“I think she knows,” Dr. Gloria said.

*   *   *

Sasha took us on a tour first of her room, showing us her artwork and toys, then of the entire house, then outside to the pool and the rock garden and the sprawling vegetable garden, where three Hispanic men in long-sleeved shirts were assembling aluminum sprinkler frames. They greeted her in Spanish, and she made Edo introduce me and Rovil. Then it was into the huge garage, where Sasha demonstrated her skill with a device that looked like a cross between a skateboard and a teeter-totter. I could not even stand up on the thing. Sasha kept trying to coach me, putting her hands on my shins and ankles, but I was hopeless. Finally she flicked open a digital fan and shook it at me until I understood that she wanted me to take out my pen.

I produced mine and she tapped it, not with her fan, but with her finger. A message appeared: Stand on the dots!

Ah: the two orange circles on the toy’s deck. I put one foot on one dot, stepped up—and the device shot out from under me. Edo caught me before I hit the ground. Sasha shook her head in mock disappointment.

My pen kept filling with messages from her. I couldn’t see how she was typing—the fan wasn’t even in her hand anymore. It was the closest thing to telepathy I’d ever seen. The fake mind readers in the NAT ward would have been so jealous.

We walked back to the house down a path made of pink gravel. Sasha was at my side, chattering away electronically. Rovil and Edo were up ahead, talking pharmaceutical biz.

“You sent that message to me, right?” I asked Sasha quietly. “The one telling me to come here?”

My pen flickered with a new message: Are you mad?

“No, I’m not mad,” I said.

“Not in the way she meant, anyway,” Dr. Gloria said. She was walking a few feet behind us, her hands clasped behind her back. She’d stayed within a dozen feet of me since we’d come through the gate, ready to swoop in as soon as I fell apart.

“Bug off,” I told her.

You’ve got a friend. Like Grandpop.

I stopped. “You noticed that?” I asked Sasha.

I do too. Lots of them.

The pen slipped from my hand. Sasha crouched and picked it up. She opened the screen wide and held it up to me. The letters were blurry. I blinked until they came into focus.

That’s okay. GP cries all the time too.

I said to Sasha, “I don’t usually…” I cleared my throat. “I mean, twice in one day? I think it’s the heat.”

She nodded as if this made any kind of sense and pulled me toward the house. The rest of the group had gone inside and gathered in the enclosed sun porch. The room was positioned at the back of the house, facing the expanse of desert. Floor-to-ceiling windows let in maximum sunlight while the house’s air-conditioning delivered maximum cold, a textbook example of the kind of have-your-cake-and-burn-it-too attitude that the über-rich specialized in. Fuck you, Mother Nature. I thought about saying something, and then Esperanza came into the room with cookies and lemonade. It’s hard to be a militant liberal when you’re being served kindergarten snacks.

My pen pinged. We grow our own lemons!

“They’re great,” I told Sasha.

Rovil had noticed this latest exchange. He leaned over and said to Sasha, “How long did it take you to train the network?”

The girl shrugged. I pushed my pen to him. It said, It’s still learning.

“What’s this networking thing?” I asked.

Edo nodded toward the ceiling. “The house is watching her. Fingers, gestures. Some of it’s virtual keyboard, but some of it’s body language. She’s got her own dialect.” He sounded proud.

Sasha nodded. The pen said, Macros!!!

Rovil said, “Why don’t you just talk?”

Edo frowned. After a moment I said, “Rovil, Jesus…”

“What?” Rovil asked. Embarrassment has a frequency, like a dog whistle. Only some people can hear it.

The pen said, Why should I?

“Good point,” I told Sasha.

Of course I was dying to know why she didn’t speak. Eduard had said she was smart and artistic. Was the muteness congenital? Had the Numinous done this to her?

I said to her, “I need to talk to your … to Edo now. Adult talk.”

Sasha looked offended. She flicked her eyes to the side, then up to Edo.

“Just for a little while,” Edo said. “Go with Esperanza and pick out the best of your drawings. We can do an art show later.”

Esperanza had appeared on cue. “Up you go,” she said. Sasha grabbed two cookies and hopped from her chair.

“I hope you’ll stay the night,” Edo said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He frowned. “You should get to know her. She’s a wonderful person.”

“How impaired is she, Edo?”

“The speech issue? We’re working on it. You have to believe me, we’ve consulted all the top specialists.”

“That’s what Eduard said. Great doctors. The best money could buy.”

“It’s true. But she is also fine.” He leaned forward. “She’s so smart, and funny, and gifted.”

“She’s not speaking, Edo. Do these specialists know why that is?”

He shook his head. “Her vocal cords work—I’ve heard her make sounds in her sleep. And it’s obviously not comprehension—look at how she writes! But the MRIs show that her visual centers are hyperactive, firing all the time, as if she’s constantly being bombarded with images.”

“So something deep in the wiring,” I said. “Something Numinous did to her.”

Edo shook his head again. “You don’t know that.”

“Oh come on, Edo. Do you think that stuff is harmless?”

“I’m not saying that, but there may be … other reasons.”

“Like what?” I said testily.

“I think there was a trauma at the foster home, before we adopted her.”

He didn’t speak for a moment. “What happened at the foster home, Edo?” My voice was flat.

“There was an accident,” he said. “A houseparent fell down the stairs, ended up with a fractured disk. He blamed Sasha.”

“A six-year-old girl,” I said.

“She tripped him, he said.”

“What did he do to her?”

He seemed not to understand me.

“She must have had a reason. Did he abuse her?”

His eyes widened. “No one suggested anything like that.”

“It’s a pretty common profile. A man—and they’re almost all men—gets himself access to vulnerable children. Grooms them with gifts. Makes them dependent on him. He may even adopt them.”

Edo looked at Rovil, then back to me, blinking hard. “That’s not—you can’t think—”

“What the fuck are you doing with my daughter, Edo?”

His eyes filled with tears. “No,” I said. “No fucking tears.”

Dr. Gloria said, “Keep your voice down.”

I leaned across the table. “Why did you take her? What the fuck are you up to?”

Oh the tears, the tears, they were a-rolling down the motherfucker’s face.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I thought she was safe, Lyda! The foster home was one of the best, very high-rated.” He wiped tears from his cheeks. “Sasha had not yet been adopted, but that wasn’t their fault. I swear that I thought she was in the best possible place.”

“Except you were wrong.”

“After the accident with that volunteer I realized that it would be better to get her out of there,” Edo said. “I didn’t think I would be approved as a parent, so…”

“You got Eduard and his wife to sign the papers.”

“I was very insistent. I told him I would go to the press, even wreck the company if he didn’t do this for me. I had to help her. He knew I was serious in this.”

“So you hid her out here, away from the world, away from any other kids.”

“That’s because I live here, not because I’m hiding her. I told you, I made sure that she saw specialists—”

“She told me she has ‘friends,’ Edo.”

He blinked. “Oh.” He nodded. “You noticed the pictures in her room.”

“Those are her gods?”