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You ain’t kidding. He’d only met Samantha once, but it had been easy to see that her addiction to painkillers was actually the lesser of her compulsions. Between her gift and her past—seduced by an academy mentor at thirteen, then turned out as a prostitute—she drew her entire self-worth from being needed.

Who could need her more than a temporal abnorm who lived every second as eleven? The intensity of his attention must have felt like heroin to her. And her ability to sense what he wanted without requiring all the social trappings he was incapable of must have made her unique amongst women.

“Can you imagine,” Shannon continued, “how the world feels to him? He can’t have a conversation. Can’t watch a movie. He gets drunk, the hangover lasts for like a week. Hell, sex has to be one of the only things that does work for him. Especially with Sam.”

“Does she love him?”

Shannon nodded. “Almost as much as she loves John.”

“Ah.” He’d had some notion of playing to her feelings, convincing her that she could save Soren. But he’d forgotten that Smith was the thread that united them. It was Smith who had killed her mentor and pimp. There was no way she’d betray him.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Cooper sighed. “I saw Millie today. Remember her?”

“The little girl with green hair.”

“It’s purple now. Anyway, she told me she couldn’t read Soren, that his perception of time screws things up. I thought maybe stress would change that, but instead, she ended up reading me.”

“Poor kid.”

He made a face at her. “Actually, she said I was pure.”

“She doesn’t know you like I do.”

“Ha-ha. Afterward, we were talking, and I screwed up, said the dumbest thing: that Soren was a freak, his gift had ruined him, put him outside society. And I no sooner said it than I thought about how the same could be said of her.”

Shannon winced. “And of course she read you thinking that.”

“Yeah. I feel so sorry for her. There’s way too much pressure for a little girl. She tries to cope, hiding behind her hair and her video games, but—” A thought struck him with almost physical force. He had that behind-the-eyeballs feeling of an idea, the tuning out of the world to examine it.

Was it possible?

Millie seemed to think so. And this was the Holdfast. The most technically advanced place on the planet, a closed society where brilliants worked with enormous funding and little restriction. They’d brought him back from the dead here.

“Cooper?” Shannon looked at him with both concern and curiosity. “You okay?”

He picked up his bourbon and swallowed the rest, barely tasting it. Then he turned his face to her.

“Carrot.”

TIME Magazine

10 Questions for Sherman VanMeter

Dr. Sherman VanMeter has made a career of unpacking the densest areas of scientific endeavor in accessible—if not polite—terms.

You’ve written books on everything from astrophysics to zoology. How are you able to achieve expertise in so many disparate fields?

There’s a perception that scientific disciplines are separate countries, when in fact science is a universal passport. It’s about exploring and thinking critically, not memorization. A question mark, not a period.

Can you give me an example?

Sure. Kids learn about the solar system by memorizing the names of planets. That’s a period. It’s also scientifically useless, because names have no value.

The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?”

But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity?

You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions.

Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line?

That’s where the critical thinking comes in.

I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions?

It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine.

Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work.

So you’re not a romantic, then?

We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines.

Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”?