.

Now she sat in her own office—or what passed for it. It involved clear sheets of acrylic, and projected light. Today it was a jungle. Softly rustling palm fronds, carefully calibrated to be seizure-proof. It felt intimate. It felt hidden. It felt secure. Kristen liked helping the employees at Wuv to feel safe, in the cocoon that was her space. It helped them to talk more.

“You couldn’t leave the condo,” Kristen said. It helped to repeat things, sometimes. She’d learned that from a succession of psychiatrists. Each of them had their tics and tells, but this was a common technique. When Nadine said nothing, she continued: “What finally made the door open?”

“I had to do the chicken dance. It started playing the song and then I started dancing, and then the door opened. I think maybe some kid in the building hacked the door.”

“Has that happened before?”

Nadine frowned. She was a delicate woman. Coltish. That used to be the word for it. All knees and elbows and knuckles. Once upon a time, she did doll-hairstyling videos online. Then she moved on to tutorials for box braids and locs. Then natural haircare. Her mother started an organic styling line. It folded within three years, and the family went bankrupt. But the uploads were classics in their genre; Nadine was so well recognized that children and their parents followed her sponsored updates and asked for photos and autographs and hugs. She’d had surgery, since then. Few vestiges of her childhood face remained. Even neural networks couldn’t match her old face to her current one. Her plastic surgeon, she claimed, had won some sort of award for his work restructuring her skull.

“It’s something Nigel used to do,” Nadine said, “when we were first dating. He would make up a riddle, and I’d have to solve it before the door to his place would open to let me out. It’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to be for entering a home, but he reconfigured it. It’s really easy; there were tutorials for it. He told the story at our wedding.”

“I see,” Kristen said.

Kristen let Nadine off with a warning. She preferred a gentle approach, at first. She assumed it was part of why Sumter kept her on, even when they disagreed—she could make Wuv’s employees feel the velvet glove long before they ever saw the iron fist. Kristen pretended that the whole meeting was her idea, that Nadine wasn’t at all in trouble, that no one else had noticed anything. It built the narrative of Kristen as a perceptive, thoughtful Chief Emotional Manager, and kept the heat away from Sumter and Mason and the board.

Besides. If she was correct about the scenario Nadine had landed herself in, it would behoove the entire company if Kristen was understanding and supportive. It wouldn’t do for them to be anything else. Not if they wanted to survive a civil suit. The province of Ontario had a fairly clear human rights code. Sumter had complained about it, when she told him that they couldn’t fire someone for alcohol-related dementia once he entered recovery. She suspected this would be a similar issue of accommodation.

Finally, it was time for her to go home. It was well past time by the third tank of pink smoke that Sumter insisted on buying her. It tasted of rosewater and almonds, and melted into icy mist on the tongue. He wiped down the mask himself, before offering it to her, so that the first thing she smelled was his custom strain of sanitizer. They were supposed to be going over the projects she would manage in his absence. They weren’t. They were talking about him. And Nadine.

“Did she tell you anything?” Sumter asked.

Kristen shrugged. “She told me enough. I’m handling it.”

“Whatever that means,” he said, adjusting the flavors on his own tank. “I wish you were coming to Dallas.”

“It’s too hot for me. And they don’t like it when men and women travel together.”

“That’s Kansas,” he said. “And Ohio. I think.”

“I’m not going through US customs with you again, is my point.”

Sumter made a final adjustment on his tank. Then he took a brief inhale and grimaced. He’d gotten rosemary-sumac-spruce. It was a little strong. Too strong for him, anyway.

“We could get married,” Sumter said. “You know. For travel purposes.”

Kristen inhaled. She held the ice in her lungs for as long as possible. She imagined the cold permeating her entire being. She pictured her blood slowing, her organs frosting over in delicate flowers. Sumter had been making more of these attempts lately. That’s what they were, little conversational pen-tests. They felt like nerdy in-jokes about some obscure series that she hadn’t seen yet.

“But then we would have to get divorced,” Kristen said. “And if you think I’m a bitch now…”

He grinned. He took a deep inhale and shook his head. “You wouldn’t divorce me, Kiki. I wouldn’t let you get away.”

Kristen slid off her barstool. “Guess I’d just have to poison you, then.”

Home was Wuv Shack 1.0, a sprawling Parkdale Victorian that was once a nod-off before it became the home of home-improvement stars, who sold it to Sumter’s parents. He kept a print version of his parents’ Toronto Life article about the inevitable renovation in the foyer. He’d since moved into his own space, but kept the place where he’d cofounded the company, and leased out the rooms to new or migratory employees for what he said was a competitive market rate.

Kristen kept a camera-zapper in her room and slept under dazzle-patterned sheets.

In her mail slot, she found a courier’s envelope. Inside was a key fob and a piece of hotel stationery. 48 HOURS, it read.

“Damn it,” Kristen whispered, and hurried outside the building. It was raining now, and she almost slipped on the greasy streets. A jitney came and she didn’t have long to wait; the hotel was a new one, surprisingly close by. She waved her fob at the door and an elevator chimed open for her. When it arrived at the proper floor, the fob flashed a room number at her.

Inside, in the dark, she heard the shower running. She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her dress, found a hanger, and hung it in the hall closet. She threw her underclothes in a drawer in the closet, and crossed into the washroom. He stood under the stream of water, seemingly asleep. Anton was the only man she knew who didn’t have tattoos. It was refreshing. Elegant. Analog. Kristen stepped in behind him and wrapped her arms around him.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“You’re not,” Anton said. “I had them send the fob when I landed.”

She smiled into his skin. He turned around and kissed her. It took a moment; he liked to assess the terrain first. It had been a month since the last time, maybe more, and she watched him take in all the details that might have changed before descending. He held her face in his hands, covering her ears, and for a moment she was not under a stream of water but under waves, far away, in a place that was very dark and very warm. He kept his eyes ever so slightly open when they kissed. It was the only time she enjoyed the sensation of being watched.

When he pulled away, he started pulling her hair out of its tie. “How was your day?”

“Sumter asked me to marry him.”

“Of course he did,” Anton said. “Will you report him to HR?”

“I am HR.”

He pointed upward at some invisible point over her head. “There’s the joke.” He knelt down and started scrubbing her from the toes up. She braced herself on the tile and watched the smart meter on the shower ticking down to the red zone where Anton or his employer would have to start paying extra for hot water.

“Do you think he was serious?”

Kristen looked down at him. He’d set her foot on his knee and was scrubbing in circles up her calf. “Are you jealous?”

He worked his way up to her knee and under her thigh. “Not any more than I should be.”

She tilted her head. “But?”

“But, he seems more aggressive. Lately. To hear you tell it.”

Kristen smiled. “I can handle it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt of that.” Anton put her foot back down on the floor of the shower. “Can I do the next part hands-free?”

She checked the timer. “You better work fast.”

“Well, you know what they say,” he said, pushing her gently against the wall. “You can have it fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.”

She came awake with her throat sore from holding back a scream. Anton had curled around her. He spoke into her neck. “Bad dream?”

She nodded and pulled his arm tighter over her.

“What happened?”

Kristen wiped her eyes. She exhaled a shuddering breath. She refused to speak until her breathing had calmed down. “Something else happened at work. And I guess it dislodged something, sort of. Mentally.”

“Something else Sumter did?”

“No.” She rolled over and spoke to him directly. “Someone at my work is in trouble. I think.”

His focus sharpened. “They’re going to be terminated?”

She shook her head. “No. Not if I can help it, anyway. But it is impacting the quality of her work.”

“Something at home?”

“I think so. But it’s hard to ask. I don’t even know if she thinks it’s a problem. I don’t really know how she feels about it. Maybe she doesn’t know how she feels, either. It might be nothing.”

“What do you think it is?”

Kristen sighed. “Can I see your device? I need to check something on a nonwork machine.”

Anton’s devices were very dumb. They used minimal storage and processing, and didn’t even wear a brand name. That just meant it was probably some special boutique brand that Kristen had never heard of. But, crucially, they had no GPS and were cheap enough to lose. This was what he’d told her when he gave her one of his phones. It was a delightfully retrograde little thing; all it did was take calls and pictures. Even the photos required extra kit to download. It felt like playing with LEGO.

He handed her one and she resolved a relationship with the hotel, and then looked up Nadine and her husband’s condo. She didn’t recall the exact address, but searching “tampon-shaped monstrosity Toronto” actually worked.

“This is where they live. Her husband locked her in today. Yesterday. Whatever. She was late because he locked her in.”

“You know it happened because he locked her in? She wasn’t just late? It wasn’t just an error?”

Kristen made an elaborate shrug. “No, not exactly. But she as much as told me it could have happened.”

“She as much as told you, or she told you?”

“She told me it was something he used to do. When they were dating. Refusing to let her out until she did the thing he wanted. Like a rat in a maze, performing for pellets.”

“So. Marriage.” Anton opened a set of floor plans the building had advertised. “Which one do they live in?”

Kristen peered over his shoulder and fingered the screen. “That one. Based on the photos she’s shared, anyway. I’ve never been there.”

He summoned the floor plan and copied a serial number at the bottom of the screen. He fed the serial number into another tab. A bunch of press releases came up, most of them for gadgeteers, real estate developers, and interior decorators. But the first hit was for the manufacturer of a smart locking system.

The locking system was part of the whole condo’s suite of smart services. It was the big selling point of the building itself: living there was like living in a fairy-tale castle where every piece of the structure was enchanted to serve the needs of its inhabitants. The showers remembered how warm you liked the water, at what intensity, and balanced your usage with that of the other residents. The fridges told you when a neighbor had the buttermilk you needed for that special salad dressing. The windows and lights got information about your alpha patterns and darkened to start sleep cycles on schedule. The smart locking systems recognized residents and their visitors over time, and even introduced them to each other when their profiles matched. Membership in the building came with special pricing from affiliated brands on everything from home goods to auto rental to nannying and tutoring. The more points you accrued, the more rewards you amassed, which could also be applied to the price of maintenance or utilities. And a massive data leakage from the network supplying this building and many others ensured an almost unheard-of interest rate, which tempted buyers who might never have managed, otherwise.

“Oh look, they have a bot,” Anton murmured.

He opened the chat and after the niceties, typed: I THINK MY HUSBAND HAS HACKED THE DOOR.

“No, wait,” Kristen protested. “If you do that, they’ll ask for your location. If you don’t give it, they’ll start pinging the machine. And once they find it, they’ll call the police. The bots have a whole protocol for smart homes, when that happens.”

“Do they?” Anton asked. “How do you know?”

But Kristen had already taken the device out of his hands. She grabbed a pillow and jammed it underneath to protect her skin. It would take a trickier question to get the information she wanted. She started typing: CAN I USE MY SMART LOCKING SYSTEM TO KEEP MY KIDS SAFE?

The bot asked for more information. It was very polite, extra double-plus Canadian, and it wanted to know what she meant. MY CHILD IS A SLEEPWALKER AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE HE STAYS INDOORS AT NIGHT she typed.

The bot informed her that this was a natural concern, and the best mechanism for keeping her kids indoors was to adjust their individual account privileges. The camera in the door would recognize each child, and the door itself would check against the child’s settings. There was a default mode for after-school play, nighttime, mornings, and so on. But the programming itself was fairly granular: you could tune it to certain days (the days you had custody, for example) or get the door to stop admitting certain people (pervy uncles, or your daughter’s creepy ex). All you had to do was change the nature of the invitation.

“Like with vampires,” Anton said.

“You said it,” Kristen said. “I bet he did something really simple, like changing her age on the account. If he made her a minor, she’d lose editorial access to the defaults. She wouldn’t be able to log in and make changes, even if she had the right password. And then he could custom tune it anytime he wanted. In the meantime, she’s solving puzzles and showing up late for work.”

Anton rose and moved to the fridge. “If I mix you something, will you drink it?”

“Can you make that sound less threatening?”

“They have rye and ginger. That’s deeply unthreatening.”

Kristen shook her head. “I don’t want to take the ginger ale if it’s the only option for you.”

Anton waved one hand dismissively. “There’s some kind of green juice that seems intended to make me feel virtuous. I can have that.”

He came back with drinks and settled in behind her. He pulled her hair to one side and pressed his sweating glass against the back of her neck. “What was your dream about?”

She leaned forward. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“It was enough to warrant this little investigation.”

“That wasn’t my dream. It’s just what’s happening to Nadine. Or what I think is happening to Nadine. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He kept the ice off her neck but played with her hair instead. It was a ploy to get her back to sleep, and she knew it. Kristen let him do it anyway. He raked careful fingers from her scalp down to the ends, separating the little snags and catches as he went.

“Why can’t you stop thinking about it?”

Kristen twisted to face him over her shoulder. “I just have a bad feeling about it. And I want to know if I’m right, or if it’s nothing to worry about.”

“And if you are right? What then?”

Kristen frowned. Anton had a way of keeping his face and voice entirely neutral that made her want to fill the silence. There was no judgment, and therefore no warning signal that she should stop. It was hard to know if he was annoyed or bemused at her sudden instinct to chase this down.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We can just go back to sleep. I just woke up with it on my mind.”

“That’s not what’s bothering me.” He nodded in a somewhat easterly direction. “It’ll be dawn soon, anyway.”

“But something is bothering you, though.”

“What’s bothering me is that something’s bothering you, and you’re not telling me what it is.”

Kristen sighed. She turned fully around and folded her legs. “Something did happen to me, a long time ago. A version of this, I guess. But it’s over now. I haven’t thought about it in a long time.”

“But this situation reminds you of it.”

She nodded. “And I guess it’s getting to me.”

He burrowed a bit deeper into the pillows and stretched his legs out so they hemmed her in. “How long ago was a long time ago?”

“Years ago.”

Anton didn’t answer. His head lolled on the pillows. He held her gaze just long enough to make things uncomfortable. In their encounters, she had never known him to be violent, or even very angry. He expressed displeasure and annoyance, but never fury. But this moment felt different: his total lack of affect made it seem like he was hiding something.

“I can see why this would be difficult for you,” he said. “If it reminds you of what happened to your parents.”

His answer threw Kristen off her game. Usually she knew the moment someone was about to bring up her parents, or the fire. There were a hundred little tells that announced clearly when another person was about to bring up something delicate. It was as though they had to physically perform the appearance of sympathy before the emotion would arise in them naturally. But Anton had none of that hesitation or reticence. He was just … himself. It was unnerving. And alarmingly attractive.

“Is it too much to talk about?” he asked. “Because we can stop.”

“No, I just thought you wanted to keep things…” She struggled with the proper wording. “I barely know anything about you. I don’t know who your clients are. I don’t know who else you sleep with. For all I know you’re married, with a whole family waiting at home for you. Wherever that is. I don’t even know where you live, or what passports you fly with. And you’re the one who wanted it that way. You said it would help avoid complications. I thought you didn’t want to know anything … personal. So why do you want to know about this?”

Anton sipped his drink. The clink of the ice and the movement of his throat were audible in the perfect early morning silence of the hotel room. Kristen heard no showers running, no toilets flushing, no anxious footsteps on other floors. For a single moment she wondered if he’d taken control of the whole floor, the whole building, the whole street. She didn’t know exactly who paid for the trips, but they clearly had the money to throw around. She knew his work was probably just as mundane and even boring as he described it, but at times like this she wondered.

“I just want to know if you’re okay,” Anton said finally. “I know you’re very brave, and very tough, but what happened to you back then was awful. And I know that because I looked it up, about two minutes after I left that room at Qureshi’s.”

Kristen blinked. “I didn’t know that you were curious about it. I would have told you more, if you had asked.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to relive it, just for me. Not when it’s a matter of public record.” He sighed. “You work for an affective computing startup. You keynote on the body’s living memory of trauma. Your parents died in a fire. The fire happened because their smart home system was faulty. And now your coworker, who you feel responsible for, is being victimized by a similar system. And you’re waking up screaming.”

He leaned forward and encircled one of her ankles in his fingers. “So yes, I want to know if you’re okay. If that’s okay with you?”

She looked at the device. The bot was going to log out. For the moment, she had what she needed. She could always do more research later. And Nadine might have more to say, if she gave it some more time. Kristen knew she was focusing on these things in order to avoid the conversation, but couldn’t stop herself. She had a script for talking about the fire. It was a narrative that had followed her since she was sixteen years old, and she had spent those years shaping it and sculpting it to a fine smooth point that slid easily away from any attempts at intimacy.

Kristen turned back to Anton. “I guess I’m just not used to people being perceptive,” she said. “The people I spend the most time with usually just try to find a hack around that.”

“Well, they are literally trying to create an algorithm that turns emotion into currency. It’s no surprise they want to automate emotional literacy. But you’re still not answering the question.”

Kristen pursed her lips. “It’s hard for me to talk about,” she said after a pause. “Not just to talk about the fire, but because this is Ontario and nobody talks about feelings here; they just repress everything. There’s a whole genre of literature devoted to the phenomenon.”

“You people are more English than the English, it’s true.”

She laughed. He tugged her ankle, and she crawled up to meet him. He still smelled absurdly good, no matter what ersatz hotel body wash he’d just used. “Sometimes it feels like it happened to a different person,” she said.

“It did happen to a different person,” he said. “You’re a different person now than you were then.”

“How do you know? Maybe I was precocious then and I’ve just slowly been catching up to myself all this time. Maybe I’m not that different at all. Maybe I stopped growing after that moment, and I’ve just convinced everybody that I’m really an adult.”

He chuckled. “All adults feel that way.” He kissed the top of her head. “Is there anything you want to know about me?”

There were a thousand things. But she had to start small. “Cats or dogs?”

He grinned. “Cats. Always. I had one, in Turkey, for a while. Actually I had a whole alley full of them. But so does everyone who lives there. It should be part of the national anthem.”

“House or condo?”

“Condo. But I rent it out. I haven’t lived in it for a long time.”

“Too small?”

He flipped her palm open and kissed the center of it. “Too big.”

“You like living out of a carry-on.”

“Very much. It’s forced me to become ruthlessly organized.”

“Are you secretly a professional killer?”

He laughed so loud it echoed. “No. Would it bother you if I were?”

“Not really. Do I snore?”

He made a sound that indicated he was considering carefully how truthful to be. “Sometimes.”

“Do you pray while I’m still asleep?”

Now he looked more fond. “Sometimes.”

“Am I snoring while that happens? Because that seems really rude. Profane, I mean. I feel like I must be desecrating the entire process somehow, just lying there.”

“I do it in a different room.”

She was working up to the bigger questions now. “Do you ever find the scars distracting?”

Anton snorted. “Of course not.” When Kristen said nothing, he tipped her chin up so she could face him. “Look at me. Of course not. You think I haven’t seen worse? I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been places where this,” he gestured along the length of her, “is nothing. Where people would be lucky to look like this, because then they’d still be alive.”

She wriggled out of his grasp. “I’m sorry—”

“No. Don’t apologize. But don’t ever ask me that again. Ever. It insults me. As a person.”

Kristen had never made someone angry at her for this specific reason before. Which was really saying something, given her talents. It didn’t feel as pleasant as it usually did. It didn’t feel like winning.

Hours later, Kristen had to stop by the Wuv Shack 1.0 for fresh clothes. By the time she arrived the house was still mostly asleep. Aside from Nadine, who was in the kitchen making coffee. She looked like she’d been crying. Kristen decided then and there to give Nadine the day off. The woman was in no shape to work. Sumter was gone. Fawn had another appointment. Even Sheila was on vacation. That left Kristen in charge of the day-to-day while Mason papered the walls of his glass cube in sticky notes.

“Didn’t feel like going home?” Kristen asked.

Nadine didn’t answer. She just poured another coffee and slid it in Kristen’s direction. “I didn’t know where else to go. Lucky there was a couch open.”

Kristen felt a momentary pang that she hadn’t been paying attention; she could have let Nadine into her room and given her more than a sofa to sleep on. On the other hand, maybe a night exiled from her own home would loosen Nadine’s lips a little. She already looked brittle. Ready to crack.

“Have you talked to Nigel about it?”

Nadine made a gesture that indicated a species of futility. “He’s up north, scouting an abandoned diamond mine. The signal’s terrible.”

Kristen had her doubts about that. One of the first things any real resource extraction firm did up north was build good, fast networks and extend them to the neighboring towns and reserves. It was a make-good for all the other damage. And the terms of the deal usually indemnified the firm against future lawsuits about leaks or cancer or water that caught fire on its way out of the tap. That made it a priority.

“When does he get back?”

“Tomorrow. Maybe. There’s no pilot, though, so sometimes the flight path changes. He said the autonomous flights are more like a standby, and it might take a while, so he’d get his own ride home.”

Kristen filed away the information to a safe corner of her mind. Then she took stock of Nadine’s appearance. Kristen had a sneaking suspicion that Nadine had looked up this particular problem, and the men commonly attached to it. Her eyes were a sleepless red, the kind of red that meant long nights questioning certain choices, wondering if your mom or sister or best friend or old roommate or faithful bartender had been right this whole time. It was time to tell her a story that would make her feel better, Kristen decided. Time to share some emotional currency of her own.

“I had a problem like that once. With a door, I mean.”

Nadine’s gaze darted up at Kristen mid-sip. She looked afraid to even hope that someone else might get it. She gulped audibly.

“What happened?” Nadine asked.

“Well, it was funny at first,” Kristen said. “I was young, you know, so I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that it was actually happening. When you trust someone, or even if you just admire them, you don’t want to think ill of them, right? You want to believe the world works the way you think it works. You want to believe that there are rules. Standards.”

Nadine nodded empathically. Kristen smiled softly. She didn’t tell this story very often. The man it involved had a whole “ethics in artificial intelligence” foundational grant in his name at the university now, and Kristen had no desire to cut the students who’d won it out of their best possible search results. It would be like the MIT Media Lab all over again.

“But I started noticing that every time I changed my clothes, I couldn’t leave the room. The door would stick. Unless I got completely naked and started from nothing. I think the guy I was living with at the time had rigged up a recognition algorithm to lock the door unless it saw a totally naked body. He specialized in image recognition algorithms, you see. And he had a bunch of training data from the Department of Homeland Security, from the porno-scanners. He kept it all in the shed, actually—he’d made the whole thing into a Faraday cage so he could comply with IRB research standards. So he could optimize the cameras in the house to search specific bodily ratios, like phrenology for perverts. He wasn’t the best at getting girls naked, so he had to program the house to do it for him.”

Nadine’s eyes were wide. “He was recording you.”

Kristen shrugged. “Probably. But I could never prove it. And even if I could have proved it, it wouldn’t have helped.” Kristen offered a tiny smile. “He was my professor. Well, not my professor, not a direct report or anything. But he was the dean of the computer science department. So if I had said anything, well…”

Nadine’s eyes were saucers. “And you were living with him?”

“His wife was on sabbatical in Denmark. And my roommate was having issues with her boyfriend. So when he caught me taking a nap in the office, he said I should come and stay for a week or two. He had this big place out in the Annex with an apartment in the basement, and no one was using it, so I should come and stay in it. I’d be doing him a favor, he said, making it look lived-in. All I had to do was shovel the sidewalk and make sure the shed was locked up at night, stuff like that. He told me he did it for students all the time, whether they were in the department or not. And he was on this big mental health kick—a lot of students were killing themselves that winter. So of course he insisted on rescuing me, right? It was right near the subway. I told myself I could leave at any time.”

“Did you confront him? Did you look for the recordings online?”

“Oh, yeah. That was my first step. Obviously.” Kristen sipped more of her coffee. “I set up an image alert, the whole bit. That was when you had to pay for it. For the good ones. It sucked. They wouldn’t take Canadian, they wanted me to pay in this currency no one was using; they were probably like thirteen years old.”

“Gross.” Nadine wrinkled her nose and sipped the last of her coffee delicately. Already she seemed more like herself, in a way that made Kristen feel somewhat proud. Hearing about someone else’s scandal always had the power of making one’s own drama seem tame by comparison. That was why no one wanted women to admit to them. They might discover how commonplace, how utterly predictable, how truly banal the evil moments in their lives were. “So what happened?”

Kristen smiled fondly. She felt momentarily sad that she wasn’t telling this same story to Anton. It was one of her favorites. She poured more coffee for herself and Nadine. “I played a prank on him, so he figured out that I knew what he was doing.”

Nadine beamed. “What, like you wrote FUCK YOU on your tits and made sure he saw?”

Kristen laughed louder than the joke truly merited. She watched disbelief and mild discomfort flit over Nadine’s features—Nadine wasn’t used to hearing the Chief Emotional Officer having actual emotions. “That would have been fantastic! I should have done that first!” Kristen reached over and squeezed Nadine’s hand. “Now, I have to go up and change, but why don’t you come with me? You can take my room. I’ll be gone all night.”

That night, Anton returned to the hotel smelling vaguely of cigars. He was in the shower a long time, and returned to find her on his device. She continued scrolling through reviews. A lot of them were about whether the rider could stretch out in the vehicle, and how comfortable the seats were, and how the shocks held, and which repeat movements triggered the vehicle into spontaneously opening all its windows.

“Which is the fancy ride service they send when they want to impress you?” she asked.

“When they want to impress me, they pick me up themselves. Humans are expensive.” He slid between the sheets and rested his chin where her neck met her shoulder. He’d shaved, which was an indication of his plans for the remainder of the evening. “Are you no longer cross with me?”

“I was never cross with you.”

“Kristen.”

“You were the one who was cross with me. You’re the one who said I insulted you.”

“Mara.”

She sighed. When one of them used the other’s real name, they had to listen. Kristen couldn’t recall when this became their rule, or even if it was a rule, and not just a habit. Somehow the idea that they had simply and silently fallen into step with each other felt weightier than a hard-and-fast rule. She put down the device and twisted around to face him.

“What’s happening?” he asked. “Why are you being like this?”

“I’m not being like anything. This is how I am. I’m … prickly. Difficult. Paranoid. Skeptical. Mason says I can’t be called a cunt, because that implies both depth and warmth.”

“Well, Mason doesn’t know what he’s missing there.” Anton smirked. “It’s so hard for you to believe I want to be here?”

Kristen nodded.

“Because of, what, past relationships? Things people said about you online?”

Those things weren’t the entire story, but they were definitely part of it. “My relationships haven’t gone well. And I did use to be a lot prettier. My parents’ followers made sure I knew that.”

Anton made a sound in his throat that corresponded to annoyance and disregard in other languages. “Give me that.”

Kristen handed him the device. He called up something he’d obviously favorited. He flipped the screen around to face her. “This you?”

It was. It was her school picture from the year of the fire. It was among the last photos taken of her beforehand. Most of her other photos had been made private. The majority of available images resembling her were composites from fans, now, based on existing video. A lot of different versions of her sixteen-year-old self had fucked a lot of different versions of much bigger celebrities, literally and figuratively. If she’d gotten her licensing rights in order, she wouldn’t have to work at all.

“That’s me.”

“Well, I refuse to believe that you were prettier then. For one, this is an image of a child. For two, your hair was atrocious.”

Kristen’s mouth fell open. “Pardon me?”

“You heard me. It’s heinous. A crime against humanity. Whoever gave you those bangs belongs in The Hague.”

Kristen dove for the edge of the bed. “Where are my shoes? I need my shoes.”

“You’re leaving?”

“No, I’m throwing them at you!”

He cackled. Then he slid an arm around her middle and hauled her up over him. He held her there. Ran his fingers up and down the scar tissue. Some parts were thicker than others. She was both rough and polished, natural and treated, like her mother’s gem collection. Then he sank one hand in her hair. He let it slip between his fingers. It was too fine, too delicate, to hold much of a grip.

“My mom cut my bangs. She did a livestream of it. She took suggestions. Everyone in my class watched. Mom gave me a cut of the tips.”

A ferocious sadness moved under the surface of her lover’s features. He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there a long time. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something. Kristen caught herself holding her breath.

“It never stops,” he said finally. “The grief. It’s loud, or it’s quiet, but it’s never silent. And there’s been only one other person in my life who understands that. Who didn’t try to cover it up or make it go away. And I didn’t…” He took a deep, steadying breath. “I didn’t expect how valuable that would become to me. I didn’t know how much I needed it. Until now.”

Now Kristen flipped his palm over. There was a tiny scar in the center, in the place where he so often kissed her. “I’m glad you had your dad then, even if it did take him a while to show up.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean him.” His voice was ice. He swallowed. “I meant my wife.”

Adrenaline turned Kristen’s stomach over. This whole time, she’d been right. It should have felt more validating. More triumphant. She’d guessed correctly. She’d prepared herself. Her self-respect didn’t have to suffer. Much.

“I thought you must be married.” She ran her fingers over the place where his ring wasn’t.

“I was.” He laced their fingers. “When I was much younger. She died.”

Kristen pulled his knuckles to her lips. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I can’t,” he said tonelessly.

She laid her head on his chest. “Well, when you can, I’ll listen. If you want.”

“I do. I will. Someday.” He smoothed her hair back. “Tell me why you’re asking about a ride. What are you looking for, exactly?”

It was a hell of a gear-shift, but Kristen didn’t comment on it. “Something secure. Discreet.”

“Discreet like paying cash for a car made before this century, or discreet like they don’t sell user data to law enforcement?”

“The latter. I don’t want it to look sketchy. And I don’t want a driver.”

“Is this for a client?”

“No. Just someone I want to impress.”

“Will you be waiting for them, when the door opens? Because I’d find that very impressive.”

Kristen paused. She had not considered this as a possibility. It would be immensely satisfying to do it that way, but also probably very messy and dramatic and exhausting, and it would really ruin things with Nadine at Wuv. And they were already so far behind on the new marketing plan.

“That’s a thought. But no. Sumter is away and I have to hold down the fort.”

He started kissing down her shoulder. He was the first man she’d been entirely naked in front of in a long time. Her history had less to do with any anxiety about the appearance of the scars than it did the way telling their story tended to derail an encounter. It made all sex seem like pity sex, because they pitied her. She’d had the best doctors available at SickKids Hospital. They had done the best they could with what they had. And her care team had continued to do so: gene therapy, immunotherapy, physical therapy, regular therapy.

Anton was right: Kristen was extraordinarily privileged. Born elsewhere, or in a different time, she would have died of her injuries immediately, or succumbed to a minor infection soon afterward.

In the burn ward the nurses had said that pain was a sign of healing, that pain was a gift, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time. But sometimes when her nerves acted up his kisses still felt muffled by her skin, somehow, as though he were kissing her through a mask. As though there were some part of her that he would never see. Only now, she could take comfort in the fact that there was a part of himself he’d hidden, too. With the ghost of a beloved young wife between them, Kristen no longer had to worry about success or failure in the relationship. Success—and she had only begun to contemplate what such a thing might entail—was simply impossible.

“Do I want to know more about this little project of yours?”

“Probably not.”

He propped his head on his hand. “Does it have to do with your coworker? The one having problems at home?”

“Possibly.”

“And your plan is to, what, teach him a lesson about the dangers of automation?”

Kristen pursed her lips. “I just want him to value his wife a little more, is all. And she’s too nice to ask for more.”

He used his other hand to trace her collarbones. “Would you like any help?”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Why would you be interested in helping me? You don’t know these people.”

“Because I think it will be good for you to do this, and I like doing things that are good for you.” He said it so gently she strained to hear. But when his eyes met hers, she felt a weight settle over her that was warm and solid and comforting. “And seeing as how you’ve already used my gear for the search, it seems I’m already involved.”

He had a point. “There is that.”

“Let me help you. I’m out of here tomorrow anyway. And this man, whoever he is, isn’t connected to me in any obvious way. But you are.”

She grinned. “Crisscross?”

He rolled over her and buried his face in her neck. “You’re my fucking favorite,” he muttered.

Anton left the next day. But he extended the hotel reservation a little longer, so Kristen could stay there while Nadine stayed in her room. “It gets me into preferred customer status,” he said, when Kristen protested. “I’ll just use the points on my next visit.”

Kristen held herself back from asking when that would be. It would ruin the surprise. It was also disgracefully needy, in her opinion. It was enough to emerge from a midweek holiday pleasantly sore and well-breakfasted. Her schedule couldn’t really accommodate the type of capital-R Relationship that led to arrangements like Nadine’s. Thank God.

Nadine herself was gone from work for three more days. There was the day she took off at Kristen’s behest, and then the other two days were spent searching for Nigel. Nigel, it seemed, had gotten into a car that flashed his incredibly common Toronto name at the taxi stand at Pearson. But it clearly wasn’t meant for him: it drove him not to his tampon-shaped condo tower downtown, but to an old cobalt mine near Temagami, Ontario.

IT CRASHED, Nadine’s texts read. IT DROVE RIGHT INTO THE PIT.

Kristen expressed surprise. The company sent flowers. But Nigel would be fine. He would just need some traction and some injectables for a while. And of course he’d be stuck at home. Alone. For hours. Waiting for Nadine to come home. Dependent on her for everything.

Apparently there was another Nigel in Toronto with the same name, who also had a returning flight. He had posted online about using the very same car service, and about his flight and how much he was looking forward to coming home. The service, Nadine said, must have associated the information and then sent a car as a free gift. At least, that was what the police had said must have happened. The car’s records were scrubbed every twenty-four hours, and it had taken him so long to be found. For whatever reason, the car was functioning in Safe Mode, the sort developed for use during possible terror attacks, and it actively jammed outgoing and incoming signals. Even when Nigel could finally call for help, he couldn’t identify the model of the car or the license plate number. He was just trapped in there, not knowing what was happening or how to escape.

“It sounds devastating,” Kristen said.

“It was,” Nadine agreed, once she returned to work. “He’s terrified. Says he can’t go back to another mine again. I can’t leave any lights off. He was in perfect darkness, for hours and hours.”

The next week, Nadine cornered her. She waited until most of the others were out at the ramen truck from North York that only appeared at their location once a month. She looked around before speaking, and when she did, her voice was hesitant. “I’ve been thinking about your stalker,” she said.

Kristen frowned. “My stalker?”

“The guy who filmed you.”

“Oh, him,” Kristen said. “What do you want to know?”

Nadine pulled up one of chairs that seemed to migrate around the office. They moved in flows of black and gray, like murmurations of mesh. “Well, if you don’t mind my asking…” Again, she looked around at the rest of the office. Seemingly assured of its emptiness, she asked: “What happened, when he found out that you’d found out?”

“When he knew that I knew?”

Nadine nodded emphatically. “What did he do? Did he retaliate?”

Under her desk, Kristen pulled down her skirt before it rode up far enough to expose her scars. In the cold weather they turned purple. When she undressed, she looked bruised. Vulnerable. She wondered if that was what Anton saw, when she had her nightmares. A bruise. A wound. A woman who would never heal. Not fully. Not completely.

Perhaps in some other universe, the fire had never happened, or she had never run inside, screaming for her mother. She thought about that other version of herself sometimes, the one without the scars, and considered what would have happened if that Kristen had made different choices. Perhaps that Kristen had never gone to a school with a rash of suicides. Perhaps that Kristen had never taken a nap on the sofa in front of the dean’s office. Perhaps that Kristen had never gone to his big house in the Annex. Perhaps that Kristen didn’t spend a spare winter afternoon sealing the shed “against mice,” making it as airtight as possible. Perhaps that Kristen hadn’t realized that the dean of the computer science department really was stupid enough to keep his door-locking PIN the same four digits as his vehicle-locking PIN, so she could adjust his garage settings and get the car to remind him to park it inside while his wife was gone.

“No. Not really. I think he was too embarrassed to retaliate.”

“So he’s not a problem any longer?”

“He’s really not,” Kristen said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

She could almost hear the other woman screwing up the courage for vulnerability. “Because you can tell me, if—”

Kristen laughed. Outside, it was snowing. Just a few tiny flakes under a leaden sky. “It’s sweet of you to be so concerned, Nadine. But please don’t worry. He’s dead.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“It’s okay,” Sumter is saying. He’s petting her hair. “Kiki. Honey. Baby. Sweetheart. Don’t cry. It’s okay. I promise you, it’ll be okay. I mean it. We’re getting out of here.”

Kristen can’t even find her voice. She just nods. He makes a pleased sound and picks up her nerveless hands. He drapes them around his neck. He pulls her closer. When he speaks, he sounds like he’s rehearsed this moment for days. Weeks. Months.

Quite possibly since high school.

“Do I have to explain this to you?”

Wearily, she shakes her head across his chest.

“That’s my girl. Never have to tell you anything.” He pulls her hands down and steps away a little. He looks at once unfathomably delighted and more exhausted than she’s ever seen him. “I will, though,” he says, drumming his fingers on her wrists. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon. I just need time.”

“Me too.” Her voice is a squeak.

“Right. Of course. Whatever you need.” He lifts his brows. “Our secret?”

“Our secret.”

He winks, squeezes her hands, and leaves. He says something about her having a moment. Something about her parents. Her history.

On the floor, Nora Mae is kneeling, picking up shards of glass piece by piece. She gives Kristen a very hard look. The other woman looks genuinely angry at her. And possibly even alarmed for her. It’s sweet. It’s nice. Kristen wishes they’d connected more in Toronto. Why hadn’t they? Possibly because she was busy taking care of Sumter. Maybe it’s all been leading here, to this moment. From that initial face-to-face interview in the tent made out of sheets to this huge black box of a house, impenetrable and unknowable as a competitor’s algorithm, a puzzle box they can’t open.

Maybe this is where it was going all along.

There’s a not inconsiderable part of Kristen that feels relief. It’s happened. It’s happening. Whatever is about to unfold is already unfolding. The domino has already fallen. The die is already cast.

She and Sumter will eventually have to talk about it—this thing between them.

Soon.

Kristen holds up a single hand, palm out. She tucks her thumb into her palm and then slowly, deliberately, closes her fingers over her thumb three times—the silent Signal for Help. Nora Mae frowns, then her eyes widen. She gets up off the floor. Kristen meets her in the kitchen.

“Mason, do you need fresh ice for your drink?”

Mason looks profoundly confused by the offer. “Sure? I guess?”

“Okay, just hand me the ice bucket over there.”

The others pass her the bucket. She smiles pleasantly and goes to the freezer. They’ve taped the lock so it doesn’t seal completely. She hauls out a huge brick of ice and plunks it inside. Then she hand-delivers the bucket to Mason. He’s sitting down; she holds it at his eye level. At first he doesn’t look. His eyes don’t raise until she rolls her fingernails across the gleaming surface. With her middle finger, she taps the place where the ice pick clings to the surface. Now Mason glances up at her.

“Take it,” she tells him. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” He takes it from her hands. A moment later Mason’s digging noisily in the bucket with the tongs. He deposits ice in his glass and gives himself a long pour. She wonders if giving him the right idea was in itself the right idea—so to speak.

“I don’t think Jong-soo would do anything to hurt us,” Kristen says.

“It’s not strictly speaking impossible, though.” Sumter throws himself into a chair opposite Mason. He seems to have forgotten Kristen’s coffee entirely, much like how he forgot she doesn’t take creamer—especially the powdered kind, which tastes like the hospital. “We all know he’s had some issues.”

“No, we don’t.” Nora Mae wipes her hands on a tea towel. “What are you talking about?”

“It was years ago. When he was just starting out. It was totally normal stuff; he had to do the whole mandatory service thing, and you know how soldiers are.”

“Excuse me?” Pearce asks. “You wanna try that again? Boss?”

Sumter pinks up. “He saw stuff! Bad stuff! Stuff that would make any one of us want to … engage in a little experimental self-harm. He told me about it, when…” He seems to have run out of air, quite suddenly. “When Sheila died. Killed herself. Christ.” He shades his eyes with one hand. “He said I shouldn’t blame myself. That none of us should blame ourselves. Some guy in his unit did the same thing, and so he had to take a whole class about it. He said it helped. He was getting help. That’s the whole reason he wanted to work with us.”

Kristen wants to say that doing the work and getting help had in fact helped Jong-soo a great deal. That he had found the right treatment and pursued it. He is a fully self-actualized independent human being with his own free will, if the tally in the pantry is any indication. He’s done a lot of growth, and has a lot to be proud of. But telling them that will also be giving him away. And she wants to give him as long a head start as she can.

“We don’t even know if he had a thing for Fawn,” Jasper points out.

“He did.” Mason is still staring at the ice bucket. “Does.”

“How do you know?” Sumter asks.

“Because she told me,” Mason says. “And that’s where I’m leaving it. Knowing how he felt—feels—about Fawn isn’t going to help us find her—them—any faster.”

Brock smiles sleazily. “Well, I mean, if he had, let’s say, an ulterior motive—”

“He didn’t. He wasn’t like that. He was just a garden-variety veteran with garden-variety PTSD featuring garden-variety depressive episodes. And even if he weren’t, it still wouldn’t make a difference. The two of them—he—would still be gone, and we would still have looked everywhere and not found them.”

“But we haven’t looked everywhere.”

Everyone turns to look at Kristen. She stands up, and starts crossing the room. Her strides grow quicker the farther she goes. “We haven’t looked everywhere! We didn’t check the elevator!”

“I need a fucking crowbar.”

Pearce is red in the face. He’s sweating. Jasper is the same. They keep trying to pry the door. It won’t budge. The others are hanging close behind: Sumter chewing what remains of his cuticles, Mason white-faced and grim, Brock pressing himself against the opposite wall. Nora Mae is holding Kristen’s hand.

“Are we sure that the controls don’t work?”

“I tried the first day.” Sumter presses the black rectangle with his whole hand. Nothing happens. “But be my guest.”

“Maybe it’s voice activated,” Jasper says.

Brock calls out: “SUDO get me an elevator!”

Kristen speaks up. “Brock, you’re not helping. We need to be focused, and we need to figure out how to open the elevator doors.”

Brock points directly at her. “You’re so lucky he wants to fuck you. It’s the only reason a total cunt like you even has this job.”

“Hey!” Sumter steps in front of Kristen. “Apologize. Right now. Kristen’s the only reason you’re even in this house.”

Brock rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, is her snatch made of solid gold, Sumter?”

Sumter’s fist shoots out like it’s punctuating something. Brock drops to the floor. It happens so fast it feels like watching a magic trick. “Don’t get up,” he says, but Brock isn’t listening.

Instead, Brock peers up at him and grins through bloody teeth. He rolls back onto his heels and squints at Sumter for a second. Then he launches himself straight at Sumter’s knees. Sumter gives a little yelp, a “Hey!” as though Brock has broken some unspoken rule, and then he’s on the floor, and Brock is doing his level best to beat the shit out of him.

Suddenly everything that Kristen knows about Brock rises to the surface of her mind, all at once: he went to Waterloo, but before that he was up in Timmins, in an off-grid house that Kristen’s dad would have envied. He had a paid mailing list or something for updates about the building of the house. Brock previously had his own gaming channel, but it lay fallow while he put everything into his video channel, which was just micro-clips of him chopping wood in all seasons. Disappointed but hungry wives across the globe sent him presents and money just to hear him thank them personally on camera.

Brock’s fist lands on Sumter’s face and Kristen sees years of that careful practice, optimized for likes and clicks and sponsorship. The sound of it, skin on skin, sounds like they’re jerking off. What was it that Harold Innis had said, about the Canadian resource economy? Hewers of wood and drawers of water. It was from the Bible, apparently. It was the answer to a question on various advanced placement tests, and quite possibly the citizenship exam. Kristen thinks of it as the sound of connecting flesh grows softer and wetter.

“Get the fuck off of him!”

Mason grabs for Brock’s shoulders, but Brock rolls him away like he’s a dog shaking off a tick. Then Pearce and Jasper do a little rich-guys-standing-outside-the-club-secretly-hoping-for-shit-to-go-south nod to each other, and one gets an arm around his neck and the other gets an arm around his waist, and together they peel Brock off Sumter. He stumbles back into a standing position and their hands come off him.

“You son of a bitch!”

Mason, who always has to have the last word, is somehow still spoiling for a fight, and he goes to slam Brock’s body against the steel doors.

But a funny thing happens, instead.

The doors open.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The elevator arrives with a pleasant little chime, a delightfully warm and old-fashioned sound, and for a moment Kristen expects the doors to roll back and expose wrought iron, or gilt, or some other Art Deco concession to analog good taste. But it’s just a simple mirrored box. They can see Brock’s terror reflected back on itself as he stumbles, arms pinwheeling, and knocks his head on the handrail. They watch three versions of his eyes go blank as he sinks to the floor. And in the end they see only one of him, a shrinking sliver, as the doors close again, and the machine heads back down.

“What did you do?” Sumter asks.

Mason does a double take. “Pardon me?”

“What did you do? How did you do that?”

For a person who has always cultivated an air of mild disappointment in Sumter, Mason is apparently still capable of experiencing betrayal. It writes itself across his face in sudden, sharp angles, like brutalist architecture.

“Me?” He points to himself. “I didn’t do anything! I was trying to get him away from you!”

“You threw him into the elevator!”

“It just opened! I didn’t do anything!”

Sumter whirls. “You all saw it, right? You saw him throw Brock into the elevator.”

As one, they all take a step back. They all make the same vaguely embarrassed face they usually make when Sumter and Mason are fighting. Kristen herself finds the fight oddly comforting. It’s so refreshingly normal and familiar. She could almost imagine they were back in the office.

“Well? Am I wrong? Did Mason not throw Brock into the elevator?”

They say nothing. When it becomes obvious that none of them will rise to the bait, Mason sighs. “This is so fucking typical of you. You’re so fucking ungrateful. I don’t even know why I’m surprised. I should have let him beat the shit out of you.”

“Our friend is down there—”

“Your friend. You wanted to hire him. I didn’t.”

“Oh, well, it’s a fine time to mention that now, now that he’s—”

Sumter cuts himself off, but Mason’s gaze sharpens, and the hairs on Kristen’s arms go up. Something inside her pricks up its ears and tells her to listen closely.

“Now that he’s what, Sumter? Say it. Go on. You’re a big boy. Say it.” He gets very close to Sumter. Too close. “You know he’s dead. Go ahead. Say the words. Tell us what the fuck is happening down there.”

Sumter swallows. “I don’t know—”

“Did you do this to us on purpose?”

Sumter scowls. “Seriously? You’re asking me that?”

“Why not?” Mason gestures at the rest of them, huddled against the wall, pressing themselves as far as they can away from the capricious elevator doors. “Everyone’s thinking it. Isn’t that true? That’s what you told me Kiki said. They all think this is some weird team-building activity. The ultimate escape room. That’s what they think is going on here. So say it. Tell them they’re wrong.”

“Shut. Up.”

Sumter emphasizes the periods at the end of each word with a little push to Mason’s shoulders. Sumter has some muscle on him, but Mason barely moves. It’s like they’ve done this so often he knows exactly how to lean into the pressure. Did they fight like this, as boys? Is that where this is coming from?

“Make me, fucker.”

Sumter’s hands are still up. Open. Conciliatory. Firm. “Mace, you need to cool out—”

Mason bats both of Sumter’s hands away and forces him up against the wall again. He jabs his finger into Sumter’s chest. “Do not tell me to cool out! Fawn is dead! Our baby is dead! This is not what you promised—”

They all barely have time to register what Mason is revealing to them; though some of them, aside from Kristen, had surely begun to suspect a more personal relationship.

And then the house goes dark.

It isn’t gradual; they are not at an opera house, slowly dimming like the flickering neurons of its patrons as they lumber to their seats. It’s instant. A darkness that falls faster than propofol. All light dies. The lamps, the devices, and the windows. The glass walls—and Kristen is beginning to see the enormity of how fucked they are now, the sheer scale of the apparatus arrayed against them—have reversed their pigmentation. The impenetrable blackness of the glass now refracts inward. They are visible to the outside, but no light from the beach reaches inside. They are the process that happens inside the black box. They are the arcane algorithms making inscrutable decisions in the dark.

It knows.

The realization settles on her like sidewalk sweat drying under icy retail air-conditioning. The thought drips down her back and between her tits and under her hair. The house knows. It knows how they feel. It knows when they’re afraid. It knows when they’re angry. It knows who they are. It knows, and it judges.

Vaguely, she’s aware of screaming. And a hand closing around hers, pulling her away. But then the lights come up. And Mason has the ice pick, and he has it raised to Sumter’s chest. Exposed, the blood drains from his face. The ice pick falls to the floor. Mason bolts for the door. Naturally, the house lets him escape.

“Goddamn it,” Sumter mutters, and takes off after Mason. Sumter is barefoot. Mason isn’t. Jasper and Pearce pause to get their shoes on, but Kristen is already tugging Nora Mae out the door. Pearce has his shoes on first, and Kristen just manages to prop the door with her own foot.

“Come on,” Kristen urges.

Nora Mae yanks her hand back. “No way. We have no idea what’s out there. All we know is it got Hari and Fawn.”

Jasper flies through the opening. The door begins to chime. Loudly. It begins to feel heavier, too.

“Nora Mae, if we don’t leave now, we are never getting out. You have to trust me.”

“Why should I trust you? You used me like a lab rat in the kitchen! And you’re in love with the guy who put us here in the first place!”

“No, I’m not!”

But she can tell that Nora Mae doesn’t believe her. Her arms are folded. Her eyes are placid. She looks as though she is genuinely savoring the prospect of time to herself, alone in the black glass house.

“Okay.” Kristen pushes all her weight against the door. “But prop the door, in case you change your mind. Please. Then I’ll go.”

Sighing heavily, Nora Mae takes her sweet time dragging over a massive lump of sculpture. Kristen can’t even begin to imagine what it’s meant to represent. Accelerationism, probably. The Rapture of the Nerds. Whatever it is, it looks like shit.

“Happy?”

“Sure.” Kristen lets the door close on the sculpture. Then, belatedly, she stretches her arm through the door. “Nice working with you. Wish we could do it again.”

Nora Mae stares at her hand. She doesn’t so much shake it as grasp it briefly. It’s a strong, dry grip, with skin as smooth as the sculpture at their feet. “Good luck. I think.”

“You, too.”

Before (5.0)

“Roll over,” Anton said, when the ping came.

“There’s a whole ceiling up there, you know,” Kristen muttered into the pillow. She rolled over anyway.

“Your back happens to be exactly the perfect size for reading my messages in my favorite font,” he said, scrolling up and down her spine with random, barely there flicks of his middle two fingers.

“But the ceiling is smoother. The ceiling doesn’t have scars, and we’re in earthquake country.”

Anton said nothing, merely slid her hair away from the back of her neck and kept reading. Kristen felt herself beginning to drop off. She would change her own bedding arrangement after this trip. She could sell the bedframe and pick up a smart futon like this one. The bedframe’s storage space had become a catchall for clutter, anyway. Moreover, she doubted the frame would put up with her and Antony’s shenanigans. He’d already proved himself quite fond of the futon. It seemed to know exactly when and where to provide more or less bounce.

“I thought I would be more sore.”

“I told you that using the onsen downstairs first thing would help, especially after your flight,” Anton said.

She nodded into the pillow. “The plane was more comfortable than I thought it would be. I think the seat cushions had this same stuff in them.” She poked the material of the futon and watched the dimple where her finger was slowly resolve itself. It was like testing the lividity of a corpse.

“That’s first class for you.”

“They gave me a lifetime Jade status after I gave a keynote talking about my parents.”

Anton began whistling the tune to “You Only Live Twice.” His fingers slid up over her kidney, then back into place. He double-tapped to magnify the text, and then made the cut-and-paste motion. A displeased sigh sounded in his throat.

“Something wrong?”

“Not wrong. Just annoying.”

“Your boss?”

Anton snorted. “Which one?”

It occurred to Kristen that she had no idea which time zone Anton called home. Or, for that matter, if he had a stable address. Or addresses, plural. The one time she had asked if all the travel ever exhausted him, he shrugged and said, “I come from a nomadic tradition.” They left it at that. His implant pinged hers regularly to let her know he was still clean, and hers did the same for him after she changed the settings. He was the only user left on the implant’s history, according to the app. It had not alerted her to any others. That was good enough. Her own life had no room for either complications or expectations. Even the decision to see each other was made just forty-eight hours ago; she reminded him she’d be in Tokyo, and he mentioned something about Melbourne, and then he checked his points and there they were. They emerged from different exits at the same train station, evidently having taken the same line in different cars.

When their eyes met on the platform, he didn’t hesitate. He dropped his duffel and beelined for her, weaving around other travelers seemingly without breathing or blinking. “Your bag—” she managed to say, before his arms snaked around her. His chin rested on her head and his fingers threaded in her hair. He leaned down to smell her neck.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, and her arms, finally, rose to circle him.

Kristen had not mentioned Sheila. She had not mentioned seeing Sheila’s body. She had not mentioned the way she dropped her drink, how it splashed hot across her toes like a rush of panicked piss. She hadn’t mentioned any of these things, and he hadn’t asked.

But he must have heard the news. It was everywhere.

And he’d made himself available in a way she hadn’t anticipated. That, as far as she could tell, was the best gauge of affection. Presence. Attention. Focus. If that weren’t the case, then Wuv as a company was fucked.

When they found his bag, a cluster of small, soft robots was building a pillow fort of their own bodies all around it. He had to flash his watch at them and wait for the duffel to ping back before they reluctantly trundled away, off to intercept someone else’s forgotten luggage.

“All right. All done.” He kissed the back of her neck, dragging her back to the present, and then rolled away from her. “What time is your thing, again?”

“The awards ceremony where they hand out five million dollars to the best approximation of a human emotion? The one with all the investors I’m supposed to impress? The one the empress herself is attending? That thing?”

“That would be the one, yes.”

“I have to be there at four, for media stuff. Then there’s a carpet at five.”

“And when should I be there?”

“Seven? I think? That’s when the actual ceremony starts. I have to do the carpet, but you don’t. There’s another entrance, I think. For other people.”

“Oh, I’m other people now?”

“People with anxiety! Or people who don’t have to be photographed. I have to be photographed. And filmed. And streamed. And tokenized. In both senses of the term. It’s good for the company. Allegedly.”

Antony rolled to face her, and gave her a look that was the equivalent of peering over his glasses. It was a habit from his days of wearing them. His new eyes were no longer new. In fact, his lenses were due for an upgrade. He’d been delaying it; he said he liked to keep his layers of reality rather charmingly antiquated. But the effect of his gaze was the same, glasses or no.

“I said I would,” she said. “I told Sumter.”

“Do you do everything Sumter tells you to do?”

“He’s the founder.”

“Cofounder.”

“Same thing. He hired me. And he was supposed to be here, today, not me. Or not just me, anyway. He’s the boy genius. I’m just the chief of staff.”

“Chief Emotional Manager.”

“Chief Emotional Manager. Yes. The point is, his fans don’t like me the way they like him. They worship him. They believe in his vision of the future. Me, they just tolerate. So I have to do his job, too, not just mine.”

“What a change, for you. However will you manage?”

Kristen stuck her tongue out at him. Anton stuck his tongue out, too. Kristen curled her tongue into a tube. Anton curled his up, too. Kristen made her tongue into a fluted bowl. Anton tried, but it didn’t work. Kristen tried holding the fluted bowl shape, but couldn’t last, the longer Anton tried and failed to contort his tongue. They collapsed into mutual giggles, staring at each other like kids, and Kristen felt the whole day stretching away from her, hers to fill with more of this.

Tokyo was even hotter than the mirror in Kristen’s washroom warned her it would be. Stepping outside felt like being kissed by a boy who didn’t know how. The raw pink wound that was the end of a Toronto winter was already the weeping sore of summer in the floating world. She had missed the cherry blossoms in their native habitat. They bloomed for barely a weekend now, like that Bradbury story Sumter made them read during the retreat up in Haliburton, about a whole summer happening in a single day. Here, whole precincts took days off for the blossoms. Children were kept home from school. It was a national day of mourning, for all the lost species. The trees bloomed and everything stopped, everyone dropped what they were doing and rushed out.

Kristen was sorry to have missed it. Not just the cherry blossoms, but the mourning. At work, Sumter and the others were still wearing black bands on their avatars. There was a new sig line to emails and texts: Wuv has lost a valued member of our team, and is taking time to recalibrate. We apologize for any delays in response. Thank you for your understanding. Kristen had watched Fawn tell a bot to compose the copy, which for Fawn constituted the act of creation. By programming or adaptation, the bot had written something just as tame and bland and insipid as Fawn herself.

There was no mention of suicide, no mention of Sheila’s history or achievements or the fact that her code made Sumter look like what he really was: a man who couldn’t pass a whiteboard test.

Kristen wanted to gnash her teeth and cover her hair in ashes. She wanted to grab people by the shoulders and tell them that Sheila was dead, the animals were dead, her mother was dead, everything was dying, they were all dead, they were all corpses on a brief holiday on the surface of the Earth.

So really, it was just like any other day.

The city had mobile cooling stations for children and the elderly that recognized your gait and pallor for signs of heatstroke and stopped to offer you a lift, but that didn’t do Kristen much good on the moss carpet at the awards ceremony. Tiny drones darted hither and thither, spritzing faces they recognized as human with fresh doses of makeup-setting mist. Others broadcast the happenings on the moss carpet. A flurry of them surrounded her. They coordinated angles, sending blinking signals for where she should look. Already, Kristen regretted her choice of dress. Despite its size and its cut, it was still made of clone leather. Sweat trickled down her back. She felt every grain of rice, every sip of sake, every messy bite of katsu soaked in curry, every swirl of charcoal-sesame soft serve. Still, it could have been worse: if Sumter had come as promised, they would have been swarmed. Without him around, she had something resembling breathing room.

The moss rippled and changed color, shifting from mystic blue to traffic-light green, and that was their cue to enter the awards ceremony. “Ceremony” being the operative word: before any judgment could be rendered, both the contestants and their devices received a blessing from kagura dancers and a priest from the local shrine.

“They do this for everything,” one of her fellow judges whispered. “Train cars. Organ printers. Everything.”

“Show some respect,” Kristen muttered. “I wish anything I’d developed got taken this seriously.”

She kept her head down as the blessing finished. Then it was time for the empress to speak. Her voice was very soft and measured. Her kimono was Vantablack with gold embroidery in the shape of a carbon molecule. She was the only one in the room who didn’t look like she was overheated. Kristen had no idea if germline genetic edits were a phenomenon among the royal family here. The Western monarchies, what was left of them, had mostly eschewed throwing their chromosomes in the CRISPR drawer. One very prominent prince had abdicated his position over the issue; he wanted his children to avoid some of his own health problems, and that didn’t exactly fit with his family’s curatorial sensibility.

Then again, maybe the empress’s composure had more to do with her own comportment and mien than anything else. Crossing the stage, she didn’t allow anyone to rush her. Kristen felt a sudden grasping envy just watching her. What would it be like to live in that sphere of slow quiet? Wasn’t that true luxury, after all—time and space and silence?

A brief introduction of each team and each judge had followed, and then the evening was open. Guests, team members, and judges were free to move between tables, and to partake in the passed hors d’oeuvres and drinks, enjoying each other’s company and that of each entrant. At the end of the night, votes would be tallied, the winner announced. Previous rounds had included speculative disaster management, the invention of a card game, and differential diagnoses among patients with intersecting mood disorders and post-viral illnesses.

These intelligences were among the best that had ever been devised. They were fully self-diagnosing and capable of their own alterations. Earlier iterations of the competitors were already being used all over the world to save lives, negotiate water markets, provide accurate polling data. At this point, any of them could have won the competition.

Tonight was the final challenge: a pure Turing exam. Once upon a time, in the bad old days, it would have been called a Chinese Room test. Now “Chinese Room” was the name of a chain of vegan, human-free automated food dispensers, and there were trademarks in play and the license cost too much to use. Each attendee (save the judges) was outfitted with an earbud receiver. Most were dummies. A few were not. Those wearing real receivers were in reality being puppeteered by a contender intelligence. At any point during the evening, you might be interacting with one of the contenders. Both judges and guests could subtly check the profiles of people they interacted with on an AR scorecard; a series of blinks was all it took to judge the behavior of the person who cut ahead of you in line for the yuzu sorbet as inhuman.

The winner would be the contender with the smallest number of checks beside their photo.

“It’s like golf,” Kristen had explained to Anton, after they had pried themselves away from the very clever futon. “Only it’s about the performance of humanity.”

“Golf is a performance of humanity.”

Anton shifted his focus from his own reflection to hers in the washroom mirror. The weather and traffic and texts from Sumter and the others back in Toronto scrolled by in its surface. The ryokan’s mascot, a friendly sprig of eucalyptus, tried and failed to draw their attention to the alerts. “So. What’s so special about humanity?”

Kristen finished screwing in her earring. “You seemed to be enjoying it, earlier.”

“I’m not sure that was my humanity talking.”

“I’m not sure it qualified as talking.”

Now he was somewhere out in the crowd, drifting among the other guests. Wrangling him an invitation had proved surprisingly easy; Kristen held all the hashes for her own and Sumter’s invites, and transferring them over was as simple as changing the reservation at the ryokan. Kristen thought she caught a glimpse of him speaking to a group of men whose layers said they were real estate developers. But at the last moment she heard someone call her name.

“Kristen? Kiki? KRISTEN!”

Kristen winced. Only a handful of people in the world called her Kiki. And now, only one of them was attending this event. She put on her best smile and turned around. “Hi, LaSalle.”

LaSalle had done a podcast about her lawsuit, way back when. It won him some awards. And he made sure that she never forgot it. But even before that, even before the fire and the lawsuit and the narrative, he had been following her family. For all she knew, he had even purchased the right to choose what she wore at school on alternating Wednesdays, or the right to say how long her hair could be, or how much screen time she had.

Somehow the two of them always wound up at events like this: tech victim turned tech worker and tech critic turned tech fanboy—assigned to work the same beat from opposite sides. They had a loose camaraderie, in a sort of way. Canadians always found each other in this type of setting. If nothing else, he was good for making sure that no one else bothered her. But for a brief moment, she wished that the invitations to the event had been tougher to wrangle.

“This is something, eh?” he asked.

“It sure is.”

“You should have told me you were coming into Tokyo. I would have made reservations somewhere.”

“I’m sorry. My calendar’s been acting up.”

“Sumter’s not with you?”

Kristen schooled her features to perfect neutrality. “Just me. Sorry.” She threw a little extra roundness on the vowel sound, for authenticity.

“Yeah, that’s too bad. I was really looking forward to meeting him.” He leaned in close. Too close. “Is that stuff they say about Wuv true?”

“What stuff?”

“Well … Does it really work?”

Kristen allowed her emotions to cohere on her face. Maybe whatever affect detection LaSalle had enabled in his lenses would let him know precisely how she felt about that question. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve heard things.”

“What things?”

He lowered his voice still further, and Kristen resented the fact that she had to lean even closer. She should have gotten some ear implants, if only for moments like this one.

“Things about how it’s all a scam,” he murmured. “How the algorithm is faulty … That it’s why that programmer, Sheila, did what she did.”

Kristen saw white. Red was supposed to be the color of anger, in poetry and in common parlance, but Kristen’s was a blinding silvery white, like the glint of sunlight on a skyscraper, a parabola of rage hot enough to melt a car to the street it so foolishly insisted on traversing.

“Who said that.” It wasn’t a question.

Too late, it appeared he realized what he’d actually said out loud. “Well, you know—”

“No. I don’t. I don’t know. And I would very much like to know who, exactly, is saying that our rock star programmer, a legitimate genius, a woman who put up with way too much fucking bullshit from this industry and guys like you and all your fellow fanboys, was so ashamed of her code that she had to put a fucking plastic bag over her head and—”

“There she is,” Anton said, slipping up behind her. His fingers found the small of her back. His other hand presented her with a bubble full of smoke. “You’re going to want to let that infuse. Oh, hello.” He shook LaSalle’s hand. “I’m so sorry to take her away, especially when you’re engaged in such a great discussion, but it’s a tight schedule. Maybe we’ll run into you later?”

LaSalle’s mouth opened and closed. Nothing came out.

Anton steered Kristen away. He had a weird knack for finding the best vantage point in any room. Tonight it was an alcove toward the back of the venue, near the service entrance to the kitchen. Briefly, Kristen considered escaping through the kitchen and out into the street. It would be cooler out now. Maybe. They could go back to the room at the inn. Make the most of their time. She could think about something other than ramming her fingers up LaSalle’s nasal passages and pulling until he wept. Instead, she punctured the bubble with her teeth and inhaled shiso mist. It cleared her sinuses and cooled her face and brought the words out.

“He wanted to talk about Sheila. He says there’s a rumor that Wuv doesn’t work, and that’s why she…” Instead of completing her sentence, Kristen gestured at her own head with a looping motion.

It was meant to suggest the bag, but too late she realized it also suggested a noose.

The tip of Anton’s tongue rested on his lips. He appeared to be deciding what to say. “Does it work?”

Kristen felt her anger in the ripples of her scar tissue. It felt like he’d punched her on a healing bruise.

“Fuck you,” she muttered, and turned to walk away. Anton caught her wrist and she rounded on him. Instantly, he dropped her hand and put both of his up, open and friendly, fingers splayed and harmless, easy to break.

“I only meant to say that if it doesn’t work, it would explain some things. And if it doesn’t work, that’s not Sheila’s fault. It’s Sumter and Mason’s fault, for pushing her so hard. And it wouldn’t be a reason, on its own, for her to do what she did. But if she felt like she was raising concerns and not being listened to, then maybe. It happens. I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. In the Canadian startup circles. Is the weather really so depressing?” He paused, and took a step closer. When he spoke again his voice was softer. “At your school. Remember? Wasn’t there a rash of suicides in the computer science department?”

Kristen said nothing. Who the hell was this man to insinuate himself into Sheila’s mindset? How could he possibly presume to know what had been going on in her head? And why had he suddenly mentioned that particular detail to Kristen? What did he know? How much digging had he done? Slowly, the hairs on her scalp began to rise.

Anton knew.

Or, he suspected—he had done the reading, and now he had begun to do the math. He was frightened, and trying to extricate himself. And he thought that she, Kristen, had killed Sheila. He thought—and she could see it now, could see the profile he must have built inside his mind, could see the murder wall he’d embroidered with red thread somewhere—that because the tech didn’t work, because Sheila had failed, the Chief Emotional Manager had decided to trim the fat and make Wuv a leaner organization with a more agile sensibility.

While Kristen had killed her share of people, Sheila was not among them.

“Those suicides—they culminated in the dean killing himself, too,” she said softly. “In his car. He was so ashamed of having let the problem go on so long. That’s what the note said.” She cleared her throat. “Why are you asking about that? Sheila didn’t go to that school, and I didn’t know her then.”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I only thought they might be related. Not that I’m saying everyone who completes suicide in tech is the same. I’m saying that there’s a serious mental health issue in the industry, and sometimes it appears in unexpected places.”

He waited for her to respond. She didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t know if we were talking about that. Her. Sheila. Her death. I thought you’d bring it up if you wanted to. I should have asked you—I’m sorry. I was scared for you.”

Kristen blinked. “For me?”

“Suicide is viral. A place where it happens, it’s likely to happen more often. You found her. I saw that, somewhere, that you’d found her. And I was worried…”

“About me killing myself?”

“About the working conditions! If it pushed your coworker into making that decision, then yes, that worries me!”

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your problem.”

“It’s your problem, which makes it my problem.”

Kristen scoffed. “That’s not true.”

His eyebrows rose. “Isn’t it?”

Whatever Kristen had prepared for this evening, it was not a verdict on the relationship. Her face must have registered her horror, because Anton smiled and drew her closer to him and kissed her forehead. “I’m just saying I care about you, is all. I think Sumter fucked you over, sending you here. Sheila was supposed to come with him, right?”

Kristen nodded. “Sheila really wanted to come to Japan. She’s wanted to visit her whole life. She even speaks—spoke—the language.”

And yet, for whatever reason, she had decided that death was a better option. There had been some news about a closure of the suicide forest—it was too dry for all the final cigarettes the hikers insisted on smoking. Maybe she’d been planning to do it here, to make a day trip that lasted forever. Maybe she’d just gotten impatient. Maybe she’d found her nerve that night and was afraid of what would happen if she lost it.

“Did you know her very well?”

“Not as well as I should have.”

Anton drew her to him again. “Don’t say things like that. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

“This is all anyone’s going to ask me about, isn’t it? All night. It’s all they asked me about on the carpet. Sheila, and Sumter’s reaction to Sheila. And then about my parents, again. Do you have any words to say about mental health? Jesus Christ. I found her fucking body.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I thought people would be any better at the main event.”

“It’s just the timing. That’s all. It was a week and a half ago.”

“And people thought I had something important to say about technology, and now I work at a tech company, and now I’m…” She caught herself squeezing the bubble of shiso mist a little too hard. She turned to look up at him. “Do you think that’s why Sumter hired me? Because of what happened with my parents? I mean, do you think that’s the only reason?”

Anton took the drink out of her hands. He maneuvered himself between her and the crowd. A robot whirred past and snatched up the bubble from the table behind him, chirping apologetically as it avoided colliding with another guest. Anton ignored both the theft and the sound.

“Sumter hired you because you’re the best.”

“Maybe this is why he bailed on the trip. He must have realized I’d be grilled about it. Realized he wouldn’t be the star of the show for once.”

“Sumter is paranoid that strong AI will learn even more about him than it already knows. Of course he didn’t want to interact with the contenders.”

Kristen’s lip twitched. She really shouldn’t have told him about her boss’s phobias. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I’m right.” He tucked her arm through his. “Now, you should get going. You have judgments to hand down.”

In the end, the game wasn’t too difficult for her to figure out. For Kristen, most cocktail party conversation was already just one step above a step function. Anyone accustomed to listening to the kinds of HR problems Kristen did understood how to tell when someone was hesitating, waiting for some impulse more intelligent than usual to give the right answer or the right question. She made two of the entrants almost immediately, one because it kept trying to respond to every single thread in a conversation, and the other because it kept allowing others to cut ahead of it in line for the washroom. This was how the other women at the event had recognized it, too—it had simply waited too many turns.

The other entrant was more difficult. It was hiding in plain sight, but doing a much better job of it than the other entrants. That, or the alcohol was getting in the way of her own personal affect detection. How could you tell if one stranger in a room full of strangers had an organic human intelligence behind them or not? What was the defining characteristic? What set ordinary social awkwardness at a formal function apart from a deep learning system’s fledgling attempts at conversation?

“If I were an AI piloting a human, where would I hide?”

“By the bar,” Anton said. “Speaking of which…”

She watched him leave for a little bit too long. She was going to miss him when their time together ended this trip. She was going to miss him more than was smart. She was going to miss him and not know if he missed her, too.

He probably wouldn’t. Not when all she could talk about was death. But sometimes she wondered. Anyone who dropped everything and flew to Tokyo from Melbourne for a fuckbuddy was probably interested more in the buddy than the fuck. Especially Anton—Anton could have his pick of the litter. He had options. He didn’t need her.

Kristen refocused on the room. The party was wearing on. People were drinking, and it was probably having an impact on their choices. Then again, these were supposed to be real-world conditions. Strong AI had to deal with drunk partygoers, the same as anybody else.

Then Kristen spotted her.

She was alone, and a little older than everyone else, and she was writing something down furiously. The longer Kristen stared, the faster and faster the woman appeared to write. Kristen watched as the woman sucked air, her skinny arm making great loops and swings.

She was writing on the tablecloth with a broken-down nib of eyeliner.

“Score one for ancient technology,” she murmured, and moved in for the kill. She kept her eyes down, pretended not to be looking at anything in particular, and darted between tables. She was only two tables away when a hand found her elbow.

“Anton, I—”

But the man holding her elbow was LaSalle. Sweat beaded at his hairline. “Caught you,” he huffed, grinning. “Sorry, about before. I was out of line. I didn’t mean to ambush you.”

Kristen relented. “Okay. Apology accepted.”

“I just wanted to ask you about that guy.”

“Sumter? He’s just—”

“No, the other guy. The one you’re with? I didn’t get his name.”

Kristen didn’t offer it. “What did you want to know?”

“Where did you find him?”

She thought about telling him the truth. I found him in a post-quake architectural confection on Mulholland Drive. He was fast asleep. Downstairs, the angels and the vultures were still brute-forcing the problem space. But when his eyes opened, he seemed to smile with his whole body and not just his mouth.

“I met him at a party.”

“Well, Kiki, I hope this isn’t too forward, but what do you know about him?”

Kristen watched the older woman scribbling out her poem. She looked so fierce, so committed. Maybe that was what it was like, being controlled by an AI. She envied that single-mindedness. How pleasant, to possess a mind without organic distractions. How much faster things would move, if you never had to question yourself. If you never had to worry if what you were doing was the right thing. It would feel like being a man.

“I know enough,” she said.

“Well, I want you to be careful. I know I’m not your dad, but your dad isn’t with us anymore, and if he were, and he knew what I knew? He’d tell you to steer clear.”

Her frown deepened into a scowl. “Excuse me? What exactly is it that you think you know? And why the hell would my dad care? Why do you care?”

“I mean, you must know who he works for. The firm. What they fund. And for whom.” LaSalle looked off into the middle distance. She realized he was scanning the room for Anton. “Did he tell you how his wife died? How she really died, I mean?”

The sweat under Kristen’s dress chilled. In fact, she had looked up how Anton’s wife had died. Assuming she had gotten the names, dates, and cities right, she had died a few days shy of her twenty-third birthday. She had been out with friends while Anton was at a conference. There was a fight at the table next to hers. One of the men sitting there pulled a knife. There was a struggle. She died in her hospital bed two days later.

As possible murders went, it struck Kristen as more than a little contrived. It was not exactly what she would call “efficient.” But why would someone like LaSalle know anything about that? What kind of crazy conspiracy blowhards spent their time learning about Anton, of all people?

“I don’t think that’s any of my business, and I know for damn sure it’s none of yours.”

“Did he tell you his family did it?”

Kristen put her drink down, far away, so she didn’t throw it in his face and get herself fired. “Look, jackass, you are so far over the line it’s a fucking dot to you. So quit chirping and sort yourself out.”

He smiled affectionately. He reached out like he was going to tousle her hair, or pat her on the head, until Kristen swerved out of his grasp. “You’re adorable,” he said. “My goodness. I’m just telling you to keep an eye out and be careful. You don’t know who sent him. You don’t know what he really wants. It could be anything. He might be trying to leverage your brand to improve his own. It’s not as though you don’t have your own following, and it’s not as though Sumter Williams is your whole story. You’d be an ideal asset, is all I’m saying. No one would suspect you. You know, like when Julia Child worked for the OSS. I’m just warning you.”

Kristen’s gaze flicked over to the older woman at the table. At least she had an excuse for leaving. She knew LaSalle believed some crazy things, but this was even worse than usual. She’d take aliens and ley lines and Lemuria over the idea that her lover was … whatever LaSalle thought he was.

Some kind of depraved fanboy? A womanizer—the kind her mother would have known about? Someone who just wanted to improve their image by riding the coattails of her own? As far as she knew, Anton preferred to have no image at all. He preferred to stay off the radar entirely.

“I should—”

“You’re right,” LaSalle said hastily. He hugged her with one arm. His grip was warm and moist and smelled of Suntory. “We’ve already talked too long.”

Kristen watched him leave. As he exited her field of vision, she saw Anton, freshly armed with more drinks. Slowly, she forced herself to turn around and make it to the older woman’s table. Her shaking hands found the chair, first. It was predictably uncomfortable in a deeply comforting way.

“Are you almost done?” she asked.

The woman didn’t answer.

“Do you need a real pen? I think I might have one.”

She paused for a moment, and then held a hand out. Kristen handed the intelligence a pen. She pushed the tablecloth forward a little, and continued writing.

“You’re not one of those guys who’s followed me all my life, right?”

Anton wandered out of the washroom with a toothbrush wedged between his jaws. “What?”

“It’s a thing. It happens.”

He marched back into the washroom, spat loudly, and marched out again. He snapped his fingers at the window, and the glass instantly fogged. Anton knelt at the futon. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

“It’s okay if you are. I was on video a lot. As a kid. Because of my parents. Because of how they raised me. How they made money. And then, because of what happened to them. Because of the lawsuit. I got a lot of interactions and engagement. Even Sumter did a project on me, in high school. For his ethics in tech class.”

Anton smiled. “He did?”

“He did. We talked about it during my interview. I had a whole … following. And I guess he was part of it.”

Anton’s head tilted. The neon outside played interesting games with his skin: now blue, now green, now pink. Each time the light shifted, he seemed to be a different person, a different sentiment, a different approach. “You’re asking if I jerked off to you, back in the day? Before you were legal?”

Kristen shrugged.

He smoothed his hair back and sighed. For the first time the whole trip, he truly sounded tired. “Is there a right answer here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of course I knew who you were. I looked you up, after. You know that.” He swallowed. “I won’t say that it doesn’t matter to me. Of course it matters to me. What happens to you—what has happened to you in the past—matters to me, very much. And you know that, too.”

Anton paused. She watched him begin to frame his next sentence. He knows, she thought once more.

For the first time, the thought didn’t entirely terrify her. Instead, there was the distant, glimmering prospect of relief. Anton narrowed his eyes at Kristen as though discerning whether she was prepared to hear what he really wanted to say. Then he seemed to think better of it.

“But it doesn’t make any difference to me,” he said finally. “Now, what is this really about? Is it about Sheila?”

“No.”

“Then what is it about? Why are you asking questions whose answers you already know?”

“How did your wife die?”

The air left him in a rush. His hands crawled up into his hair. He stood up and walked around in a little circle before he could face her again. “You don’t waste any time, do you? No wonder Sumter’s in love with you.”

The words stung more than she expected. “Let me rephrase: Why did someone come up to me at a gala, sponsored in part by my own employer, and warn me that I should be careful around you, and that your family was responsible for the death of your wife? Why would someone do that? Why would they say those words to my face?”

Anton didn’t so much sit down as collapse. He flopped backward on the bed, staring upward, and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “You,” he muttered. “You, of all people.”

“I defended you, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

His hands fell back from his face. “What?”

“I can’t have this kind of madness in my life again, Antonin.” She put the stress on his full name. “I can’t do it. Not again. Do you know how many of my dad’s FujeeKoin friends came after me, when their wallets got light? Do you know how many of them went after my doctors? Because it’s a nontrivial number. And my doctors were already a little busy, trying to help other kids.”

“Mara.” He reached out and took hold of her wrist. She’d been pacing, and was unaware of it until just now. He tugged her closer. Pulled her into the space between his knees. “I’m sorry.”

“And the only way I can handle it is if I know you’ll give my questions a real answer.”

Anton’s arms circled her from behind. He wrenched her to him. His hands held her wrists. His ankles looped over hers. It was a therapy hold, she realized. That was the technical term for it. She had seen it deployed on other children during her treatment, but had never experienced it for herself. She could never be held tightly enough to make it work. The burn scars always got in the way.

Behind her, he set his chin on her head. When he spoke he sounded very sad. Almost disappointed. “Is this your version of asking me where this is going?”

Instantly, Kristen knew she had lost. It was over. It had been stupid of her to push. Normal people had reason to be suspicious of Anton, and the reason being that he was restless and fun and impossible to pin down. But Kristen appreciated that restlessness. It’s the dedicated men you really have to worry about, her mother had often said, in between podcasts or episodes or shrill texts about missing children. Life was fleeting, after all. It was rare for Kristen to find someone as charmed by ephemerality as herself. And now she had squandered it by asking for more details.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” Anton said, “about my family.

“My grandfather had a beautiful silver lighter, inlaid with all kinds of stones,” he said. “It lived in a mirrored box, lined with velvet, in the top left drawer of his desk. He used it for guests, when they came over to smoke. And he lit his personal incense with it, in the morning. The blend he used in his office, not the stuff burned in the rest of the house. It was the first gift he ever gave himself with the money he earned. Quite possibly the only one, knowing him. Everything else was for the family.”

Kristen blinked. She had seen that lighter, or one very much like it. She had seen Qureshi flicking it open and shut while he asked her if she wanted another job, a different life. He had asked her that question and then sent her upstairs, to the room where Anton was sleeping.

“From the moment I saw it, I wanted to touch it,” Anton said. “I think not only because it was so beautiful, but because it was so precious to him. It was special to him in a way that the rest of us weren’t. At least, it seemed that way at the time. When I was growing up. So once when he was away, out with his falcon, I snuck into his office and got hold of it. It was so heavy, I couldn’t understand how he worked it. I’d never held an old-fashioned lighter before.”

Kristen’s voice became very small. “Did you light something?”

“I tried. But it didn’t work. I kept flicking and flicking this thing, and it wouldn’t light, and I dropped it, and one of the inlaid pieces fell out. Malachite, you know. Fragile.”

“And your grandfather found out?”

“Yes. He did.”

“What did he do?”

“He asked me why I would go behind his back like that, why I hadn’t just asked to see the lighter. He would have shown it to me, he said, even if he would never let me touch it. But I couldn’t explain then how much I wanted to touch it, how much I wanted to learn how to make it work. But, of course, he decided to show me how it worked.”

Kristen felt something well up beneath her eyes. “Did he—”

“He held my hand over the flame. Not touching it. Not so that it was actually on my skin. But like in Lawrence of Arabia. Which is pretty fucking ironic, considering the source. The trick is not minding. That’s what he said to me. Like in the movie. The trick is not minding. That was the first time I was ever burned by anything.”

Kristen squeezed his hands. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re the lighter, Kristen. If I hold on to you too long, I’ll get burned. And yet I can’t stand to put you down, and I know I can’t put you away in a box. Even if it is a very beautiful box. Even if it’s a huge box, with everything you could ever want or need in it.” He kissed her temple. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Kristen thought of a house, very far away, with very high walls and falcons circling above it in patterns matched by tiny, humming drones. She thought of what he must think of her. Of what he suspected, what he might know. Perhaps it was better just to let him go. It would be easier than handling things another way, later. “I think so.”

“There isn’t room for you in my daily life,” he said plainly. “And there never will be. In fact…” She felt him draw the breath that she knew would be their end. She knew it the way she knew all rejection, and felt some measure of betrayal that her own senses, usually so keen, had not read more into the way Anton had dropped everything to join her. “In fact, it would be best if we didn’t do this again.”

Kristen felt her face get hot. This was not the conversation she’d wanted to be having. It felt deeply, ineffably shameful to know that he’d assumed she wanted something more. To think of him, thinking of her, imagining her pining away. “I never asked—”

“You’d hate it, Kristen. You’d hate every moment of it. Not at first, but eventually. And then you’d hate me, too, and I…” He dug his chin into her shoulder. “It’s selfish of me, I realize, but when I think of how things would change, I know I can’t allow it to happen. You’re too big for any place I could ever find for you. You’re like those very clever octopuses who are always learning how to unlock their aquariums. You would break free, and then you might get hurt.”

Kristen twisted a little to face him. “I didn’t know you had a thing for tentacles.”

“You,” he murmured, and kissed her. His face was wet. He tasted of salt. “You.”

In the morning, he was gone. And all her texts bounced back.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Unlike the others, Kristen doesn’t leave the house at high speed. The scars make running difficult; the stiffness of her skin doesn’t allow for a full range of motion. Moreover, if her ears are full of the sound of pounding pavement or heaving breath, she might miss something important.

Besides, her goal isn’t to find Mason or the others. It’s to find Jong-soo, or at least his stash.

That means taking the time and making the effort to see details. Like how she noticed that the kettle Sumter had allegedly used just moments earlier to boil water for her coffee was stone cold, which means he dropped the French press purely for dramatic effect. So—Sumter was either lying about having just noticed those knives were missing, or he simply couldn’t stand not being the focus of attention for two measly minutes.

Either way, she is tired of it.

Kristen figures Jong-soo would have made for high ground, first. He’d want to be where he could see the others coming. So she follows the track, which roughly sketches the spine of the island as it climbs steadily upward. The island is still extremely flat; what might be called a mountain locally is really just a foothill to Kristen. But it’s as good a path as any, and it takes her into shade. Don’t go ruining all my hard work with skin cancer, one of her pediatric plastic surgeons liked to say, every summer.

She’s easy prey out here; if there is an obligate carnivore in the area that developed a taste for human flesh after Fawn, Kristen will definitely be next on the menu. But she finds herself curiously copacetic with that idea. The risk is worth it. It’s nice to put her body to some use other than worrying. She remembers something about exercising after experiencing trauma; movement is supposed to help ameliorate all the slow damage prolonged adrenaline exposure does to the nervous system. They have been on this island for who knows how long, and she still hasn’t seen much of it. It’s good to breathe real air and see real sky and hear real waves.

But as she listens, Kristen hears a familiar voice.

“She killed him,” Mason is saying, as clearly as if he’s just come up alongside her. But when Kristen instinctively hits the ground, she sees him in front of her, through the bamboo and ferns: he and Pearce and Jasper are all down below, on the beach, in a squared-off pit that looks like the beginnings of a new foundation for a different building. “And the CEO of Telo-MORE. And Nadine’s husband. And God knows who else. She’s the one who gave me that ice pick!”

It’s true. No good deed goes unpunished.

“Buddy,” Jasper says. “I say this with love. But you’ve gone totally fucking nutbar.”

“Nadine’s husband chose a completely legal medically assisted death, after his injuries, and I heard those other men killed themselves,” Pearce says.

This is true.

At least, it’s true for Kristen. It really was no different, she reasoned, than deciding to smoke cigarettes despite knowing the risk of cancer and eventual death. Those other people had made certain decisions, and those decisions had consequences. But it wasn’t fair to push their decisions onto the ignorant.

Todd, over at Telo-MORE, had been working on custom CRISPR-enabled life extension. His argument, the one he spread across keynotes from San Francisco to Sao Paolo, was that keeping his customers—the wealthy—alive indefinitely was actually good for the environment, because they would see the long-term consequences of their actions. They would stop offloading climate responsibility onto their grandchildren. Privately, he understood the problem with allowing the rich to live indefinitely. He knew that it would only exacerbate existing tensions, and that it would likely perpetuate the ongoing passive genocide of the Global South, as the wealthy watched poor brown people slowly boil to death in the heat of some other country’s fire. Todd even had a theory about it: he thought it was just possible that all the stories of vampires, those seemingly always-wealthy revenants whose mythology survived all over the world, were seeded by some post-Singularity future civilization that had figured out time travel, warning early humans about what would happen if a technology like his actually came to pass. He had told her this when she asked to see the rooftop garden after their interview. She had already handed in her temporary building badge, but he told her to meet him around back and they could take the freight elevator so they wouldn’t have to go through security all over again.

But I’m developing that vampire idea into a pilot with some friends, so it can’t leave this conversation, he had said, on their way up to the roof.

It won’t, she had said, and pointed out one of Toronto’s few remaining peregrine falcons. No, over there, you have to lean out a little over the railing to see, she had said. She had admired his belt earlier, and he had said it was made out of mountaineer-grade nylon. It could bear twice his weight, if it had to. She bought one for herself, when it was all over. The brand had proved its worth.

Mason is still staring at his colleagues with perfect focus, seemingly unaware that his tongue is also curling into the cut along his lip, tonguing it, reopening the wound. Maybe he likes to think of all her victims while he sucks his own blood—another rich vampire.

“They’re in on it together,” Mason continues. “This whole thing. I’m sure of it. Sumter brought us here on purpose.”

Suddenly Kristen remembers the fight she’d had with Anton, in Tokyo. They had been fighting about Sheila. Or not about her, but because of her. In the aftermath of her. Curious, that Mason hasn’t accused her of killing Sheila, too—though of course, he’d then have been wrong twice.

“Jasper’s right. You’re crazy.”

Mason’s hand describes a circle in the air. His arm obviously hurts, because the circle is slower and wider than it might ordinarily be. Like a vulture. “This, this whole place, the house, the island, used to be his family’s place. It still is.” He stamps his foot on the unfinished foundation. “And in the basement, Sumter—”

“Wait, what?” Pearce asks, just as Jasper says, “Hold up.”

Pearce has grabbed Mason by the throat. Sumter’s second-in-command is still wearing yesterday’s clothes. In three years of knowing him, Kristen has never seen this happen. Even on the nights he spends at the office. He keeps a stack of vacuum-sealed black bamboo T-shirts from the Netherlands in a locked drawer in his desk. Something in him, somewhere, has clearly begun to crack.

“You knew? You knew about this? And you didn’t tell us? After everything that’s happened? Even after Fawn?”

Mason’s face crumples. “He promised me,” he says miserably. “He promised me we would be together. All of us.”

Sumter jogs along the beach between them. Kristen, still hidden above, notes that his grin is the same self-righteous rictus that he wears for his various appearances.

“Hey, guys,” he says, like this is some scripted-reality reunion special where all the worst people come back. But he looks overall hopeful. Optimistic. Friendly. He looks like the kind of man you might trust with all your money and all your dreams and quite possibly all your emotions, too, if you happened to be looking for a cult without dietary restrictions.

“Has anybody seen Kiki? I’m worried about her, all alone out here.”

He doesn’t explain to them how he knows she left the house. But Kristen sees Pearce wonder about it: he glances over at Jasper, and Jasper glances back. She was still there when they left. How does Sumter know she isn’t?

“Guys. Come on. Have you seen her? It’s dangerous out here. She could get hurt.”

Kristen wonders suddenly if he’s acting the part of a father now. Maybe that’s where this is going. Maybe, confronted with the possibility of his demise, Sumter has realized that leaving behind three companies, some patents, and a variety of stock options isn’t really the legacy he’d hoped for. Maybe, never having had a father, he’s taken with the idea of becoming someone else’s.

They are, after all, playing house.

“You don’t care what she is.” Mason sounds as though he is discovering altogether new frontiers of surprise. “She’s a one-woman production of Canadian Psycho, and you don’t give a shit!”

“The only thing Kristen Howard is guilty of is doing what it takes to make it as a woman in tech. What I care about is the fact that you’ve had it in for her from the jump.” Sumter glances between Mason and the others. “Guys? Wouldn’t you say that’s true? Haven’t you noticed?”

Jasper seemingly doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Um, maybe?”

“Yes,” Pearce says. “Definitely.”

“See, I like you, Pearce. You’re smart. Honest. I appreciate that. We’re gonna need those qualities, where we’re headed.”

Kristen watches Pearce make the decision to ask his next question.

“Has Mason always been like this? Suspicious?”

“You mean paranoid?” Sumter looks at his cofounder fondly. “A little. But I appreciate that, too.”

“I’m protecting you.” Mason is barely audible over the crash of the waves. He’s probably ashamed to even admit this much. “I’m your oldest friend, goddamn it. I’ve been protecting you since we were kids. I’m your cofounder. I’m on your side. And I’m telling you, this has to stop. It’s over, Sumter.”

“Nothing is over, Mason.”

Pearce lets Mason go, finally. Mason backs away from him. He gives him a lot of clearance. Pearce barely notices. “Is this your place?” Pearce asks.

Sumter pulls up short. He gives Mason a disappointed look. “Mace. We talked about this. You can’t just spoil the surprise that way. It’s rude. It diminishes the experience. No trigger warnings. We agreed. Remember?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jasper mutters.

“You goddamn son of a bitch.” Pearce sounds almost hurt. Like he really had expected better of his boss. He advances on Sumter. “You motherfucking asshole, what the fuck did you do?”

“Now, obviously I didn’t want it to happen this way,” Sumter explains. “People are dead. I accept that. I take full responsibility. There are a lot of things I could have done better here. Hindsight, and all that. But I want you to know that you’ll all be taken care of, when everything is said and done. Okay?”

“Fuck you,” Pearce says.

“You know, I don’t appreciate your tone.” Sumter’s own tone is stiffer now. He’s annoyed. This is how he sounds on panel discussions when the moderator holds him to a point, or an audience member or a fellow panelist won’t just let him be right. “Now, Pearce, I like you. I think you’re a smart guy. I think you’ve got a lot of potential. I think you’re ready for your next challenge. But I swear to God, buddy, I only need your brain stem and your testes. So I will have no trouble whatsoever taking what I need, and throwing away the rest.”

“What the fuck are you even talking about?” Pearce’s face is red, with frustration or sunburn. It’s still red when Sumter holds out his hand, makes a fist, and squeezes six times in quick succession. But Pearce’s face drains to pale when the sand beneath him opens up and swallows him whole.

A tiger trap.

Cowardly and disgusting. Just like all trophy hunting.

Jasper’s screaming is the only thing that drowns out Kristen’s own. It occurs to her that she’s having a psychotic break. A real one, this time: not just the slow degradation of her sense of self and reality—but an actual light-switch moment when Kristen transforms from average, undiagnosed female psychopathy into full psychosis, featuring rapid-cycling paranoid delusions.

“Shut the fuck up, Jasper,” Sumter says, and then Jasper disappears, too.

A hand clamps over Kristen’s mouth.

She freezes. There is a warm weight on her back. Solid. Soft. She watches Nora Mae’s other hand creep over to cover her own. They enlace their fingers in the dirt.

Sumter points at the places where his employees used to be. “This is your fault, Mason. You made me do this. I didn’t want to do it that way. I thought we could all come to some sort of understanding. Negotiate a new contract.”

Mason says nothing. He’s watching the waves. Kristen sees his shoulders rise, and fall. He says something that sounds like “Do it.”

Sumter snorts. He offers a huge, disappointed sigh. “Mace. Come on. Don’t be like this. Let’s go back. The hard part is over! We’re sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent! Literally!”

Mason says nothing. Instead he turns more fully toward the shore. He takes another deep breath.

“Mason. You said it yourself. You’re my best friend.”

“You have a new best friend now. And I hope she fucking eats you alive.”

“Okay, way to be dramatic. Don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel.” Sumter’s shaking his head. “Well, whatever you say, you’re still my oldest friend. Don’t you want to hang out?”

Finally, Mason turns to him. “No, Sumter. I do not want to hang out with you. In fact, I’m not sure I ever want to see your face again.”

Sumter grins. “I love you, too, buddy. We’ll get through this. You’ll see.”

Then he closes his fist six times, and Mason is gone. Sumter does nothing. He watches the space for a while, where his best and oldest friend stood. Then he kicks some sand aside, like an animal burying droppings, and he does some of the stretches he went away to Joshua Tree one winter to learn. And, finally, he begins to walk back toward the black glass house.

His family home.

Kristen thinks back, remembers the dossier she’d amassed on Sumter before their interview. She’d been looking for something specific in him. An X-factor, perhaps. A certain something. She always knew it when she found it, before. When it was there it stuck out, and there was no way to get rid of it, much in the manner that a strong cologne somehow always coated the back of one’s throat. She wondered sometimes if it really was a pheromone of some kind, and that for investors it smelled like money and for her it smelled like meat.

Back then, she had not been afraid of Sumter in the slightest. There were no stories. No dead girlfriends on ski trips to Whistler, no disappearing nannies, no teachers or professors who suddenly left their positions, no settled lawsuits, no whispers on the various group chats for women like her, not even any refusals on his part to comment on whatever exposé came out that one September, the one that was supposed to change everything, for real, this time.

Then again, maybe she simply hadn’t looked deeply enough. After their interview Kristen had scoured her archives for an email from a student looking to do a profile on her at the time of her lawsuit, and she’d found it—it was in the portion of her fan messages that her attorneys deemed too trivial to deal with, but kept anyway in case of eventual stalkers. It came from an address associated with the boarding school, but he’d written a line at the bottom: If you’d rather speak over chat, reach me at … and given a personal email.

This email linked to his profiles, and she could find him through those. Most of them had been closed up, but a handful of sound-alike profiles on Reddit gave her his opinions on everything from pineapple on pizza (why did it matter, he argued, once you knew the ham was fake?) to whether it was really cheating if you got yourself off looking at the fap-fakes your girlfriend’s ex had posted of her. (Isn’t it really just her? the maybe-Sumter had typed. Her, but the porn version? Shouldn’t she take it as a compliment?)

Perhaps Kristen should have reconsidered her verdict on Sumter.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Nora Mae asks.

She is still holding Kristen’s hand. Wind sifts through the bamboo. It’s warm, but pleasant. It’s like the kind of sleepover Kristen never really had. This part of her social development is also on a kind of delay. She understands that now. They say childhood trauma survivors remember events in pieces, disjointed, and that remembering one’s life out of order leads one to live it out of order, too—not as a linear progression, but endless hopscotching between moments of clarity.

This is why Kristen enjoyed killing. She felt so deliciously clear about it, so focused, like someone seeing an empty stretch of skin and craving a tattoo. Something painful and permanent. Something that would leave a mark. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Her dad had said that, a lot, before the fire.

“He’ll be back at the house by now. He’ll know we’re gone. He’ll come looking.”

Something inside Kristen is changing, stilling, readying itself for a spiritual winter. It’s almost a relief. Kristen knows how to manage situations like this: volatile, unpredictable, dictated primarily by greed and vanity and other mortal sins you sometimes had to apologize for on a video that you would eventually delete when your audience forgave you.

“Not if I find him first,” Kristen says.

Kristen does not want Nora Mae to watch her kill him. Having an audience doesn’t improve her performance. She prefers certain things to be private. And she has never actually killed someone with her bare hands before. She has always on some level feared that she might lose her nerve.

“What are you going to do?”

“Emotional labor.” She smiles. Squeezes Nora Mae’s hand. “If I’m not back by tomorrow morning, I want you to find Jong-soo’s stash of supplies and build the biggest fire you can.”

Nora Mae snorts. “I was gonna do that anyway, genius, if I didn’t find the boat launch.”

“Boat launch?”

Nora Mae jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “Whatever dug that foundation down there, and whatever dug the one for the house, especially if there’s a basement like Mason said, it didn’t come by plane. Something docked here. Even if it was just an equipment ferry coming off a larger vessel. That means there has to be a place to tie up. And if there’s a boat launch…”

Kristen smiles so wide she feels the salt and sand on her face crackling. “Then there might be a boat.”

Nora Mae is suitably smug. It makes her a thousand times more beautiful. Kristen hopes, desperately, that Nora Mae’s wife will get to hear her tell this story.

“There might be a boat. Although at this point I’d take anything with a functioning radio.”

Inshallah, Kristen thinks.

“What?”

“Hopefully. So I go finish the job at the house, and you find a way to reach help. It sounds like a plan.” She squeezes Nora Mae’s hand. “If I’m not back soon, and you have a way off this rock, then get the fuck out. Don’t wait for me.”

Nora Mae’s brows rise. “You thought I was gonna wait? For you?”

Kristen laughs. She stands up. She feels so much lighter now. She is so close to finishing a very long-term project. “Why did you come out here? I thought you wanted to stay.”

“Saw the tally in the pantry. Realized there was gear out here, and I could probably make it, at least for a little while.” Nora Mae peers up at her. “Hey. My turn. Did you really kill Nadine’s husband?”

Kristen tilts her head. “Does it really matter to you, if I did?”

“Yes. It does.”

Well, there is no accounting for taste. “For the record? He was alive when I was through with him.” Her eyes narrow. “You didn’t like him either, Nora Mae. You didn’t like what he was doing to Nadine.”

“You’re right. I didn’t.” Nora Mae stands. She brushes herself off. “But I tried to fix it by being a friend to Nadine, not an enemy to her dipshit husband. Her life wasn’t any easier after what you did. It was way, way harder. Suddenly she was his wife and his caregiver. And the support they got from the province was chickenfeed. It was so hard, he literally decided to die. And that’s on you. You did that to her.”

The sun is beginning to set. At least Kristen knows where west is now. It feels good to have some kind of cardinal direction. To have at least one thing she still knows to be true. One thing which she does not doubt or suspect or wonder about.

“I can’t do anything about that anymore.”

“Yeah, well. This was supposed to be Nadine’s first vacation in like five years. But now she’s dead. And I’m pretty sure you can do something about that. So get after it.”

Before (6.0)

Kristen had considered it a metric of her affection for Anton that it took her a few weeks to feel angry at him. Usually her anger was like a distant flare of heat lightning, bright and hot but still quiet. This was more like a change of season: a widening darkness, a growing sharpness.

It was rare for someone to get under her skin like that. But she’d thought the bounced texts would stop, eventually. She’d assumed he was simply taking a break—that they might even be friends, one day, the kind who could run into each other in an airport and buy something overpriced and underseasoned together from a kiosk sticky with other people’s germs.

But no. The pings kept bouncing. The email didn’t register. The phone didn’t connect. It was as though he had stopped existing.

Then it occurred to her that he could die. Anton could have a heart attack, or get taken out by an autonomous vehicle that didn’t see him as a human being, or he could catch whatever the new virus was. He could get locked away by border police who gel-tied him and forgot him for three days in blistering heat without water. He could die, and she wouldn’t know about it unless some well-meaning colleagues posted little animated tributes to his CV on his first missed work anniversary.

She had spotted him on the conference’s trade show floor, the sole representative of good taste amid all the tactical spider-mesh and bulletproof messenger bags. Some part of her had been nervous that he might show up, had almost expected it even, simply because his arrival would do the maximum damage to her keynote. Kristen had a broad streak of Northern Ontario pessimism born of long winters and watching the same trucks roll over into the same ditches every Boxing Day, as predictable as that week’s half-off sales. In months past, though, when things were good, before he had learned the truth or before he had begun to suspect it, she had looked for him at airports. He seemed to always turn up, somehow, when she was not expecting him. And so she had hoped that this time, her expecting him might actually keep him away, as though the universe actually had decipherable rules that one could follow in the hope of a specific outcome. She felt a pang, and then she felt annoyance, and then she made herself feel nothing. Kristen could walk away, and she was going to.

And then, as though he had felt her gaze on him, he turned and spotted her too. He looked like he was in pain. Real, physical pain, sharp and sudden. The way he looked once when he cut himself shaving in the dripping mirror of one of their many anonymous suites. And then, he looked afraid. He looked like he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to stay, or hoped she would ignore him. A twist of pleasure curled up in her gut, seeing that tiny hint of fear.

“Kristen, wait—”

“No. I have somewhere to be.”

“We can walk and talk.”

“You can talk. I’m walking.”

Kristen searched for the nearest ladies’ room. Not for the first time, she wished for all-gender washrooms in convention spaces. No such luck, not in England, the land of the two genders. The other night she’d entered a pub where one washroom door was marked bangers and the other was marked mash. (Later, when she hunted around for empty plugs to fill up her chargers along with everyone else at the crowded breakfast buffet, she made sure to glove up and then squirt honey down inside the outlets.)

Supposedly there were multi-gender spaces in certain parts of the city—pastel ghettos—but the convention wasn’t in one of them. Anton wouldn’t last a minute if she walked into a washroom trailing him behind her like this. There were enough wannabe Vikings at these things that were just itching for the chance to prove themselves and their alleged chivalry that all she would have to do is call out once and Anton would probably wind up arrested.

“I miss you.”

He sounded slightly breathless. He was carrying his full-grain leather duffel bag. The carry-on tag from the airline was still looped around one handle. Packable quilted jacket slung over his shoulder. Loafers without socks; stretch cashmere trousers. He had just left the plane.

“You flew all the way here just to say that?”

“Yes,” he said, and she paused, turned to face him. The shuffling horde immediately began streaming around them. She watched telepresence cranes correct their paths and weave to avoid them. “I had to tell you. Before you go on your other trip.”

Kristen didn’t recall having told him about the trip to celebrate the acquisition. Sumter had finalized the details after Anton started bouncing texts. She folded her arms. “You look terrible.”

“I know.” He sounded miserable. Pathetic. And he really did look awful—thinner, greasier, dark circles under his eyes and hair that needed cutting. It wasn’t like him not to take care of himself. Even his manicure was out of date.

“I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”

“I never said that.”

“You’re right, you said It would be better if we didn’t do this anymore. Which assumes that we were actually doing something in the first place.”

Now he had the audacity to look betrayed. “Of course we were doing something, we had something, we—”

“We had nothing. You told me, to my face, that there was no room for me in your daily life. Not that you ever shared anything about that daily life with me. You didn’t want to complicate things.” She gave him a look up and down. “You tried so hard to remain mysterious, and really you’re just boring,” she said. “You told me nothing, because there’s nothing to tell. You’re just a sad guy in a space-gray suit, like every other investor here.”

His jaw worked. “I deserve that,” he said quietly.

“You’re fucking well right, you do.” She turned and resumed her march. But this time, he grabbed her wrist. She whirled back and met his gaze. Her voice emerged from somewhere very deep and cold inside her. “Do not touch me. You don’t get to do that anymore.”

His hand spasmed and his fingers loosened their grip. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “For everything. I mean it. I didn’t want it to go like this. I didn’t want this. I shouldn’t even be here; no one knows I’m here—”

“I don’t care.”

“I know you don’t. But please, just hear me out. Just come with me, just listen, and I’ll explain everything.”

“There is no way in hell I’m going somewhere alone with you.”

“We don’t have to be alone. We just have to be…” He looked at the rest of the convention center. “Somewhere else. Please. We can go anywhere you want, as long as it’s not here.”

Kristen’s eyes lit on a coffee stand. “There.”

“No. Farther away than that. Outside this building.” He rolled his eyes. “I don’t want to be interrupted by someone who knows us. Do you?”

He had a point. With Wuv’s acquisition now public knowledge, there was more attention on her than she liked. She had no desire to expose their business to the countless participants and devices that were doubtless listening at this very moment. Already, the people orbiting them were giving him suspicious looks. It was the look strangers always gave him when they were together—he was tall and brown and broad, and she wasn’t. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the two of them were probably their very own pornographic search term. England was one of the worst places for him, at this or any other moment in history.

But he’d come to find her anyway.

“Did they give you shit at passport control?” she asked.

“Boatloads of it.” He held out his hand. “But it was worth it. I think.”

They didn’t speak on the DLR out from the center to Tower Gateway. He followed her off the train and out into the cold glass forest of towers that were once banking chains and chain hotels and grocery chains, before the vegetables cost a small fortune. Now the dark rides had taken over: actors and hawkers and drones were all advertising glimpses into the city’s past, from Richard III to Sid Vicious. There were ghost tours and tea tours and gin tours and music tours and they all happened on the same driverless buses that shouted at passersby in broad cartoon accents when they stopped at designated tourist pickups. It was as though the city itself had become a giant museum of its own history. Which of course was what it had on some level always been.

“I could make you take me to a haunted house,” Kristen said, pointing at one of the innumerable Tower of London signs dripping projected blood from its Gothic font. As her gaze settled on it, its interface tracked the movement of her eyes, and it spun up a fluttering animation of starving Irish miners.

“Do you want me to take you to a haunted house?”

“No. You’ll try to hold my hand.”

She had trouble telling the actors apart from the people who genuinely lived and worked in the area: they all had the same sick, gray, desperate look. She pushed toward the bridge, which was full of student groups in sweaters that matched their rucksacks. They also had a vaguely hunted look about them, a sort of dazed listlessness, a lifelessness behind the eyes that was probably something to do with a lack of vitamin C or just a lack of options. The people were like the country itself: almost dead, and seemingly unaware of it. A zombie nation shambling from leader to leader as it slowly disintegrated limb by limb and person by person.

Kristen leaned her forearms against a balustrade. “So?”

He came to stand beside her. “I was wrong. And…” He swallowed. “And, this was wrong. It should never have happened.”

“That’s it? You were wrong? That’s the best you’ve got?”

He sighed. “I thought it would be best if I stayed away. And that was a mistake. It doesn’t matter if I’m close to you now or not. What’s done is done.”

“Why didn’t you just, I don’t know, call? Text? You didn’t have to come all the way here and interrupt my trip. I’m supposed to be working too, you know. I need to get back for the opening-night dinner—”

“I know. I know. And I’m sorry for that, too. I just had to see you. Do you believe that?”

It was a strange question. Why did she need to believe it?

But he sounded so desperate. Possibly jet-lagged. Possibly he hadn’t slept at all.

“You could have come to Toronto.”

“I found out you would be here. I couldn’t wait.” His hand slid an inch closer to hers on the balustrade. “Not any longer.”

Kristen peered at him from the corner of her eye. It sounded rehearsed. But it was the kind of rehearsed that sounded like it was rehearsed in actual therapy, and not in front of a hotel smart mirror with antianxiety affirmations that blinked brightly when the lights came on. She made her voice more level than it wanted to be.

“You practiced this a little, huh?”

The laugh burst out of him so sharply that the tourists turned to look at him. “I missed you so much.”

And although she hated to admit it, she had missed him, too. “Thank you. For saying that. I never quite believe it when people say that, but I believe it when you do.”

She paused. It was time. She had to know. She had no idea how she might handle it, once she knew what he knew, but it was London. There were always opportunities.

“For a while there, I thought you were afraid of me.”

She watched the fear ripple across his features and then go somewhere quiet, like a breeze over the surface of the river below. What replaced it was a sort of forced cleverness, a deliberately flirtatious sensibility that she now recognized as something he did when he was nervous.

“Why would I be afraid of you?”

“People around me tend to die.” She made her voice walk the knife’s edge between wry and sad. Which is to say, she made herself sound honest. “My parents. The dean of my department. One of the other CEOs I interviewed with, and a few others.” She watched him as she mentioned each name. He remained steady. Stoic. “And then there was Sheila,” she said. “So maybe you were afraid that you were next.”

He smiled a little too brightly. “It takes more than that to get rid of me. My being here is evidence of that.”

She had always admired the wiry strength of him, the span and pressure of his fingers, the certainty of his grip. She had always known that if he wanted to, he could hurt her. But then, that was true of most prospective partners. For whatever reason, she had never seriously considered the possibility that he might harm her. Among other things it would be rude, and he was never rude. He had better manners than most fine old Ontario families.

“I would be very sad, if something happened to you,” she said, with real honesty this time. She made sure to hold his gaze. “I don’t like how you ended things, but it’s not like I wanted to hurt you. I never even thought about it. It never crossed my mind. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Some part of him relaxed. She saw it in his shoulders, in the fading line between his brows. “I think so, yes.”

“At first I thought your family was an issue. I thought maybe you even had children.”

The founder of Telo-MORE, Todd, had been thinking about a baby. He’d said as much, that they were swiping for a surrogate, and for just the briefest second Kristen had hesitated. But, she decided, it was best to resolve these issues upstream whenever possible. Wasn’t that what the genetic engineers he employed were always saying? And who wanted parents that lived forever? Codependents with zero boundaries, that’s who.

A sad look had drifted over Anton’s face. “It would be nicer if that were the case.”

“But it’s not.”

“No. It’s not.”

“And you still think there’s no room for me in your daily life.”

He flinched. Like all men, he hated hearing his own words repeated back to him, as though they should have real meaning or consequence. He looked vaguely ashamed. “It sounds so embarrassing when you say it.”

“It was embarrassing to hear it. You were assuming that I wanted something that I never asked for, which says a lot more about you than it says about me.”

Now he just looked annoyed. “I didn’t—”

“I’m not done, Anton. You’ve had your chance to explain yourself, and now I want mine. Let me be perfectly clear. I’m already a Chief Emotional Manager. I’m not looking for even more emotional labor. I don’t need to be married; I already have a man who disappoints me on a daily basis.” She laughed a little. “Marriage is its own black-box process. And I’ve already seen what happens inside, and I don’t want it. I don’t want to be put there. I don’t belong there. You were right about that much, at least. So you can stop worrying about me wanting more than you can give.”

You should be more worried about what I can take away, she thought, but didn’t say. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t said it. She saw the same thought cross his mind, in the way his posture changed.

“There won’t be a next time. You won’t forgive me, for what I’m about to tell you.”

Kristen briefly wondered if this was what other people meant when they said that their relationships made them feel seen. She didn’t much care for it. “Try me.”

His weight shifted. He appeared to be deciding how to say what he’d come to say. “They asked me to spy on you, Kristen.”

She folded her arms. Of the many possible excuses she had expected to hear, this was not among them. “Pardon me?”

“The night we met…” His voice cracked. “The night we met, I was broken. Shattered. And I’d been that way for a long time. My wife was dead and my mother was dead and I had cut my father out entirely. My friends were starting their lives and mine was a wreck. My grandfather was all I had left. But when I woke up in that room, and you were standing there looking at the moon? I thought I was dreaming. And then you were crying, and you needed help, you wanted to get away from him, and I…” He swallowed. “I thought if I could just do this one thing right, then maybe I wasn’t completely useless.”

“You’re not useless.” She tilted her head. “I doubt they ask useless men to spy on women like me.”

He took a deep breath and straightened his posture. “The people I work for, they wanted an insight into your company. Into the technology that Wuv uses. They wanted to know if the technology actually worked as promised. They needed someone else who could learn about the inner workings of the company. So when I came back and did my usual debrief…” He rolled his lips inside his mouth and then out again. “When I told them what happened, what we did, they told me to continue the relationship. By any means necessary.”

The chill that ran through her had nothing to do with the breeze off the Thames. She wasn’t sure which was worse: the possibility that Anton was telling the truth, or the possibility that he wasn’t, and this was all just some sick ploy to get back inside her good graces. Was he really that manipulative? Had she been wrong about him this whole time? She hadn’t thought he was “one of the good ones”—the category of men who claimed the dubious honor of noble intentions and yet couldn’t help reveal the rot at the core. The type of guys who would definitely not finger you if you passed out drunk at a party but would still feel inexorably compelled to tell you how they’d jerked off about the idea, later.

Maybe she had been too eager to buy into Anton’s performance. Maybe she had been seduced by the very idea of decency.

But she was rarely wrong about people.

“Why are you telling me this?”

He looked to the river. “Because it’s the right thing to do. But also—it’s not what I signed up for. I’m an analyst, but I’m not that kind of analyst. And now it feels like I’m not someone that I recognize anymore.” He ran his hands through his frustratingly perfect hair, then gestured broadly at the bridge, at the river, at the empty benches down below that had made appearances in seemingly every spy movie ever. “You see why I wanted to do this in person.”

There was something in his voice that didn’t sound right. He was still working up to the worst of it, whatever it was. The truth was stuck in his throat. Staring at the river, she blinked three times in rapid succession, and watched the Wuv logo appear in her vision. When it dissolved, she turned to Anton. He still wasn’t on the platform, but Wuv could grab ambient data and give him a speculative emotional capital score. Whatever his devices bled out, whatever data wake he had left rippling behind him in public, even the tenor of his most recent posts, they could all be added up to something like a truth score.

But when Kristen turned her augmented vision on him, there was nothing. No difference between the naked eye and the assisted one.

“I didn’t bring any devices,” he said, seeming to have surmised what her slow assessment of him probably meant.

“What?”

“I couldn’t. It’s too risky. I don’t have anything. I’m completely analog right now. Otherwise they would know what I’m doing. They probably already do.”

She still didn’t entirely believe him. Or, she didn’t want to. This was about something else. It had to be. The spy movie setting told her it was. He had chosen his environment too carefully. Too perfectly. It was misdirection. Like the haunted houses just down the alley. He wanted her to be looking at the story he was telling her, and not the one that was really unfolding all around her, the one she was actually in. What did he know already? And what did he want to know? Why had he come all this way? If he was truly serious about the level of surveillance aimed at him, then meeting her in the city with the most cameras per square foot wasn’t exactly the cleverest idea.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

He reached to take hold of her shoulders, but his hands fell. “After we hooked up in LA, I was asked to install spyware on all your devices. And I did it. Because it meant I could see you again.”

For a moment, Kristen saw a blinding white light encroaching on her vision. But in fact it was simply the ambient health monitoring in her lenses warning about a sudden flare in blood pressure.

“They have your emails. Your texts. Photos of you. At home, even. I didn’t recognize it at first. I’ve never seen it. Where you live, I mean.” He tried to smile. “It’s nice, your place. I like it. I like that cubby where the shoes go.”

She heard herself breathing through her nose. She focused on the sound of it, until the glow in her vision faded to the edges. This was how Anton had known about her upcoming trip. Of course. She thought of her father. She thought of her old professor, and the men she’d known more recently. She thought of Wuv, and Sumter, and Mason. She thought of the whole surveillance economy turning every event, every moment, every human interaction into a pay-by-the-minute striptease that only ended when every sperm and egg and genome was accounted for. She thought of herself and her career, and how for just a moment she had felt so smug and superior on the other side of the dataset.

“You’re right.” Her voice was rough. “That is something I can’t forgive.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes were wet. So were hers. She had expected … something else. Something that wasn’t this, that wasn’t him doing the one thing she categorically objected to. There was being seen, and then there was being surveilled. And she despised the latter.

His throat moved. “I…” He was breathing hard, like he was trying not to be sick. “For the record, I really like you.”

Kristen blinked. “Pardon me?”

“I like you. A lot. I didn’t expect to, but I do. Really. I didn’t really know how much until just now, this minute. But I do. I like you like a friend, and as a person, and also like everything else. And that’s why I’m going to tell you the next part. Are you listening?”

He held her face in his hands. He looked desperately sad. He folded her close to him. For a moment there was only his smell: anxious sweat and oud and cashmere and the medicated balm he used when he was chewing his lips too much. Then he was whispering something. He said the words so low at first that she didn’t hear, like he was sounding them out before really saying them.

“What?” Kristen asked.

“Sumter knows,” he said simply.

Her knees gave out for just a second. Then the adrenaline took over and she was fighting to leave his grasp, pushing him away, and he locked his arms around her waist and held her in a tighter grip than she’d known was possible for him.

“They told me to end the relationship,” he was saying. “And when I asked where the order came from, I found out it was a favor between friends. Between Sumter and my grandfather. He knew, Mara. He knew you were with me, the whole time. And if Sumter was able to find that out, my guess is that he knows everything else, too. We would have shared information. In fact, I’m fairly sure that was a condition of his selling my grandfather the company.”

She tasted something bitter in her mouth. He was stroking her hair and hushing her like she was a child. They swayed back and forth together on their feet. Tourists passed them by and gave them sympathetic glances. They thought it was just a breakup, and not the end of Kristen’s life as she knew it.

“But Qureshi doesn’t own Wuv. The buyer is a…” Now she couldn’t even remember. Her mind was a blank.

“A small but influential multinational venture capital firm with selective investments in bespoke technology services?” He blinked. “My love, how exactly do you think this works?”

She shoved herself out of his grasp. “Don’t be a prick.”

“Don’t be naive.” He sounded exhausted. “They were looking for something compromising. Something they could hold over an asset. So that asset would give up information about Wuv. And they figured it out. They—we—had different tools at our disposal than your police services did. We did things—we knew what happened, when you were younger.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her eyes stung. “There was an investigation. The insurance company, and the service provider, they both…” Her throat closed.

“I know. They determined it was an accident.”

“It was an accident. It was a fucking tragedy, I lost everything—”

“You killed them. You researched how to do it from your father’s accounts, so it would blend in with his own queries, or be blamed on him. Then you told your father to change the settings on the fire detector, and you raised a bot army to force a spike in the currency, and the cumulative heat generated by the processors caused the fire. And because you had conveniently stored emergency supplies like flour and extra matches and hand sanitizer in the same room, they acted like a natural accelerant.” His fingers made quotes in the air.

Kristen wiped her face. “You sound just like the conspiracy blowhards who sent bomb threats to my doctors at the children’s hospital.”

Anton winced. “Everyone looked at the fire itself. No one thought to look at the coin. And you got away with it, because you were smart and cute and tragic and you spoke well and you were in the hospital. You ran into a burning house, just to save them. So no one thought to tie it to you. No one wanted to tie it to you.”

Kristen rolled her eyes. She held her wrists together and faced him. “So turn me in, then. If you’re so sure. You have proof? Let’s see it in court. Or is it really all inadmissible?”

He kissed her forehead. He kissed her wet cheeks and the bridge of her nose and even the places on her scalp where she had to style her hair carefully to cover the scar tissue.

He spoke into the skin of her forehead. “It’s never bothered me. The others didn’t, either. Not your professor, not the life-extension CEO, not the roboticist who got behind the wheel with fentanyl in his system, or the AI developer who ate sesame, or the influencer selling stalkerware who slipped in a hot tub while on ketamine. I know it should’ve bothered me, but it didn’t. By the time they showed me all the names, I’d already seen what that first time had done to you. What it cost you. You’re in pain all the time. You’re in Hell, every single day. And it never ends, no matter how many others you take off the board, or how skillful you get at hiding it.”

A sound like a sob escaped her pursed lips and Kristen clamped her teeth together and squeezed her eyes shut and locked her shoulders and made her hands into fists and even curled her toes, anything to keep the truth from leaking out. Anton took hold of her face and leaned their foreheads together. He breathed slow and deep. After three breaths she began to match him. Her nervous system resettled and a shudder went through her. She was shivering. Animals did this, shaking off trauma. There were whole classes on the technique, which she’d learned in the hospital with all the other wounded children. Some of them really got into it. It was easier for kids whose skin could still move.

Anton redirected her gaze to meet his. She could see the whites of his eyes. They were bleary and red. He hadn’t slept. He licked his lips.

“But I need you to hear me now, Mara. You’re very clever, and I adore you, but you’re not a genius. You’ve just been very lucky. And one day that luck will run out. One day they’ll stop seeing a pretty white girl and they’ll see a murderer.”

Kristen reached up to hold his hands. “You say the nicest things.”

“I’m serious. You can’t keep getting away with it.”

Her voice was wooden. She felt very tired. “People get away with murder all the time. There are up to two thousand extinctions a year. Black parents are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white ones. Six million children die of hunger every year. Pollution kills ten million more. This planet’s history is a true crime documentary.”

“You’re in danger.”

Something in her frosted over. “Who am I in danger from, exactly?”

“Not me.” He said it a little too quickly. “But if you love me, even if you just like me, if you ever had any affection for me at all…” He kissed her forehead again, and whispered into her skin: “Please, do not get on that plane with Sumter Williams. You are dangerous, but so is he, and not the kind of dangerous that you can handle on your own. You are strong, but he is powerful.”

Kristen felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She pulled back and looked at Anton. “You think I’m dangerous?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kristen stares at the front door to the monolithic glass house. There are fewer stairs on this side, and she needs to preserve her energy. She has a rough outline for a run of show. Some mental notes. Nothing set in stone. Her raised fist has barely touched the glass when the door sucks open and Sumter pulls her inside, and into his arms.

“Oh, Kiki, thank God.”

It’s an odd replay of their first day here. Only this time, Sumter is doing what he always wanted to do: he takes her face in his hands and kisses her.

It’s an overeager kiss. All tongue, all thrust. Kristen realizes this must be why it’s called “puppy love”: it feels like being bowled over and licked everywhere. Kristen doesn’t even bother trying to return it. There isn’t an opportunity to do so, even if she wanted. It’s like he’s manspreading into her mouth.

“I was worried sick,” he mutters. Now he’s kissing her forehead, her temple, the tip of her nose. “Where were you? What happened? Where’s Nora Mae?”

There is only one answer that will keep him off the scent for any meaningful length of time. “She’s dead. I killed her.”

He seems surprised. “Really? How? She’s a big girl, and you’re so little.”

It’s true. Major physical injury in youth does have the potential to stunt growth, in all sorts of ways. But Kristen doesn’t allow this distraction. Instead, she says: “She took the ice pick that Mason dropped. And she had me down on the beach, and she climbed on top of me and held me down…”

Kristen notices her boss’s pupils dilating. She slows her voice down, adjusting the story as she speaks, to make it good for him.

“… And she was choking me, really hard, harder than I’ve ever been choked before, but then I found a rock. I swung it into her elbow, and then I took the ice pick from her and stabbed her. I think I got her lung, from the sounds it made. She got away from me, but I chased her into the water, and I grabbed her hair. And I held her down beneath the waves. Until she died.”

“God, that is so hot,” Sumter groans, and kisses her and lifts her like she’s nothing. Kristen wraps her legs around him to keep her balance. He kneads her ass until he sets her down on some nearby surface, pausing to lean over her. When Kristen can open her eyes without him noticing, she sees above him the skeleton of the ancient tortoise. He’s put her on the table.

The wood is still stained with Fawn’s blood.

“Waited for this forever,” Sumter is saying, more to himself than to Kristen, as he’s rucking up her shirt. He pulls it off and stares down in awe. “You’re beautiful.”

Kristen shakes her head automatically. “No, not really—”

“No, really. Your surgeons, your doctors, they did such a fantastic job. I thought it would be so much worse.”

A wave of sickness washes over her.

She has to shut her eyes again. So she feels it even more keenly when Sumter starts kissing down her throat to her collarbones and her sternum. “Dreamed of this. For years. My perfect girl.”

He is biting her, very gently. Putting his teeth marks in all the places the fire did not touch. Marking them as his own. “You know, I donated to your burn ward? I endowed a chair. And a grant. Anonymously. I read up on the research necessary to make you well again, and I found the best guy, and I bought him. Lock, stock, and barrel. For you.”

Tears are rolling down Kristen’s face. When Sumter sees them, he kisses them away. “Oh, baby girl, don’t cry. Don’t cry. It’s over. It’s all over. I promise. You don’t have to worry about anything, anymore. Not ever again.”

“It’s just…” Her voice is a gasp. “What you did. For me. I had no idea.”

He licks a stripe along her ribs. “Well, you know what? It was money well spent. Because I am extremely pleased with your care team’s handiwork.”

Kristen wonders, as he traces their edges with his fingertips, if he dictated the size of her post-adolescent breasts. If he told her surgeons what else to fix up, or whether adjustments had been needed to her original form. So much of her treatment is a blur of pain and isolation and drugs. It would have been easy for him to make his wishes known. As easily as he is doing now, peeling her leggings down almost casually.

“Wait,” Kristen says.

Sumter pulls back immediately. He is all concern—suddenly he’s one of the good ones. But he still looks happier than she’s ever seen him. His knuckles are bloody and he has a black eye, and his chin is shadowed with the odd blond beard that he usually only tries to cultivate when he feels insecure about his jaw. It’s the only other indication, beyond his injured hands and face, that something might be amiss. It betrays a certain lack of judgment. The beard is always a bad idea, for him. There isn’t enough contrast between the color of his hair and the pallor of his skin to make a noticeable statement.

He’s a human toner malfunction. Kristen has no idea how Sumter has lived this long without realizing this.

“I’m dirty,” she says.

He smirks. “I’ll say.”

Kristen pushes herself up on her elbows. She places the sole of her foot in the center of his chest. He seems intrigued.

“I want it to be special,” she says. “The first time. But I’m covered in sand. And blood. And…” She licks her lips. “The first time, I want…” She rolls her lower lip between her teeth. “I want to be naked, for you. Raw. And I want you to be naked, for me. I want to know you. I want to know everything. No more secrets.”

“Well…” Sumter lifts her foot and kisses her instep. “After all that, I’m gonna need to clear the pipes at least three different times before I can even begin to do you justice. Plus I should really clean out that elevator. First impressions, and all. So you go upstairs, and take all the time you need.” His gaze lifts. “Unless you want help?”

She smiles fondly and shakes her head. And he lets her go.

She suspects he feels a primal sense of validation at the way her legs are shaking as she trudges up the stairs.

She heard once that people in earthquake-prone regions learned to take showers immediately after the shaking stopped, because aftershocks could take out the water systems. She considers this moment to be a similarly seismic event. Once in the bedroom, Kristen manages to quickly find Fawn’s and Nora Mae’s devices, plus her own. Using her scattered clothes as cover, she makes sure they’re charging. Then she enters the washroom and brushes her teeth and steps under the shower.

She makes sure to be thorough. She scrubs her scalp. She does a deep moisturizing treatment. She shaves the one armpit that she can reach with her wounds, then makes herself as baby-bare as possible everywhere else. She gives herself a mask for twenty minutes, at least. She eats all the snacks in Fawn’s bag—helpfully, they are mostly pre-workout gels designed to make women feel full and focused and fast. Then Kristen brushes her teeth again, and flosses. She draws in her eyebrows. Makes her lips kissable. Makes it look like she cares. She wears a dress that Anton had liked: tight and black on top with billowing white tulle and flowing white chiffon beneath. It’s tight enough to hold a battery pack between her shoulder blades. It can hold all sorts of other things, too.

When she’s ready, she gives herself one last look in the mirror. Her face is a little too pink, almost girlish, but she doesn’t look afraid. Her eyes are still her eyes: blue, with a little flare of gold near the iris. Her mouth is still her mouth: a little too thin, a little too pinched.

Her scars are still her scars. They’re right where she left them.

Sumter is waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. When he looks up, he actually whistles. Some women spend their whole lives dreaming of moments like this one, Kristen realizes. But very few little girls dream of doing the things that Kristen has already done.

“I’d ask if you’re ready, but you obviously are.”

Sumter loops an arm around her waist and she actually flinches. Like she’s an intern at her first trade show. It’s disgusting. He’s disgusting, and so is her performance. She could reach up and grab his hand and dislocate his thumb, she thinks. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. It would just be pleasant and satisfying, like watching video of someone draining an abscess. The sudden impulse to hurt him is itself comforting. It reminds her of childhood. The thought of his howling agony tastes like Kraft dinner with ketchup. Tart. Creamy. Warm. In her mind the taste is associated with biding her time. She has waited this long. She can wait longer.

Sumter ushers her toward the elevator. He raises his hand, then withdraws it. Something has occurred to him, it appears. “Kiki?”

“Yes?”

“You know I love you, right?”

She nods. “Yes. I know.”

“Do you love me?”

This is a test. One she doesn’t know how to pass. One she has never had to pass, ever. “I think I must,” she says slowly. “To have stayed by your side for so long. I had other offers. But I wasn’t ready to leave. I was just…” The words become truer the longer she considers them. “I was fighting my true self, for so long. I was spending so much energy, avoiding what was right in front of me, because I thought I wanted to be something other than what I was.”

He frowns. “And what’s that?”

“Your secret weapon.” She nods at the elevator. “I think it’s time for my reward, don’t you?”

He grins. He squeezes his fist six times. The doors whisper open. Inside, it still smells of bleach. And the journey downward is very long. They go so deep beneath the tropical sands that the air gets cold. When the doors open again, they open on blackness: a vast and echoing void, with a single glowing spot at the center.

Sumter doesn’t turn on any lights. He simply takes her arm, like he’s escorting her to a seat at the opera, and marches her into the darkness. It is very cold here. There is the faint hum of air purification systems. Their steps echo into what is obviously a huge space, bigger than even the mansion above them would have implied. As they draw closer to the glow, she recognizes the space for what it is: a huge virtual production studio, hung with white silk. It rises out of the darkness like a moth. When its lights hit her, the screen begins to change.

They’re at the end of a short hallway, one featuring a Nordic-styled white wall with cursive vinyl decals stretched over it. The text has a sweetly rounded font, displayed in a kind of soft brushed-copper color that was trendy when Kristen was growing up.

Before Wuv.

Before the fire.

Before a lot of things.

The text should rightfully spell out the more anodyne saying, in that faux farmhouse imitation of warmth: WELCOME HOME.

But in her house, in the house she grew up in, in the house that burned down, the L never quite stuck to the wall. It bubbled and peeled like it was allergic to their space. So the greeting became a kind of prophecy, or a mission statement.

We come home. We come home. We come home.

These letters, too, are missing an L.

Sumter leans down behind her and whispers in her ear: “Remember that diorama I told you I made, in my ethics in technology class? Of your house? Before it burned down?”

Kristen does remember.

She remembers so many things.

And right now, she remembers Sheila quoting Claude Shannon: The enemy knows the system.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It’s funny, what surfaces in the mind, and when. Kristen finds it’s not the milestone memories that shock her when they arrive. It’s not remembering her parents’ fights, or the way they sat when comparing social metrics on Saturday evenings after they streamed, or even the time the septic tank backed up or the winter the pipes froze, back when pipes still froze.

It’s the smaller memories, the little tiny in-between moments, like the whisper-thin black gutters that separate panels in manga and glue the whole story together. Life is lived in those gutters. Decisions are made in those gutters. In the space of a blink, a breath, you can choose to end everything.

I thought you were buying a shed for all those machines.

Have you seen the price of lumber?

Kristen can’t look directly at anything. Not at the reconstructed kit house with its immaculate camera-ready floors, white pine shiplap ceilings, and deliberately minimal decor with perfect Canadiana accents of cable knit and buffalo check and the odd appliqué moose. She cannot allow herself to look at the matching Muskoka chairs draped in sherpa wool in front of the wood-burning stove, or the placards reminding them what to do and how to feel about it: LAKE LIFE IS REAL LIFE. COCKTAILS, CAMPFIRES, AND COZY CLOTHES, OH MY. ALWAYS BRINGING MY EH-GAME.

Hold on, that’s the alarm, sorry guys, it’s a godawful sound for you but it’s like a cash register for me.

Nobody remembers cash registers, honey.

There is even a Thunder Bay amethyst cluster, huge and striated purple and gray and white, with a thin rusty red coating of hematite across the termination like it had been used to stab someone and then given pride of place. It isn’t precisely the same as her mother’s favorite piece—that piece had exploded, probably, at those temperatures—but it is of the same vintage. It looks just like the one that appeared on the ladder shelf that always sat behind her mother, when she was on video. It had sat with her other Canadian minerals: nephrite jade and epidote and her treasured tiny cluster of hessonite garnet from the long-dead Jeffrey mine, ammonites and amazonite, sodalite and labradorite and lumps of raw silver from Cobalt—from the place, Kristen thinks now, where she had ended what Nadine’s shitty husband had considered to be the life he deserved.

You know you can turn off the alarms when you’re streaming, Dad. It’s not that hard. Here, I’ll show you on the app.

“Do you like it?” Sumter’s voice is almost shy. He runs the backs of his knuckles down the back of her arm. He is tentative, tender, tremulous. Kristen feels an unexpected pang for him. If he’d lived the rest of his life with this kind of open vulnerability, he might not have spent the past decade perfecting a diorama of a teen girl’s house.

The rug sprawled across the floor is the same rug Kristen’s parents fought over: her dad had wanted the national Maple Leaf tartan, and her mom had wanted the Ontario one. Her dad settled the argument by putting it to a poll on their Daily Decor video.

This is the one her mother wanted. The one they never bought. Sumter has truly thought of everything.

“It’s perfect, Sumter.”

“I know it’s a lot.” He sounds charmingly self-aware and self-deprecating. The way he always does, right after he’s finally unveiled the latest stage of a project. The tension of secrecy is gone, and now he can bask in the afterglow of having pulled it all off.

Kristen wonders just how many times she will have to burn down this house before it finally dies.

“I just wanted you to be able to see it one last time,” Sumter says.

Like this is exposure therapy, like he’s an accredited professional with a bunch of letters after his name and not some startup upstart born with a silver spoon up his ass. Her own therapists, the real ones, never had the audacity to pull this particular variety of condescending bullshit. (Well. There was the one. But something had happened to the screws in their special new ergonomic chair, and that guy fell and slipped a disc and had to go away for a while, and so Kristen got a new doctor. All for the best, really.)

Sumter pulls away from her and tips up her chin with a finger. “And I need to know you’re done with all this, that you’ve really let the past go, before we can leave.”

Kristen tries to focus on the positive. She hauls a smile up to her face with approximately the same force required to pulley a grand piano up from a sidewalk. “We’re leaving?”

He smiles. “I’ll show you.”

The room goes black.

When the lights come back on, Kristen sees the true magnitude of the room. It’s like an airplane hangar. Or possibly the interior of a decommissioned nuclear reactor. It felt about that deep, going down. She has never been here before, but it is very familiar nonetheless. It is a kind of hospital room. It is climate-controlled. It hums with lights and fans and machinery. The walls gleam white and sterile, with the same tiles spanning the floor, walls, and ceiling. Kristen’s vision keeps sliding around the walls to avoid looking at the streaks of blood on the floor.

It’s hard to tell how old the blood is: just old, or very old. To Kristen, it’s the same color as the fourth day of a regular period.

Kristen has dreams about places like this sometimes. She doesn’t dream about the fire very often. The drugs they gave her immediately afterward have mostly erased it from her memory. Propofol. Ketamine. They spared her from the worst of it. But she does still dream about the burn ward. She does still have dreams about hospitals. Her doctors had told her, over and over again, that the initial trauma wouldn’t be the real burden. It would be everything that came after. The severity of her burn was less important than how it was treated. That was the best predictor of success in healing: consistent care.

Life is like that, too, her therapists had said, when she related this to them.

Along one wall, much like a wardrobe, there hang a series of clear plastic bags. Fawn’s body is in one of them. Her eyes are still open. Hari is there. And Brock and Pearce and Jasper. Even Jong-soo is here, and so is all the gear he took from the glass house. It’s clustered on a stainless steel prep table. The oilcloth had been hastily wadded together and thrown on the floor.

The only one missing is Nora Mae, and Kristen feels a jab of delight at that.

Sumter is stuffing Mason’s still-twitching body into one of the bags next to Fawn’s. It’s obviously difficult for him. He looks like a man trying to carry an oversized beanbag chair up several flights of stairs. Mason keeps falling across him, saying “Sorry,” as though he has any reason to apologize. Sumter keeps saying “Sorry,” back, like they’re two people sharing a revolving door, and one of them isn’t actively participating in the murder of the other.

“He’s, what, a hundred and eighty pounds? You think? Kiki, you saw his insurance forms, right?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I mean, he probably lost some weight here. We’re all down at least five pounds. Which is probably for the best, honestly. They say you’re supposed to keep an empty stomach, during the trip.”

“What trip?”

“Mars,” Sumter says, like he’s talking about one of the new subway stations, or some other remote wilderness that people wish were more hospitable to human life. “Therapeutic hypothermia works a lot better when we’re not reheating last night’s leftovers inside your gut. Also reduces the risk of infection and contagion when we get there. Like, what happens if you thaw out and throw up and give everyone norovirus? Scuttles the whole mission.”

Mason’s body finally flops all the way into the sac and Sumter zips up the side. Slowly, Mason turns to see Fawn’s body hanging beside his own. He blinks. “She’s still kinda hot,” he says. He turns to Sumter. “You said I could keep her. You promised.”

“I know, buddy. You just need to be patient a little while longer, okay?” Sumter hooks up a small vacuum to a hole in the sac via a long, coiling hose. “I’ll catch you on the flip side.” He switches the vacuum on. It’s surprisingly quiet. Quiet enough for them to hear the sound of plastic squeaking on plastic.

“Now, don’t worry,” Sumter assures her. A minute later they hear the beep of a slow heartbeat. “Hear that? He’s not going to asphyxiate. Not really. It’s just a lot easier to keep the bones and organs from drifting in zero-g when you hold them in place. You have to swaddle people in long-haul hibernation. Like a baby.”

Sumter opens a tall, thin cupboard. Icy fog billows out as it rolls out to its full extension. He lifts Mason’s sac off the rail like he’s a carcass ready for the butcher, and then hangs him inside the cupboard. Then he begins fussing around with tubes and needles. He finds a plug in the sac in the region of Mason’s heart, and stabs inside. Blood flows down the tube. It is dark red, almost black, the kind you lose when you’re really, truly dying.

“See, this was our problem with earlier models, when we had tried with the other women,” Sumter is saying. “We couldn’t get the heart-port right. The bag didn’t fit! Can you believe that? They don’t make long-haul hibernation solutions for space travel in women’s sizes. Isn’t that wild?”

He stabs another needle into another plug near Mason’s left wrist. Clear fluid enters him here. A digital display lights up on the cupboard. It begins counting upward. He hip-checks the cupboard, and it rolls closed. The cupboard display continues counting.

“This used to take forever,” Sumter says. “Like, one degree per hour, until the body got to eighty-nine degrees. That’s the torpor state. Back then, the needle went up into the brain through the nose. Like mummification, right? Crazy.”

“But you can thaw him out, right?”

“I mean, sure, in theory,” Sumter says.

“How?” Kristen asks.

The system looks like a piece of consumer technology, not something on the cutting edge of engineering. Sumter wouldn’t use something that wasn’t beautiful. Every piece of kit he uses reflects what he believes to be the human ideal: thin, white, and hard.

“Sous vide, baby.” Sumter sounds like he’s narrating a special new reverse-sear technique. “Every unit gets thrown into an insulated saline bath, and warm fluids re-enter while the body repressurizes and acclimates to local gravity. You won’t even feel it. It’ll be just like going to sleep. I’m gonna give you a sedative so I can take your IUD out.”

The hairs on the back of her neck rise. “So I go to sleep here, and wake up on Mars?”

“Uh-huh.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. It could be three years from now, or it could be three hundred years from now. It depends on how fast robots can set up the habs.” He says it like he’s planning out how to diversify their registered retirement savings portfolio. “Where did you think all the money went? You know I have other investments.”

“Is that all I am to you?”

Sumter looks a little flabbergasted. He makes a sputtering sound. “Kiki. Don’t be modest. Come on. You know why I chose you.”

“No. I don’t.”

He holds her face in his hands. “Well, for one, you never gave us your eggs. Even Fawn let us freeze her eggs. Well, her embryo. Hers and Mason’s. I mean, how are we supposed to populate new worlds with Earth’s best and brightest if you won’t at least let me have your eggs?”

“And more significantly…” He strokes her hair between his thumb and forefinger. “Because we’re just alike, you and me. Two peas in a pod. A perfect match. We’re both orphans. And we both know what it takes to make it. We both know that achieving anything requires sacrifice. We both have a killer instinct.”

She has no idea why Sumter has this particular obsession: she attributes it to the fact that his family’s attorneys looked far and wide for other heirs who might try to make a play for Sumter’s fortune. They even searched through reams of publicly available genetic data from various brands of at-home test kits.

And then Kristen realizes that Sumter has another reason to look for any possible relatives.

I know you were never close, but still, finding him that way, that’s … alarming.

She thinks of how Mason’s eyes softened when Sumter told him that they’d found Craig’s body in the water. She thinks of how Sumter’s watch—his prized possession—was missing, and how his luggage was the only set that hadn’t been carried inside, how he had been so concerned with bathing outside and keeping the house clean of any trace he might have left behind. She remembers bumping into Craig’s body, floating in the water. The face gone, the toes and fingers gone—no way to truly tell how long he’d been dead.

“Craig was your cousin,” she says.

“Bastard cousin, yeah. Still pretty bright—just not so much, toward the end.”

She recalls the way the door was open on the plane. The way that Sumter insisted to her that the black box wasn’t there, that he couldn’t find it. How he hadn’t been worried about losing his prized watch. How everyone assumed this was a team-building exercise. How the house being his might back up that theory if anyone investigates.

“He’ll be your DNA match. So you’ll be declared dead.”

He makes finger guns and shoots them at her. “Bingo.”

She has been outmaneuvered, and soundly. You’ve just been very lucky. And one day that luck will run out. But she still has one card left to play.

So Kristen pretends to be very interested in this latest project of his. She runs her fingers over every surface. She inspects every menu on every display like they’re leading a design audit. She will need to do what she did during their first conversation, their interview. She will need him to talk about himself.

“Why did you need to fake your own death, Sumter?”

“Look at you, going all girl detective.” He is staring at her. He looks absurdly proud. Then he seems to remember himself. “I should have told you from the beginning. See, the thing is, it doesn’t work.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Kristen makes her voice very gentle. “What doesn’t work, Sumter?”

“Wuv. It never did. At least, not the way we said it would.”

Kristen remembers Sheila giving her the Wuv demo on the day of her interview. Sheila had seemed so proud. Not arrogant, but delighted to be there, and happy to show off her handiwork. And at every other demonstration Kristen saw her do, she had seemed just as proud. Confident. Not even a hint of anxiety or desperation. She had been the kind of innovator everyone told little girls they could grow up to be, if they just did every single thing right and never made a mistake or had needs of their own.

Had that really all been a lie? A scam? A con job?

“Why didn’t it work?”

He grins. “Guess.”

Kristen tries to remember Qureshi’s objections to investing, but all she can think of is Anton, and his lips in the palm of her hand. “Interest rates,” she says, simply because it’s a thing that people who actually own things are always complaining about, and Sumter owns more than most. “The borders have hardened. The markets have splintered. It’s harder to move money around, even using an alternative system like Wuv.”

“Well. There is that.” He looks annoyed, like either she shouldn’t have mentioned something so banal and obvious, or he should have thought of it first. “But honestly, it’s even simpler than that. It’s something I should have picked up on, in the research. If I’d ever actually listened to your keynotes, instead of staring at you with my tongue hanging out like a dog, I’d have put it together.” He crosses his arms and leans back. “Okay, I’ll give you this one. What happens to the nervous system, in a traumatized body? What is PTSD, when you break it down to its most essential symptomatic presentation?”

A thousand answers spring to mind. Traumatic flashbacks are the body’s nostalgia for survival. They’re the ruts furrowed deep in an access road no one has serviced in years. They are the proverbial Proustian madeleine, dipped in arsenic tea. But physically, they are something else. Physically, they are simply a symptom of systemic nerve damage.

“Signal disruption,” Kristen says. “It’s signal disruption. Cross-wiring. Misfires.”

Sumter snaps his fingers and points at her. “Exactly. And what does Wuv rely on, to put together an accurate portrait of you or me?”

She has been so stupid. They have all been so unforgivably stupid. They have wasted their lives—and their deaths—on an idea that anyone could have told Sumter about, if Sumter had allowed himself to be told anything he didn’t want to hear.

“You had a signal latency issue. Like with high-frequency trading and direct market access. Wuv relies on a diverse set of inputs to create a composite, but not all the inputs arrive at the same time, because they come from different networks with different protocols. So the composite can never be accurate. And…” Every one of her slides flickers through her mind. Every conversation with every doctor. Every advisory label on every prescription. “And the chemicals that make up human response move at different rates, too. The four types of estrogen all have a different half-life, and that’s just one hormone. There are over sixty, and we’re still finding or synthesizing more.”

Sumter nods encouragingly. “But?”

“But the sensory inputs that feed into Wuv don’t know that. So they feed unstable values to the Wuv composite, and the composite can’t self-correct. So Wuv verifies the input values again. And if they’ve changed in the interval, it looks like an error. Which needs another verification. Which creates…”

Sumter’s eyes glow. “Go on. You know the answer.”

She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “A consent violation loop. It creates a consent violation loop.”

Sumter gives her a long, slow clap. “Give the little lady a set of steak knives; she’s won this round.” He beams. “And you say you’re not technical. God, I can’t wait to get you pregnant.”

Now she does laugh. The irony is too much. Too sharp. It cuts too deep. But Sumter takes it as encouragement.

“And, like, sometimes stuff doesn’t work. Or it doesn’t work a hundred percent effectively a hundred percent of the time. And that’s fine. Nobody cares. Does it matter if the essential oils or magnets or whatever work? No. Because they’re doing the thing you paid for them to do: making you feel like they worked, so you can feel like you actually solved a problem and maintain some sense of agency and control over your own life.”

For some reason, she is reminded of her job interview. It is as though the conversation they started that day never really ended. Like all her worst moments, Kristen is still living it.

“I mean, it’s not like we were shipping out lettuce with E. coli on it, or something. It wasn’t dangerous. It wasn’t going to kill anybody. It’s not like a car that randomly explodes, or something. It’s not a cancer test that doesn’t work. It’s not even dangerous in some vague way that never holds up in court, like you can use it to buy ads for genocide or something, or tell fat girls to kill themselves, or whatever. I mean, shit, I was collecting honest affect data on how people really felt about abortion, not whatever bullshit they told their interstate border guards!”

He has clearly been developing this rant for days.

“And you should appreciate that, Kiki. You know better than anybody how those kinds of platforms can destroy people. I mean, I’ve watched the video. Your parents’ marriage. Wow. Just, like, wow.”

Kristen nods, to let him know that she also believes fundamentally that her parents would have been happier apart. Possibly with one or the other dead. She wasn’t picky. Not at first. When her dad became a FujeeKoin evangelist, Kristen’s cost-benefit analysis had shifted. Her mother could catch another man, within months of her husband’s funeral. Or, even better, she wouldn’t. She could renovate her brand into a model of strong widowhood, instead. But Kristen’s dad? He would enjoy a succession of women closer and closer to Kristen’s own age, each with longer hair than the last, until he settled on the one most likely to wear prairie dresses to the tradwife orgy.

At least, Kristen had assumed as much at the time. It had seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen, ever. She’d had no idea how bad things could really get.

“Like, aside from whether or not it actually worked, it’s a pretty basic idea. It’s an affect detection system that harvests ambient sentiment and physical response data and generates a score, and the score can be tied to a voucher system that can then be spent on causes you support. That’s the pitch. Simple. Right?”

Kristen nods again.

“But, you know, Sheila, she had all these visions of what could go wrong. She told me, during our last trip up to Haliburton. For Thanksgiving. After we went to LA and landed Qureshi. You remember.”

Kristen does remember. She remembers Sheila leaving early. Her dog got skunked on an early morning hike. She had to find a vet. Or a groomer. She couldn’t possibly stay in the house. At least, that’s what Fawn told her, later. What she remembers is hearing a car door slam and looking down at Sheila from the window of her guest room. She remembers raising her hand to wave and wondering if the other woman was all right to drive, because she looked like she hadn’t slept all night.

“She said it was good that Wuv didn’t work. Because if it actually worked the way we wanted it to, it could be used to identify how people felt about … anything. Their families. Their friends. Their governments. And I said, Yeah, Sheels, that’s the whole idea. That’s the whole fucking business model. And then she got all upset and said it would be used to identify queer people in countries where it’s still illegal. That was just one example, she said. So I said, Well, then it’s kind of their fault for choosing to still live there in such a backward, stupid place, isn’t it? But then she called me an asshole and said she was going to tell, you know, everybody. So, you know, obviously, I had to take care of it.”

Kristen desperately wishes she had killed this man when she had the chance.

She has had so many chances. Rides home. Hotel rooms. Catered lunches. The time he turned around too quickly on a stories-high escalator in the new terminal at Pearson, loaded down with an everyday bag that would have been good for a solid week: all he’d needed was just the gentlest push, the kind of gesture that might have even looked like Kristen had been trying to help, when detectives reviewed surveillance video during the inevitable inquest. But she had wasted all those chances to rid the earth of this man, and now Sheila is dead. The technology will fall to the most powerful, those with the worst motivations and enough money.

And Kristen is going to die, too.

“I mean, for one, she was going to destroy our valuation. That was your equity, Kiki. She was going to clean it all out. And secondly, if there were any kind of investigation, it wouldn’t just be me on the hook. They’d have found out all about you, too. Probably. I covered my tracks, tried to hide my research on you, but you can never be too careful, right? I had to protect you. Us. I had to protect us.”

Kristen wishes she had died in the fire. She wishes she had never set the fire.

She wishes she’d had the courage to tell her mother to leave.

She wishes she’d had the courage to make herself leave, too. Once Dad sank her education savings into FujeeKoin, there had been no reason to stay. It wasn’t like she had ever actually been able to protect her mother from anything before. But no, Kristen had waited. She had wanted to prove her own cleverness, and she had found a complex problem to work on (that wasn’t herself). She’d gotten creative.

“But, good news, we sold the company anyway, and the buyer, well, they bought it. Pun intended. But, you know, the folks we sold it to, they, uh, aren’t as forgiving as the SEC, or the FDA, or well, just about anybody. They’re not what you’d call nice guys. So I started to get a little nervous. What would happen to me if they figured out that we’d sold them a bill of goods? And at that point, I figured I had to start managing my exit strategy. As it were.”

He gestures grandly at the scene around them. And for the first time, Kristen realizes that he has, in fact, given her a major opportunity for healing. He has done everything he can to make her innermost wishes come true. To make her well. To make her whole. To overcome her worst fears.

A new life awaits. Sumter just doesn’t know it yet.

So Kristen nods, slowly. She makes a big show of understanding, putting the whole thing together. “A plane crash. Classic. Very mysterious. Very true crime.”

“Well, at first I thought it might be a bit of an overdone trope, kind of cliché—”

“Perish the thought.”

He points at her. “I made sure you were buckled up, Kiki, after we poured out that champagne. I want you to know that. You had buckled yourself in, because you’re responsible like that, because you think of the details, but I want you to know that I made sure. I didn’t make sure, with the others. And look what happened to them.”

He means Nadine, and the others who were thrown around the plane when it lost cabin pressure and started free fall. She remembers the champagne and nothing else. Only darkness, and waking up God only knows how many hours later. In Hell.

“Nothing happened, I swear. Nothing untoward, I mean. I dosed you all, but nothing really happened after that. Unless you weren’t wearing a seat belt. But whose fault is that, really? Is it mine? I don’t think so. It’s not my fault Hari doesn’t drink, either. This whole thing could have gone a lot easier for him. Those were his choices, not mine.” Sumter clicks his tongue. “You know, I just couldn’t get over the tone he took with you. It was just so uncalled-for. Challenging you like that? In private? You must have felt so unsafe.”

Not hardly.

“What was that? I didn’t hear.”

“Only a little,” Kristen says, pausing to clear her throat. “You were listening?”

He fixes her with a look. “Honey. Come on. Be real. I told you I’d never let anything hurt you, and I meant it. That’s why we need to do this. The whole planet’s dying. We gotta get off this rock to preserve the long-term health of the species.”

Kristen doesn’t bother asking how the long-term health of the species might be improved by the deaths of her coworkers. Not that she has any room to judge, necessarily, but at least she maintained a more curatorial sensibility, when it came to her list. She really handpicked her targets. It was like free-range farming. She only killed the happiest pigs.

“And you want me to have your baby?”

“Why not? Everyone else is. Me and Nora Mae. Me and Nadine. Me and Fawn. Even me and Sheila. You didn’t think I was showing up on Mars without viable embryos, did you?”

She is grateful for the tears, now. They make her look harmless. She pouts. “It’s not very special when you’re doing it with everyone, Sumter.”

He smiles wanly. “The only one I’m doing it with is you, baby,” he says. “We’re gonna have organic life up there. The real thing. You and me. In fact, I think we should get started right now. I want you in local gravity. Even if it is just the once.”

Between her shoulder blades, where her own device is hidden, Kristen feels a single vibration. Then another. And another. And another. She has apparently found the gap or the booster in the network. Her devices’ connection settings are paired to Sumter’s. So are Fawn’s. Any network he has access to, they have access to. The feature is meant to ease the presentation of pitch decks and assist the communication between autonomous agents. On her toe, Fawn’s smart ring is also abuzz. The moment Fawn’s gear is within range of an open network, it should begin firing away all the messages Fawn never got to send. And because Fawn is in marketing and communications, there are likely a lot of them.

She needs more time. “I need more time.”

He gives her a long, condescending once-over. “Don’t get shy on me now.”

“I’m not. I just…” She looks at the racks and racks of bodies. Personally, she had always hoped for cremation. It seemed more fitting, after everything. “I want to do an exercise. You said I won’t be ready for this next phase of our lives until I’m in more control of my emotions. Right?”

He frowns. “I don’t think I said it exactly that way, but fine. Sure. I guess. That was my point.”

She casts a longing look at the Muskoka chairs and the tartan rug. “I want to go home again. Please.” She looks up at him through her lashes. “Please, Daddy?”

Sumter draws his breath so sharply it sounds like he stepped on broken glass. It takes him a minute. But he’s game. He’s probably imagined this very thing. Why else would he have gone to all this trouble?

“Sure thing, baby girl. I—” He catches himself. Smiles wryly. “Daddy’ll be over there, when you’re ready. Do you need a minute? Because Daddy definitely needs a minute.”

She gives him two very girlish thumbs up. And she gives him more than a minute. Exhaling slowly, Sumter starts walking. When he’s halfway to the seats, he gestures, and the lights go off and the stage is set. Slowly, soundlessly, while his back is to her, Kristen removes Fawn’s ring from her toe. She leaves it exactly where she stands, in the warmth of her own footprint. Then she takes out the other devices. It takes the willpower developed through years of planning not to look at them before she puts them on the floor.

When she looks up, Sumter has sat down. He is peering into the dark. He can probably make out the ghost of tulle and chiffon. She fluffs up her skirt. Smooths down her hair.

She is ready to finish the job.

“Daddy?”

Sumter jolts. His smile is tight. “What is it, baby doll?”

“I want to talk to you. I need to tell you something. But I’m afraid it’s gonna make you real mad.”

He’s watching the way her bare feet cross each other on the rug. “You can tell me anything, Kiki. You know that.” He plucks the air with his fingers. “Come here.”

Kristen climbs down into the Muskoka chair and balances herself on his knees. He groans a little. She isn’t sure if it’s arousal or pain or both. She doesn’t care. She twines her hands behind his neck.

“Is this okay?”

“It’s more than okay, but nice girls don’t sit like that, sweetheart.” He slips his hand under her knee and rearranges her so she’s side-saddle on him, not astride. But his hand stays there, under her knee. And she can feel him under her, just barely keeping his hips in check. “There. That’s better. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

When she has imagined this conversation in the past, or tried to write this letter, or even, God help her, tried to do this with sock puppets in one very earnest intern’s office, she had no end of things to discuss. But now, it’s hard to pick just one thing.

“Go on,” he says. “Don’t be shy.”

Sumter smiles at her sincerely, and for a moment he is the harmless boy Kristen met, the one with too much money and too many ideas, none of them especially good. None of them had seemed so bad, either. Not on the surface. But of course it takes some imagination to see how good ideas might go bad, and that is the quality lacking in most boardrooms. They can imagine success. They cannot, and will not, imagine failure. Or the ramifications of developing a technology that knows how everyone truly feels about everything.

“I don’t like the new token system.” Kristen rubs her feet together. They’re cold. Sumter chafes her bare legs with the palm of his hand. The other plays with her hair.

“What do you mean?” he asks neutrally.

“I don’t like that you’re auctioning off what I get to wear to school, on the internet,” she says plainly. Sumter’s hands freeze. “Or what I get to eat. Or if I get dessert. Or what chores I have to do.”

After a long pause, his voice cracks when he says, “You don’t?”

“No. I don’t. It makes me feel like you don’t really care.”

“Oh, Kiki, baby, Daddy cares. He really cares.” His hands resume their movement. “Besides, Daddy was only experimenting. He didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

Kristen feels a wave of nausea roll over her, because that was in fact exactly what he had said, over and over again. That it was only an experiment. One revenue stream among many possible revenue streams. A side hustle. It wasn’t exploitive, he told her mother, behind closed doors. They were just letting the internet decide if she had to sit at the table and finish her vegetables. Harmless. No different from calling up your in-laws for advice. Only they were getting paid to do it. They were collecting valuable data. Data that someone else would want to leverage, someday. It was an investment.

Sumter threads a finger between her knees. “Is there anything else Daddy asks you to do, that you don’t like?”

She waits until he looks up and meets her eyes. “I don’t like that you moved us so far away, up north. I don’t think Mama is very happy here.”

“Noted,” Sumter says. He pauses. “I will ask her about it. But we’re talking about you, remember?”

“I don’t like that there are cameras everywhere,” Kristen continues. “I’m never sure if we’re streaming or not. I don’t like not knowing what’s live and what isn’t. It makes our house feel like…” She looks around at the studio. “A set. Like it’s fake. Like we’re fake people.”

They are fast approaching the hard wall of Sumter’s therapeutic acumen. She can tell by the distracted way his head keeps turning toward the darkness, where the bodies hang waiting. “I’ll buy us an on-air light,” he murmurs. “Do you hear something, sweetheart? It sounds like…”

It’s the sound of her devices, vibrating persistently against concrete, several meters away. At this distance the buzzing takes on a sort of Doppler effect.

“Sometimes I have really bad thoughts, Daddy. About you.”

Sumter swings his focus back to her. “Oh yeah?” He runs a hand up her leg. “Is that why you tried to sit on me like that, before?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you want to try it again?”

She nods. He nods, too. He slides lower in his seat. She swivels on him. Braces her legs. She hikes her skirt up and reaches underneath, surrounds him in frothy white tulle and chiffon. “I knew it,” Sumter is muttering. “I fucking knew you’d be like this.”

Kristen freezes. “Like what?”

Under her, he’s sweating. He’s lost. He doesn’t know up from down. His balls aren’t just blue, they’re ultramarine. International Klein blue. Bluescreen-of-death blue. Sumter presses a kiss to her chest and his lips are ice cold.

“Damaged,” he says. “Permanently.”

Kristen nods sadly. She presses a kiss between his brows. “You’re right, Daddy,” she murmurs, and slams the ice pick into his neck.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Sumter punches her in the stomach.

It’s more painful than Kristen expected. A different kind of pain than she’s felt before. And she’s felt so many kinds. She’s able to isolate it, as he slams her against the floor. Stars explode in her vision. He kicks her. She pukes a little. Some of Fawn’s half-digested gels come up. She spits them out. When the lights come up again, she can see what flavors they once purported to be.

“Where is it?”

Sumter is holding his hands to his neck. Trying to stop the bleeding. His voice sounds oddly like it does when he’s relaying orders while brushing his teeth at the same time. Kristen rolls over, still coughing, and sees him make a beeline for her and Fawn’s devices. She climbs to her feet. The level of pain is entirely new. She suspects a broken rib. She pushes herself across the floor on all fours.

“Goddamn it, Kiki!” He’s stomping on her devices. Ending her calls for help. “I have a vision here! I have a plan!”

Kristen side-checks him and he falls over her. The ice pick is still in her hand. She drives it into his body, quick and shallow, tiny punctures, again and again and again. Her mother’s true crime obsession was full of all sorts of helpful pointers. But Sumter grabs her wrist and twists. She hears the fracture before she feels it. She screams. And then she laughs. When she laughs, he hits her. He uses an open palm.

Once. Twice.

“Stop! Laughing!”

She can’t. She snorts back blood and spits it out. He dances backward, disgusted. “Wow,” she says. “Margaret Atwood was right.”

“Huh?” Sumter asks, just before he slips and falls backward onto the polished concrete, which is now coated in blood.

Kristen pounces. He grabs her arms. She bites his neck. Sticks her tongue in the wound. Rips into his tendons like they’re cheap cuts at an all-night hot pot place. He’s howling, writhing.

This is far more satisfying than anything else they could have tried. More intimate. More vulnerable. Searingly real. Dizzyingly powerful. Oh, he wanted to spank her? He wanted to be her daddy? That’s cute. That’s adorable. But Mara Kristen Howard has a reputation to maintain, thank you very much. Unlike Sumter, she still has some dignity left to preserve. She plants her knees on his shoulders and covers his mouth and nose. She squeezes until she feels the cartilage snap in her hands.

He is kicking. He is trying to launch himself away from her body, tip himself over and out of her grasp.

Sumter must never have attended a self-defense class, Kristen thought. Otherwise he’d have known that the easiest way to escape an attacker was to use leverage to one’s advantage. If someone covers your mouth, you’re supposed to pull not at his hands but his little finger, until it breaks, and then you can run. If someone chokes you out, you’re supposed to thread your arms through his grip and push, rather than clawing at his hands. Use your legs to throw him over. Be smart. Be strategic. When of course the best strategy would be to stop these problems before they can start.

Everyone is always so concerned about telling girls and queers and Black and brown folks and Indigenous women and even little kids online how to stop these things, how to anticipate threats and avoid them, and no one talks about just getting boys to stop being boys. She and her mother had pondered this once, during a rare, private, unrecorded moment—about whether, as with the baby Hitler version of this temporal trolley problem, they would choose to go back in time and kill the tech barons.

And that’s the thing. That was how she knew, deep down, that her mother would be completely okay with the way Kristen had decided to resolve their issues, and spring them free of their kit-house cage. She had thought her mother might be a little sad, for a while, and then get over it. But Kristen hadn’t planned that her mother would be in the house that day.

That was the real tragedy. Apparently Kristen’s dad had texted her mom to say that the currency was surging, and he had insisted she come home from work early to celebrate their future. It had simply never occurred to Kristen that he might want to share his victory. She had never imagined that he might actually love them, not really.

It’s only when Sumter Williams is well and truly dead that Kristen realizes she’s been saying all this out loud, in a whisper, as though she were soothing a child.

There is still the problem of escape. With her devices in bits, she can no longer call for help. Even if she could, she is no longer certain she could speak. It hurts very much to breathe. She is dripping sweat. It feels like the case of strep she had when she was little, before they moved. Some of her therapists had suggested that this infection had caused changes in her brain. Obsessive, antisocial behaviors. All the result of a perfectly ordinary organic inflammatory response, combined with a misfiring, self-loathing autoimmune system.

Kristen limps over to the table where Jong-soo’s gear is. The food is still there. If Nora Mae is locked out of the house, that means she has no hope of finding sustenance on the island. She may already be critically dehydrated. Kristen opens a pouch of electrolytes and tries to drink. She can only sip.

Across the room, her house blazes back to life. In a fully lit environment, the projection is much harder to see. The scrim looks shabby. The technology is old. It was probably bleeding-edge when Sumter’s parents bought it. Now it’s practically retrofuturistic. A nostalgia purchase. A conversation piece. In Sumter’s rendering of her childhood home, there is a fire in the woodstove. It’s kind of pretty. She wishes Anton could see it. She knows he’s seen the other images: the curled husk, the blackened beams, the caution tape.

The enemy knows the system, and Kristen knows how to fool a fire detector. And despite everything she has learned about the Williams’s vacation home, she is still just as willing to bet that the fire safety system will call the nearest authorities, if triggered. As sure as she had been on that first day. In fact, it is likely the system is on a redundant circuit intended to succeed when the first fails.

Pausing to spit more blood, Kristen hobbles over to a mesh desk chair. She drags it over to the table. She flips open the first aid kit. She peels open the cans of jellied ethanol. She gets to work.

Not technical? Please.

It takes longer than she’d planned, mostly because the pain in her wrist and hand is worsening, and because she has to throw up a couple of times. But eventually, Kristen pushes the mesh chair closer to the elevator. On the chair is her little bristling hedgehog of explosives: the ethanol, a box of matches, and a small bottle of hand sanitizer, all held together with paper tape, wound with twine, and stuffed with cotton gauze soaked in some acetone cleanser she found in a cupboard.

The elevator is still there, waiting, when Kristen waves what’s left of Sumter’s hand in front of the sensor. She had guessed that there would be a subdermal chip buried in it somewhere. And she enjoyed the process of hacking off his appendages with a box cutter.

When the door opens, Kristen braces it with her body, and carefully wheels in the chair. She has made a very halfhearted wick. She’s not sure it will catch. If anything, it’s more reasonable to expect the fumes to do the job. And if this is the case, she will likely die in flames. Just like she should have, years ago. Either way, the elevator will be sent back down to her floor once the system recognizes a fire.

Her hope is that it will also trigger an alarm, and the alarm will call the house, and the house will not answer, precipitating an external response. Her hope is that Sumter has not taken the entire system offline. Her hope is that he still had some infinitesimal regard for the idea of regulation, or at the worst, forgot that anything was hooked up.

Then again, she thinks (as she braces the matchbox between her knees and strikes the match with her other hand): Who invites Kristen Howard to their house without first turning on the fire alarm?

AFTER

Kristen wakes to the sound of the ocean, in a bedroom she doesn’t recognize. Her wrist is expertly taped. So are the wounds on her side. And her face.

Anton is there. He somehow looks even more terrible than he did when she’d seen him in London. But now he’s smiling. He appears ragged but supremely confident, the way people do when they’re sleep-deprived and punchy, running on fumes, capable of things they’d never allow themselves to do in daylight hours. He wears a magnificent cream-colored cable sweater, linen trousers, and the cologne Kristen smells in her dreams.

It’s weird to feel flickers of arousal in this moment, but she attributes it to leftover adrenaline.

“Took you long enough,” Kristen croaks. She remains lying down. She is torpid, like a serpent after devouring prey much larger than herself. There is no sense expending any extra energy. Working hard at anything is what got her in this position in the first place. Clearly, the results speak for themselves.

“Well. Customs was terrible.”

She smiles back. It hurts. Everything hurts. “How did—”

“My friend has a yacht,” he says. “And the yacht has a chopper. And I was persuasive.”

“Persuasive.”

“Extremely.” He starts to fill a cup with ice chips. “There’s a woman outside who asked me some extremely pointed questions about my intentions toward you.”

“Nora Mae. Nora Mae Two Axes Palmater. She’s named after four different heroes. From the Eel River Bar First Nation, in the province currently known as Ontario.”

“Nora Mae,” he says, handing her the cup. “I like it.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“Me? Perish the thought. At least, until your ribs aren’t in danger of deflating your lungs.”

Anton reaches up and pulls something out of her hair. It’s dried and red. It is a clot of blood. She’s not sure whose. His hand shakes a little, holding it. It might be horror, or revulsion, or simply exhaustion. Kristen notices herself noticing these things, and realizes she has attached no meaning to the movement. She is no longer reading the tea leaves of his behaviors. She is simply in the moment. She simply is. She is alive. She exists. It is neither bad nor good. It is the experience every therapist has hoped she might one day enjoy.

“So I take it you delivered your notice.”

Kristen nods. “Effective immediately.”

He picks up her hand and kisses the center of her palm. “How did your boss take it?”

“Not well.”

“And to think, they called him a genius.”

“The word’s really lost all meaning.”

“Tragic.” Anton is smiling to keep from crying. His eyes are wet. His voice cracks. “So, what’s next?”

Kristen thinks of every body still on the plane, and every body in a sous vide bag. She thinks about business lore. About an endless series of talks and interviews and “learnings” and telling this story again and again and again: I killed him. And him. And him. And him. Oh, and that guy, too. TEDxQuantico.

And then Kristen thinks about Nora Mae. About all the ways she is a survivor. About all the stories she can tell—stories that Kristen cannot. About the platform this will give her, and what she could do with it.

“I think I’m ready to let someone else take the spotlight,” she says. “Move into more of a behind-the-scenes role. Get some work-life balance. Maybe take a sabbatical. Figure some things out.”

His smile shatters his face. It makes him ten years younger. He looks boyish. Hopeful. “I think I can help with that. I have a contract in mind, actually.”

“Short term?”

“Long term. Binding. Ironclad termination clause.” He holds up a single finger. “The job consists of one task. After that, it’s just asset management.” He pauses, then, “I need you to be my date for my father’s wedding.”

“He’s getting married again? That poor girl.”

Anton smiles. “I was thinking you might bring your diverse skillset to the challenge of developing some … creative solutions. For her.”

Her lip splits open. “I have some ideas.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I honestly can’t recall the moment I first had the idea for Glass Houses. It rippled free from the dark matter between multiple tech companies going nova, when the interest rates were as low as the regulation. You won’t believe me, but I promise I had the idea before books like The Circle or The Startup Wife. I had it before Silicon Valley or The Dropout or WeCrashed. I felt foolish continuing in their wake. But Kristen would not leave. She was with me when I visited Whitehall for work. She flew with me to Dubai, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Denver. She observed, coldly calculating, when I sat down to watch a keynote and that guy touched my hair while he touched himself.

Like the traumatized mind, the creative mind never truly ceases working. It is hypervigilant; it spies details most miss. It plots all the exits. A plot can be a story, but it can also be a strategy. And it can be the place to bury someone. Sometimes burying someone is the only strategy. That is what this book is about.

In truth, I was working on this book before I even knew it existed. I researched it during a pneumonia-riddled childhood spent watching and rewatching the films of Alfred Hitchcock, reading Agatha Christie, and listening to Elizabeth George’s Lynley novels in the car with my mother. It lurked, waiting, as I read The Westing Game and Ripley’s Game and House of Stairs and House of Leaves, and anything by Sébastien Japrisot. It sat beside me in a darkened cinema watching Knives Out. And it pounced when Ruth Wylie at the Arizona State University Center for Science and the Imagination asked me to write a story for Slate’s Future Tense series.

In short, this book was a long time coming. Multiple people were extremely patient with me, not least my editor, Miriam Weinberg; her assistant, Tessa Villanueva; my agent, Sally Harding; and everyone at CookeMcDermid, especially Ron Eckel and Hana El Niwairi. The publicity team at Tor, including Laura Etzkorn, Jocelyn Bright, Emily Honer, Emily Mlynek, and Rachel Taylor, has been nothing short of stellar. I’d also like to thank my cover artist, Zoë van Dijk. I am grateful to all of them.

A bunch of my fellow novelists listened thoughtfully to the premise of “the evil startup on an island book” and encouraged me to keep going. Among them: Alyx Dellamonica and Kelly Robson, Gemma Files, Ramez Naam, Cory Doctorow, Karl Schroeder, Tim Maughan, Joanne McNeil, Natalie Zina Walschots, and Sarah Gailey. Charlie Stross, the man to whom I owe this contract, read early drafts. Kat Howard, for whom Kristen is named, told me the book was “so unbelievably tense” she had to put it aside, which warmed the cockles of my Hitchcockian heart and gave me the nerve to go on. Do us a solid: read their books and tell your friends. In particular, read Charlie’s book Glasshouse. It’s my favorite of his.

I read multiple books while researching this one. Among them: Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman; Whistleblower by Susan Fowler; Bad Blood by John Carreyrou; Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. Thanks to my time in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCAD University, I’d already read Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, as well as Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur.

I also recommend Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, Josh O’Kane’s Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, Georgina Voss’s Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World, and Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User. And everyone should read the dissertations of my friends Damien Patrick Williams (“Belief, Values, Bias, and Agency: Development of and Entanglement with ‘Artificial Intelligence’”) and M. W. Sauter (“A Businessman’s Risk: The Construction of Venture Capital at the Center of U.S. High Technology”).

At SXSW 2018, in the greenroom before our panel, Bruce Sterling asked me how I was doing. I said I was fine, just tired, and blathered on about projects I was working on. Bruce kindly waited for me to finish. Then he looked me dead in the eye and asked: “But how are you really?”

Reader, I was not fine. Finishing this book required both physical and mental healing. I had to build myself into the person who could finally write it, and before that I had to seek help. My friend (and former boss!) Jessica Langer-Kapalka found me care, drove me to appointments, and destigmatized the process. I am profoundly grateful for my therapist and all of my doctors, from the surgeon who removed my gallbladder to the psychiatrists who diagnosed me to the professionals who developed and administered vaccines for COVID-19. I am even more grateful to live in Canada, where public health saves lives. The people who want to kill public health want to kill other people. But they’re lazy, so they outsource the murder to private equity. It’s like hiring the world’s slowest hitman.

Other people showed up for me in ways that I still can’t quite believe. Jerome Veith housed me, no questions asked, when I needed it. Alex Leitch, Mols Sauter, Jairus Khan, and Nat Walschots cleaned my house when my husband had emergency surgery that put him in hospital indefinitely. George rebuilt my kitchen. And my living room. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Scott Smith saved my life on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

Still others kept me thinking during a time in history when it was all too easy to dissociate. Malka Older, Heli Kennedy, and Marco Palmieri taught me how to storybreak and outline. Jess Bland at SOIF invited me to write pandemic scenarios for WHO. Angela Watercutter at Wired kept me sharp and thorough. August Cole and Peter W. Singer asked me to write stories for audiences I couldn’t have imagined, and in so doing gave me the opportunity to learn my craft all over again. Mat Burrows at the Stimson Center handed me a dream project. Eric Desatnik, Brian David Johnson, Anab Jain, and Tom Weis all gave me work that kept me curious. Then there are the group chats: Tuesday, the NFG, the FFC, the HC, and the FNWE consistently keep me motivated to notice more, think again, and question my assumptions.

But really, this book would not exist without two people: my mother, who gave me a love of mysteries, and my husband, David, who assured me again and again that seeing the world would make me a better writer than seeing the inside of any office. David is the pandemic partner everyone wishes they had. Unlike so many spouses, I was not surprised by the one who came home to work alongside me in March of 2020. He was not a stranger; he was the friend I met and fell in love with years ago. He held me when I collapsed, mute, after looking at the projected estimates of orphaned children. He nursed me through multiple surgeries. He loved me, comforted me, and nourished me (and Claudius and Hecate), all while losing his mother and entering an entirely new field of work. He is compassionate, literate, gentle, and braver than he knows. And years ago, he asked me: “How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?”

ALSO BY MADELINE ASHBY

Company Town

THE MACHINE DYNASTY

vN

iD

ReV

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MADELINE ASHBY is a consulting futurist and novelist based in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series and Company Town, and a contributor to How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange. She has developed science fiction prototypes for Changeist, the Institute for the Future, the Smithsonian Institution, SciFutures, Nesta, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Atlantic Council, and others. She is a member of the AI Policy Futures Group at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and the XPRIZE Sci-Fi Advisory Council. Her work has appeared in Boing Boing, Slate, MIT Technology Review, Wired, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. You can sign up for email updates here.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

GLASS HOUSES

Copyright © 2024 by Madeline Ashby

All rights reserved.

Selections from earlier versions of this novel have been previously published as the short stories “Domestic Violence” in Slate, “The Japanese Room” in the XPRIZE anthology Seat 14C, and “The Cure for Jet Lag” in the anthology Women Invent the Future.

Cover art by Zoë van Dijk

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First Edition: 2024