“I’m glad. I have never done a hostile takeover.”

“No, I mean the whole thing, because a book told me to give you this after ‘an important conversation about buying a company.’ ” I looked down. She was holding out a book to me.

“Goddamn it, Carl,” I said under my breath and then began to read it out loud.

This is the last time I’ll be in touch. After today, I will no longer be able to communicate with you. I hope you have learned things from our correspondence.

I also want to say, of all the people I have communicated with in this way, you have had the worst time. I wanted to make people’s lives better while I did this, but yours has gotten worse. This is a function of our working together toward a particular outcome.

So, I’m sorry this has been a rough time. Remember that music brings you joy, that making a podcast with Jason brings you joy, that playing games with friends brings you joy.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

The last round of fundraising Altus did valued the company at over $500 billion. But we didn’t need to buy all of Altus, we needed to buy over 50 percent, so we just needed to convince a few very, very rich people that they were holding on to a deeply toxic asset and they would be lucky to get even 2 percent of their money back.

Anyhow, now that that’s all explained, we can return you to your regularly scheduled climax.

MAYA

The copilot walked into the cabin after our ears started popping with the descent and said, “We’re coming in on final approach, we don’t really know what’s going to happen when we land, so be ready, I guess.”

We had talked through a bit of the plan and at least knew what we were each going to do once we were on the ground.

“April, when we land, you may notice a difference in your ability,” Carl said. “I severed the node that connected me to Altus, which means that you will not be able to reach into the network. I am going to begin rebuilding that network from the inside when we land, but it will take time. You should notice if and when you reconnect.”

“I’m already disconnecting, I think,” April said. “It’s like … it’s like I’m trying to grab something, but my hand is passing through it.”

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said without turning to look at me, “I’m fine.”

We landed uneventfully, and as we taxied down the runway, Carl and I went to the back of the plane and, well, we hid in the bathroom. I sat on the toilet; they lounged in the sink. I always expected Carl to smell like an animal, but they actually mostly just smelled like April, because they used her shampoo.

The moment the copilot brought down the door, we could hear someone yelling.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING! YOU CAN’T JUST LAND A PLANE WITHOUT TOWER CONFIRMATION OR FILING A FLIGHT PLAN! GOOD LUCK HOLDING ON TO YOUR LICENSE AFTER THIS!”

It was time to start the plan. I peeked out of my position in the bathroom as April walked to the front of the plane and then down the stairs.

“This seems fine,” I said to myself.

“Yes,” Carl said, ignoring my sarcasm. “So far, all according to plan.”

As April stepped down the stairs and into the light from the tiny terminal building, the guy stopped yelling, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

I sat in my thoughts, staring into space, trying to keep my breathing steady, and then, I finally asked Carl, “When do we go?”

“We just need to make sure that no one will see us when we leave the plane.”

“How long will that take?”

“About ten minutes.”

“How long have we been waiting?”

“Eight.”

It had felt like an hour.

“And then what?”

“And then we take out the cell phone jammers, and then we go get Miranda, and then we try and explain to the world how bad these people are and hopefully the price goes down low enough for us to buy it.”

“How likely is that?” I asked.

“I haven’t run the simulations,” Carl said.

“What?” This seemed like an oversight.

“Maya, this is it. This is the last chance. Altus is a black box to me, so any simulation I ran would have a very wide margin of error. But, more than that”—they sat up in the sink—“it doesn’t matter what the odds are. This is our last chance, and if I knew that the odds were very low, it would further decrease the odds, so I haven’t looked.”

“You’re really weird.”

“Oh well! It’s time to go anyway,” they said calmly.

It was warm, but I still felt myself shivering as anxiety battled with drowsiness. None of us had slept on the plane, and that had been a mistake. I followed Carl, not into the little airport but directly into the forest that surrounded the compound. Carl, of course, moved effortlessly through the mess of undergrowth while I stumbled along, every step sounding like thunder, my black hoodie getting caught on every branch it could.

“Seems like you’d be comfortable here,” I said, thinking maybe it was a joke, but really just wanting to say something.

“It is nice, actually—you keep the apartment too cool for me.”

“You never said anything,” I said, somehow feeling defensive.

“I didn’t feel like it would be well received,” they said, hanging in front of me.

“Are there any other monkeys like you here?”

“No, the only extant Caribbean monkeys arrived from Africa on slave ships, and there are none on Val Verde.”

“Are you … are you reconnected to your network, then?”

“Oh yes, if I was not connected to the network, I would not be able to control the monkey. I have kept the bandwidth very low in the hopes that my sibling will not notice. Ah! Here we are.”

Ahead of us was some kind of electrical transfer station that was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high painted block wall. The monkey ran at it and tried to scramble up the wall, but the painted cinder block was too slick.

“I’m going to need you to throw me up there,” they said.

“Like, pick you up and toss you?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes, I weigh around ten pounds.”

I grabbed under their fuzzy armpits and arranged them so that one hand was under the monkey’s butt. They were surprisingly light. A stringy, bony affair, awkward in my arms.

“You’re not great at this.” The voice was loud and quite close to my ear, making it clearer than usual that it came from the smartwatch around their neck.

“Jeez, it’s my first time, OK?”

“Here.” They positioned themselves so that one of their feet was gripping each of my hands. The monkey’s big toes were like thumbs, and they squeezed my hands.

“One,” they began counting, “two, three!”

On three, I flung my hands upward while their legs pushed off. My ribs creaked where my chest was still healing as I pushed, but the combined force of the two of us, and the boost of my height, was enough that their little hands had no problem gripping the lip of the wall. They pulled their body up and stood on the wall and then looked down at me.