“Yeah?”

“I’ll show it to you later. It has to do with your imaginary cat.”

I smile weakly. “I can’t wait for Félicette to puke on your keyboard.”

He shrugs. “Imaginary vomit’s my favorite kind.” He presses his knee against mine and stands, stopping midway to whisper against the shell of my ear, “I missed you last night.”

I shiver. He’s gone before I can answer.

• • •

“—LONELINESS IS KILLING me, and I must confess, I still believe.”

Once again, everyone in the control room laughs at Guy’s bellowing. The situation in the conference room is probably the same.

“That was lovely. Thank you, Britney,” Levi murmurs through the mic, amused. We exchange a brief look. My heart’s aflutter. I feel like I’m about to go onstage for a school play I’ve been practicing the whole year. But I’m an adult, and what’s at stake is my professional hopes and dreams. Which, I remind myself, are the only sort of hopes

and dreams I allow. “Ready to start?”

“I was born ready, baby.” Guy lifts one eyebrow under the visor of the helmet. “Well. After a labor that my mother often refers to as the most harrowing forty-three hours of her life.”

“Poor lady.” Levi shakes his head, smiling. “You know the drill, but this is what’s going to happen. We’re going to

start an attention task on the screen.”

“I’m being paid to play video games. Excellent.”

“Then we’ll activate the helmet when we’re ready and measure your performance under both conditions, for

reaction time and accuracy.”

“Got it.”

“Starting in a few seconds, then.” Levi turns off the mic.

He and I exchange another glance, this time lingering.

This is it.

We did it.

You and I.

Together.

Then Levi turns around and nods at Lamar to start the routine. There isn’t much I have to do since the protocols have been programmed and are loaded to go. I lean back, eyes on the monitor, fixed on Guy’s sitting form.

I’ll need to buy him a present, I think. A bottle of something expensive.

Britney concert tickets. For being so patient when I kept shooting theta bursts at his brain. For

being so nice. For lying to him. Then the task loads, and I’m too busy observing to think much of anything.

It starts like usual. Guy’s job is to detect stimuli as they appear on the screen. He’s an astronaut, and at baseline he performs about ten million times better than I, a regular everyday wimp, ever could. A few minutes later Levi gives another signal, and the brain stimulation protocol I wrote is activated.

Ten seconds pass. Twenty. Thirty. I eye the estimates for the performance metrics—nothing happens. Accuracy and reaction times are hovering around the same values as before.

Shit. What’s going on? I squirm nervously in my seat. The lag between the inception of the stimulation and the improvement in performance is usually over by now. I glance at Levi with a worried expression, but he’s calm, sitting back in his chair with his arms folded on his chest, alternating looks between Guy and the values. The only sign of impatience is his fingers, drumming on his bicep. He does that when he’s focused. Levi. My Levi.

I’m stimulating Guy’s dorsal premotor cortex—why the hell is he not improving—?

Suddenly, the numbers start to change. Accuracy skyrockets from 83

percent to 94. Median reaction times decrease by tens of milliseconds. The new values oscillate, and then keep steady. I swear the entire room sighs in relief in unison.

“Sweet,” someone murmurs.

“Sweet?” Lamar asks. “That’s epic.”

I turn to grin at Levi and find him already staring at me with a happy, undecipherable expression. This, at least, is going great. The rest of my life’s

a shitshow, but this is working. We made something good, and useful, and just plain badass.

I told you, didn’t I? What’s reliable, and trustworthy, and never, ever abandoned Dr. Curie? Science. Science is where it’s at.

Until it’s not.

I’m the first to realize something’s wrong. Most of the engineers are talking among one another, and Levi’s eyes are still clinging to me with that curious, earnest expression. But both the values and the monitors are in my line of sight, so I notice the numbers changing to values we’ve never before seen. And the twitchy way Guy’s elbow is jerking.

“What’s—” I point at it. Levi immediately turns. “Is he okay?”

“The arm?” Levi’s brows knit. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“It’s similar to what would happen if we stimulated his motor cortex, but we definitely aren’t— Whoa.” The twitches get significantly larger. Guy’s entire body starts shaking.

Levi turns on the mic. “Guy. Everything okay in there?” No answer.

“Guy? Can you hear me?”

Silence. And Levi’s deepening frown.

“Guy, do you—”

Guy falls out of his chair with a loud thud, his body at once rigid and slack.

The control room bursts into chaos— everyone stands, half a dozen chairs scraping against the floor.

“Stop the protocol!” Levi yells, and a second later he’s out of the room and into the lab. I see him appear on the monitor and kneel next to Guy’s spasming body, taking him into his arms. He turns him to the side and clears the floor of nearby objects.