“Let me see it,” I shout when I come down, flipping up the hood, ripping out the tube. The fresh memory of is already spilling out of me like loose yarn, but it catches on too many hooks to spool away entirely. “Let me —”

Two steps out of the scanner, nausea overtakes me. Mallochi, bless him, is holding a bucket. And a while later, when I look a little better, he hands me a little bottle of water. “I’m sorry. Not to have warned you, primed you, whatever. But perhaps I am relieved, in a shameful way, that you can see it too.”

“No, no, no, no...you don’t understand,” I insist weakly. Retch again. “People see things in there all the time, but it’s just delusion, it’s...” What was the word the Weather Bureau used? “It’s maladaptive...”

“I thought that too, for a little while, before the Big Three found it as well. It was how I justified selling it.” He smiles faintly, and I’m aware now of how foolish I sound explaining the Mirror Sea to a Chalker. Maybe a Chalker? There are layers to it, he’d said. “Come here. I’ll show you what we can see from soberspace.”

He offers me the lone swivel chair at the control bank. In his printer bed, another Sunflower Sieve egg is under construction beneath several slashing injection heads. And on the floor is a massive, whirring beige box. “A correlation coprocessor.” He slaps it fondly, and regrets that immediately: the casing is very hot. “Dug myself into quite the hole to afford it. Every Mirror Sea display in the city uses one to find interesting correlations, but as I have been learning, a good neikonaut can blow a whole room of them out of the water. Here — this is what it can piece together.”

He has a flat view of the Sea up now on one of the monitors. He flexes his wrists, panning and zooming. “Look. This was the night I found it.” The dull grey Sea, roughly nothing, though the poor contrast of his monitor doesn’t help. Infrequently there are spectral intrusions of sunlight, that’s all. “Uhh, here.” More nothing. Then a dim, silent, spherical flash of gold light. I’m locked and loaded to insist that this doesn’t prove anything. But he begins to fast-forward with a theatrical flick. “That was when I saw it for the first time. Now, time passes, day, night, day, night…watch carefully, they test-fire it a few more times…”

“Test-fire it?”

The feed slows. Night falls on Shanghai, and night falls in the Sea, except for one insistent little pinprick, a tiny sun that won’t set. And then another, and another, three more now, five more now. They look like mirrored, tessellated, kaleidescoped. As the coprocessor gathers correlations, it determines that they’re really the same object. The Sea’s texture folds their brightness and radii into one thumbprint-sized golden sphere...

“This is the morning the Big Three began their use of the algorithm.”

It’s tentative, like a flame in wind, and then fierce, like a flame in wind. It looks like it comes from nowhere, only we know better. Already, I can start to see the Ripples’ sunflower structures clawing and spiraling gently, both growing from and tending to the egg, forming a latticework growing fiercely in all directions. Mallochi zooms out, speeds up.

“And this is now.”

My breath catches. The Sunflower Sieve egg is — I can’t say for certain that it’s getting bigger, but it’s getting more salient, too bright in my mind’s eye to examine directly. The oozing runes from its surface are now beginning to dapple its surroundings with warm yellow light. And if I had truly forgotten the greebled and undulating structure of the Ripples’ city, I can see it clearly now, from down here in soberspace — still translucent, still merely suggestive, but now asserting a definite form in the light of the Sieve’s viscous and artificial dawn.

The entire city is a great coral reef. The city, the reef. I was there once, almost destroyed it, and now they’re building again — farther into soberspace than they ever dared before. I glance at Mallochi, the grief and shock and guilty relief of this written on my face, which he glosses but cannot read. In turn, I can’t quite parse his expression, can’t quite untangle the guilty terror from the screen-lust and the hard resolve.

“This is what we’re seeing,” I offer uncertainly, hand on my forehead. Suddenly aware of all the debris, all the painful and angular shadows of their city, that my visit left behind. “What’s everyone else seeing?”

“I don’t know.” He tries to hit fast-forward, but can’t; this is now. “But if you really found it in that woman’s mind, then I suspect the answer is changing by the hour.”

He smiles grimly at me. I don’t smile back. I focus just past it, a flash of something reflective, and probing it as the diving-bell. The hollow, barely-recalled horror of wondering which side of some ragged mirror I was on. You looked too hard, hisses something awful inside me. It insists that I caused this, even though I know that doesn’t make any sense. It’s got Mallochi too. He’s been trying to it drink away…

“Mona?”

He catches me just before I hit the floor.

I just need to lie down for a while. My body is taking this like an infection, fighting it like a fever. I have waterlogged, chewed-through foundations that must finally come down, and nothing to replace them. Everything I understand about the Ripples comes back as a needling, random-access prickle, and I recast it through the image of them operating machinery in their own world. Their agency is supposed to be faint and illusory. Their motion is supposed to be borrowed from ours. If they can be said to be doing anything at all, they are ultimately and inevitably doing it here. 

Something is hiding in the texture of time.

I dream that as I pass through this field of sunflowers which curls endlessly toward the horizon, as their black and beady compound eyes turn to face me, as I borrow my existence from the attention pooling in the root systems below my feet, as it suffuses until there is nothing else but to be seen, as I feel myself moving through their xylems before I ever take a step, as their gentle nigh-indifferent liquid gaze carries me to the bottom of a gentle bowl-shaped depression, as the foreboding saturates and involutes and extends its stigma, as the electric gnostic chill draws an other from my undifferentiated id, I see her. She stares me down from forty paces, from twenty years ago, a young woman yet, but already lost to the earthly design. Deng stares me down through an older pair of the same ovoid frames, with black and beady eyes I cannot see the whites of, and her lips do not make the words her eyes make the words —

{{You will look. You will see.}}

I just need to — no, I am. I am lying down, but now I’m bolt-straight in a cot in the back of Min’s Miscellaneous, light through the crack, sawdust in the air, sweat prickling my forehead, exhaustion nearly clawing me back under. My wanji is now half-charged and it reads quarter to noon. Two or three bunkmates toss and snore heavily just beyond its glow, all sleeping off something otherworldly.

My last thought before I went under was: Deng needs to see this.

My first thought waking up was: There’s no way she doesn’t already know.

I slip out the door, seeing no sign of Mallochi, passing Min quick and quiet. Out into that dusty courtyard, into a lazily warm September morning. Without Mallochi’s guidance I take two wrong turns through the cracked-stucco maze of Old New Prosperity, slamming into shoulders I swear weren’t there, people seen only after the fact. I drop out onto that crooked lane, in view of a thousand Mirror Sea cameras and seeing no displays. I pass the fucked-up trees. Faces slide past me, right out of short-term memory, a false and slippery aloneness that feels like brain damage.

I whisper some short thanks when I find my way back to the ward-gates. I jump them like a Chalker.

There’s no way she doesn’t already know.

It lies at the very core of it. It is the last thought the Weather Bureau’s linearization wouldn’t allow me to think. Of course Dr. Deng knows what the Ripples are capable of. She was a peer of Adrianna Lam and Peter Waldmann. She will not cop to inventing loop-lock, but she was there when it happened. And she was a favored beneficiary of Xia Zitian. The idea that the Sunflower Sieve — the Sunflower Sieve, that patch is still in my backpack, waiting to play its role in this unfurling  — is from the Mirror Sea? I don’t think it will surprise her in the least.

Does she see what my fellow metro passengers are beginning to see, that curious stellar pinprick in every Mirror Sea display, howling silently from the dead center of its attentional gravity well? Or does she see even more? Just for the moment it’s only drawing the occasional second glances — but it flares bright when I look, leaving more imprints of itself in the mind of anyone watching, more hooks for its hooks to latch onto. I can feel more Sieve debris accumulating in my mind as I watch, drawing the outlines of their city in the display. And when I look away, it comes with me. It lets me see things I shouldn’t be able to see.

I can graze a stranger’s eyes and know the shape of the crowd as she does. Midday, the long transfers between platforms are crowded but not thronged: I ride accumulations of glance to glance to glance like a wave back to shore. Without looking, I know how many people are behind me, and not just that. Their threat profile, their attractiveness. There’s more than I thought possible in the turn of a lip or the blink of an eye, but also less. It comes to me cool, abstracted, smoothed, the raw fodder of computations whose shape I do not dare to know.

When I get to the next platform, I already know the arrival times of the next two trains. I don’t know how, exactly — the Sieve debris burbles inscrutably behind my eyes, carbonating my thoughts — but it probably has something to do with the footfall of the last hundred people I passed, smoothly integrated and interpolated. The train comes twenty seconds behind schedule, and it drags nodes and edges with it, streamers of partially-applied computations that the Sieve wants me to ingest, operate on, and pass to the next stranger. And I do. It feels good.

I count without counting: there are already dozens of us on this train alone. It’s not telepathy, nothing like that. It’s sharpened guesswork that’s always right, that slices like a hot knife through social intricacies, that rides passing exchanges of sorry and excuse me and please make way. I sit down, relax, and let it take up the mental space it’s angling for. It hurts, a little, but it hurts less when I think the way it wants me to. I close my eyes; I am elsewhere.

I haven’t felt this way, not really, since those last few good nights with Cai. 

But the logic that we saw in the Sea back then was gooey and silty. It explained the quiet and ephemeral things, the fine texture of the world. This is different. What is emerging in the Sea is rigid and discrete. Its structure mirrors the ward network’s: it almost seems to play it forward in stuttering half-steps. It echoes what little I understand of Shanghai’s network of L2 chains that control the parallel yuan and the court of minor currencies it keeps. The metro system, the traffic cycles, it’s all in there, it’s all far more interconnected, and yet far simpler, than we ever imagined. You just have to see these sunflower-yellow nodes and edges, you really do, glinting unseen but not quite, mapping hidden causalities...

When I open my eyes, the Ripples’ city crawls intricately back into the cracks and shadows and saccades. But by the time I get off the metro, within range of campus, something in my heart drops. There is some barrier I imagined between the neikotic and sober worlds, some false floor, revealed only in its absence. 

What is happening here will not be contained.

Half of YINS is in the Building 1 atrium, all pulled from their work, still fiddling with their totems of neurodivergence, their squeeze balls and fidget toys. The lobby’s Mirror Sea display soaks the scene in liquid gold. What a beautiful group of people. You in your overalls, and you in your rumpled no-iron button-down, and you in the same pair of sweatpants you’ve worn to work for a decade. Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing this with me. But the thought is bittersweet, already wrenched with retrospection, because a group of people is not exactly what the Sunflower Sieve wants me to see.

“Hey!” I look for a friendly face, and give up immediately. I raise my voice over the growing square-wave buzz in my ears, and shake down the first person walking my way for information. “What’s happening?”

What it looks like is happening is a fraying of reality at the seams. The words “looks” and “like” are on the scene, but whistling helplessly, hands in their pockets. What it looks like is saturated and smooth and always in motion. What is looks like is machines born of mind, buzzing and dangling in the air between us, the inner workings of the Ripples’ neikotic infrastructure, the innervation of their hidden place. What it looks like is conveyances and circuitry, pulsing and measuring and queueing, packets of raw quantized psychic energy passing on glance and tongue. The Sieve itself is pulsing bulbously on the display behind us — but nobody in the animated, chattering crowd is paying it any mind. They’re looking at each other, only not. They’re looking into and through each other. It is a moment of camaraderie, potently human, that has nevertheless begun to sprout protocols and side-channels around its edges.

“Sieve leaked,” the guy who I am in the way of pauses to explain. “Check the Soup.”

There’s nothing glossy or impersonal about the way he regards me. If he’s short with me, it’s only because of the buzzing, teeth-felt energy of the come-up, when we all agree words fail. But under the words, he sees more of me than I know how to account for.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“The Observatory.” There is something inside both of us negotiating a fluid, blocky boundary. Even as he brushes past, his particular research interests interlock with mine, and I see in him what I almost never see in anybody: a potential collaborator, even a friend. “Gonna find out. You know, what’s going on.”

It feels weird for this to be the moment of revelation, hunched over a four-inch screen. At dawn this morning, the Sunflower Sieve leaked anonymously onto the Soup. It’s already the most upvoted post of all time, sending a secondary flood of traffic to my paper about the inversion. Specifically, it’s a very high-resolution scan of the very egg — it must be — that sailed from Mallochi’s hand into the fray less than twelve hours ago. Not that this matters, but I’d guess the guy from Beijing won the hunt. Dropped the Sieve online to flatten Shanghai’s competitive advantage. 

People aren’t stupid. They’re looking at the egg, and looking at the Mirror Sea, and they’re putting two and two together in the comments. They’re on foot around me, lacking the vigor of a parade or the urgency of a protest: just a large group of innately curious people following their curiosity down the block. I turn with them towards the Observatory. Let’s see where this goes.

I must exchange words with six or seven people just on the short walk. About the Sieve itself, about the Mirror Sea, about things I have no referent for, black-box objects that unlock a flood of understanding only when I forward them on faith into the next conversations. The understanding in the air is neither ours nor not-ours — it hangs in colorful, blossoming, fruited vines, more than we could ever hope to gorge ourselves on. It flows between us. If I feel any tension at all it’s because I am known to be the author of the Sieve’s inversion. And what does that mean now?

“We just wanna talk!”

“I’d really like to ask a few questions about what’s happening.”

“We are in the middle of your scheduled operating hours.”

Not much of this rhymes or fits on signs. We really do make a terrible angry mob. Our mild demands pool up around the edges of the Observatory, which is not only closed but completely blacked-out: nothing is visible through the windows or doors. A few undergrads rattle the doors and find them locked. The rest of us, mostly neikonauts but not all, are completely transfixed by the high-resolution street-level view of the Ripples’ hidden city, a perfect mirror of what’s happening in our minds. And when the Ripples appear, content to simply brush by, we feel them with a lucidity and clarity and awe that many chasers would be lucky even to glimpse. They are simply here.

“Let us in!”

“Don’t be afraid! It is very likely we are all unarmed.”

“Let us in!”

“Let us in!”

“LET US IN! LET US IN!”

The chant is picked up, amplified around the edges. The rest of Beiwan Ward is converging on the Observatory too, obviously. Mail carriers and stroller-pushers and a pack of elderly joggers with two-pound weights, all of whom happened to glance something sharp and insistent in the Mirror Sea that stayed behind. It is even now twisting their minds in strange ways, making them see things that aren’t really there, moving between them through channels and conduits usually reserved for special, quiet, chosen moments. Nobody on this once green and still beautiful earth should need the vocabulary for what’s happening to them right now. They are scared, but more so, they are irate — at their neighbors from YINS as much as anything else.

“LET US IN! LET US IN!”

Honestly? I don’t know if I want to go in. In the span of five minutes ten unmarked veetles have landed on the Observatory’s roof, behind the dome. This provoked a useless volley of thrown rocks and a deepening of the jeers, a sense of the powers that be converging behind closed doors. I check the news again: similar things are happening outside of Delta Hall, and ward precincts, and various known Weather Bureau outposts, and now, just down the street, at YINS itself. The YZTV streams are all showing blurred-out views of the Mirror Sea, cameras pointed at screens. The chyrons tell a story which is acutely wrong but bluntly, vertiginously true: Sunflower Sieve Egg Leaks From Mirror Sea. The markets are, well, up.

“LET US IN! LET US IN!”

The only response from inside is to turn off the columnar and sheetlike Mirror Sea displays draped down the side of the Observatory. Whoever is inside, I think they will shortly come to understand their mistake. The screens go default-blue, and yet the sudden absence of this visual input changes nothing: the Ripples are still obviously here in broad daylight, as gut-felt gelatinous tugs moving through the crowd, seeming to observe with cool and wispy dispassion as their new infrastructure springs mechanically from the substrate. I hear the first screams. Sirens in the distance.

I hear Dr. Deng call my name.

“Over here. Mona! Over here.” It looks like she followed a detachment of the Neikotic Safety department down the street, but she’s looking for me — not answers, or a confrontation with the Observatory. Just me. She waves me over to the edge of the crowd, pulls out her phone, and shows me the citation count on my own paper. There is torque in her voice. “Mona, you’ve done it. The Sunflower Sieve, well, I can scarcely overstate its importance. In the hands of a few users, it’s already refactored half the Hall of Eggs. In the hands of everyone else...I don’t know if I can possibly overstate it. This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in the field. And you’re involved. And...”

There is something, both an accusation and a request, on the tip of my tongue. I need to say it. It crowds out everything else. I need her grace and gentle kindness and fearsome explanatory power. I need her to tell me exactly how it’s real and how it’s not, to teach me the steps I need to dance between those worlds. I need her hand on my shoulder as we face the future she’s describing together. But I can’t find the words. She’s speaking too fast, and the ward redlights are pulling up, blowing their whistles, megaphones amplifying their empty threats to the crowd. 

“And...I want you to know that, if there’s anything I’ve ever been very well suited to help you with, Mona, it’s probably this. Notoriety comes with advantages. But it will draw out parts of you that you never knew existed. You will need to come to grips early and often with the image of you that exists in others. Which is almost never accurate, but is nevertheless in some ways as real as you.”

“I...” I clutch my head, trying to process that. I feel emotions rising, and the Sieve latching onto those, trying to tag them with some opaque neikotic byproduct. What is happening here is maybe straightforwardly just not good. I need to take the inversion, and so do all of these gathered hundreds, and the thought of all of those diving-bells makes me nauseous. “Dr. Deng, look where we are. Listen to what these people are saying. Something is happening in the Mirror Sea.”

“No there isn’t.” She waves away our surroundings with eerily and defiant calm. “There never is. It’s the same old story. People are getting riled up over something new, that’s all, and this city can’t process its feelings without looking at those screens. This sort of thing happens all the time...”

When, Dr. Deng? When does this happen?

“...but you just don’t notice because it’s to do with boy bands, or the Shanghai Sharks, or something else you don’t care about,” she decrees primly. “Because you’re a scientist.”

“Look!” I can’t show her what I see, and the nearby displays have all been turned off. But I can pull it up on my phone and she can see it on TV. “Look at that, in the very center, and tell me what you see.”

“It looks yellow,” she admits.

“It’s the Sunflower Sieve egg.”

“I can’t stop you if that’s what you want to think.” But she can blink me down like this, with firm and growing disapproval. “But I don’t think it’s healthy to think that. Shall we head back?”

It’s almost impossible for me to get these two words out from between my teeth: “You’re lying.”

“Lying?” She is studiously, vacuously calm. “About what I see?”

My vision tunnels around the edges; I didn’t mean to say it like that. Or did I? Wasn’t there supposed to be a better way? Wasn’t it supposed to be different this time? Plain grey veetles are descending onto the nearby streets. Someone in the crowd is leaving a trail of yelps and shouts. My boundaries are porous, my irritation at Dr. Deng boiling over into a fury that is not entirely my own. It’s going to be a blowout. Last week of September, right on schedule. And this time we have an audience.

Oh, fuck it, I might as well.

“Level with me for once,” I match that iciness. I reach into my bag. “What, exactly, is this?”

Deng sees the Sunflower 1 patch, and now she’s on the tips of her feet, not exactly looming over me, but terrifying all the same. Something in her face, a deep-set stability to those wrinkles and lines, has broken. “How dare you,” she snarls. “After everything I’ve done for you? After I plucked you from a miserable life in your sad, senescent excuse for a country? After I put up with years of your laziness, your antics, your childish inability to focus? After I delicately hold your little hand and walk you to publication? We are here for your benefit, do you know that? Do you know I took this job so you could be here? This is how you repay me?”

“I know what you are,” I sob. It’s only half-true. I haven’t learned anything specific, I can’t follow this up. But, feeling my way into the crowd, I know the answer is coming, white-hot, knife sharp. It’s coming for her, and me too. I trip over my words, resort to swiveling an accusatory finger at Dr. Deng, and then at the Weather Bureau agents making their strident way down the street, and back again. “You’re...not even a whole person.”

“This is a what you put in front of me, with no warning, on a day that I hoped would be a triumph for us.” She laughs mirthlessly, deep and bitter. I’ve heard that laugh a thousand times, directed at poorly constructed arguments and sloppy papers and guest lecturers going wildly off the rails. It’s a laugh that says, you’re crazy. “I know what this is. You’ve been querying the Xia Zitian papers, haven’t you? Well, whoever synthesized them did a very poor job with it, because they’ll affirm almost anything if you know how to ask. So tell me: what exactly do you know?”

I never get to answer this question. Yao Dongyuan does it for me.

He parts the crowd, thirty feet away and a hundred miles distant. He yanks on the attention of this entire half of the crowd, creating a sideshow with a flick of his gaze. His eyes glimmer with elsewhere’s light. There’s no other way to put it: he wields neikotic weaponry, Sieve-stuff, mental mechatronics weighing hard on the squish of his psyche. Everyone already knows how to see it. Everyone recoils as his clockwork halo clicks and burbles and turns out a spindly appendage — which whips out to still Dr. Deng where she stands, catching me in the crossfire, flooding my neikotic channels with adversarial tiles. My eyes, my tongue, my ears, all sting.

He takes a few steps down the sidewalk towards us. Points a finger for good measure: “You.”

My vision overflows with sharp little spindling probes, spills over with acrylic greens and yellows. Reality buckles. It’s not fun at all anymore, what the Sieve can do to us, without offering even the illusion of control. I’m not sure Yao sees a difference between Deng and I. He approaches us, eyes wild, hair every which way.

“Tell me I’m wrong. All of you! Tell me I’m wrong!”

The rest of the Safety department turns, horrified. Dr Qin shouts stupidly: turn it off. Dr. Ku tries to duck behind a ginkgo tree. But nobody who’s gotten a clear glimpse of Yao’s abominably barnacled neikotic exoskeleton, Dr. Deng included, can really move. He suspends us in molasses, in waking sleep paralysis, moving between us like a demon. Time slows by half and half again as I struggle to move my arm even an inch, going taut, snapping like a rubber band when he speaks again.

“Do you think I wouldn’t find out what Cheng Qiaoling was? Or wasn’t?” He spits the words into my face. “Do you think I’m that easy to fool? That you could jerk me around forever and I wouldn’t find out? Do you think I’m stupid, Mona?”

“B-b-b-b-” I reply. Reality peels into frames.

“Well I’m not!” This should sound childish. Instead his words cut, bite, drill. “You let me think Cheng was my fault. You told me I was crazy for what I saw in there. I almost did something I couldn’t take back and and and then I got to thinking. I got to wondering. Why hide it, why make me doubt, why tell me not to trust my own senses? Who does that? We all know who does that. I can’t believe I looked up to you.”

“Ren,” Deng gasps. She is no longer permitted to breathe, had maybe one syllable to leak out. I hope it counts. I can’t turn my head, but I can make out Dr. Ren doing his very best to make a particular kind of fist, to make something happen on his wanji...

“And you,” Yao growls, his spindles now locating Dr. Deng. But there’s still an undergrad in there, terrified to be addressing her this way. The prophecy he means to deliver turns to crumbs in his mouth. “The straggler. The coward. The missing piece. Shameful. Shameful. Back here after all these years. Do...have you told your pet? You haven’t, have you? She still...she loves you, doesn’t she?”

“Ren!”

“You ran and ran and ran, and where did your legs take you? Why did you find yourself home? Because this is the site of your sin. Because you worry we died for nothing.” Yao’s appendages grow appendages grow appendages, reaching out to measure. There’s something watching through his eyes, however indirectly, from the Mirror Sea. “But don’t worry, Jinghan. We’re still here. We’re all still in here, except one little piece.”

I try to reach back into him, invert it, but my mind is pinned down. I can’t make the necessary motions. And when he speaks, it rings with that depth, that pressure: {{Dr. Deng, we will have you in whole.}}

“Ren!”

The Weather Bureau — the mass noun, the formless ooze — finally materializes onto the scene. There’s a joke about how you only see two of their agents at a time, how there’s really only a few of them flitting around. More than a dozen are cordoning off the sidewalk around us, boots heavy on the concrete. Three draw vialguns and fire point-blank on Yao, sticking him in the neck and and back and butt. He drops knees-first, headfirst, onto the pavement. The world regains some of its normal color. But the appendages Yao has left in my mind are not gone, just flailing stupidly, disconnected from whatever was at the controls, on the other side of the lens.

“Pursuant to the authority of the Special Provision for Psychological Safety, Section 166, you are hereby under arrest.” God, do they really need four? Two to pin him down, the third to inject him with something else, and the fourth to read him the conditions of his detainment? “You will be held until such time as your own psychological safety, and that of those you truck with, can be assured according to the mechanisms and evaluation guidelines of Section 166, section six, paragraph two...”

He’s already out. My stomach sinks through the ground.

Dr. Deng is on all fours, gasping, wheezing.

I keep looking away and then back at Dr. Ren. I saw something else in him, just now. There was no denying that, for a moment, he was in charge here. And I’m trying to see it again  — hoping each time, on first instant, to pierce the image of the mild-mannered professor. To rearrange those dark circles and worry lines and nerve-set jaw some other way. But he seems to have a remarkable amount of conscious control over his own aspect, like he’s doing something to his own face...

“You two.” He offers a hand up to Deng, who reluctantly takes it. “Let’s get some space from this.”

Dr. Deng looks deeply unhappy to be following him. Around the corner, and right up to the nondescript metal doors on the side of the Observatory.

“Is it true?” I ask her. “Do you work for the Weather Bureau?”

“No.” Deng’s denial is sour to the tip of her tongue. “I do not.”

But Ren sighs and interjects. “I can’t do this anymore, Deng. She’s already at the very center of it. It’s time she knows.”

It takes a skipped beat of the heart to be sure they’re talking about me. It takes the courage of one last breath to step into their crossfire and interrupt them. I’m shaking all over, vibrating with nerves and adrenaline and now, rage, preemptive rage at Dr. Deng. “It’s time she knows what?”

“Well, where to begin?” Ren runs his hand over his head, through phantom hair. “That your advisor was a close confidant of Xia Zitian? A consultant, for years, training neikonauts within the Mirror Sea project? That we brought her back to Shanghai on condition that she tell us what she knows? Help us manage the second Sea?”

“You didn’t bring me anywhere,” Deng insists.

“That she won’t?” Ren ignores her, raising his voice. “That she’s been stonewalling on anything related to the Mirror Sea? Pretending her work under Xia never existed? Fussing with the trimmings of the loop-lock virtual machine as the Ripples regain their —”

“Turn the cameras off!” She roars. “The Bureau wants my advice? Here’s my advice: you’re worse than the Ripplechasers, worse than the fucking Chalkers. You’ve gone as quadratic as any of them, and they couldn’t do it without you. You sick freaks just can’t stop peering into it, looking harder, daring it...” She runs out of breath for a long moment. Venom, too. That anger is fear now. A pleading, nearly whispered fear. “Turn — the — cameras — off.”

Ren, calmly, sadly: “You know we would if we could.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” she snaps back. “Not for a damn second. Mona, let’s go.”

But Ren has unlocked the side door to the Observatory, and he’s holding it open. It is not a closet at all. The offer takes shape in long, silent glances between the three of us. From me, devastated and confused, hungry for something just out of sight. From Ren, flatly irritated, hurried by an unseen drumbeat, but obviously curious for my reaction. From Deng, wild, desperate, and drowning…

“Mona, I never wanted this for you, I wanted —”

I don’t look back. I slam the door and follow him inside.