“So what’s the deal with you and Lillian?” Cal asked Mick, sitting in his lap in the cell, tapping on his leg.

“There’s no deal with us,” Mick said. He had an arm idly around Cal’s waist and was fiddling with the tablet Nadya had given Cal. He couldn’t read any of the text on it, but he’d figured out how to find pornography with it and was watching one of Earth’s moving drawings called an anime about some lady whose tits got bigger every time someone fucked her. It had sound, which Cal had been translating for him, but the talking had mostly stopped a while ago.

“Uh-huh,” Cal teased, still tapping. “You guys are always hanging out and conspiring. Which, you know, I’d assume was magic stuff except for the sex.”

The room Nadya had Cal taken to for their interview was warmer than the rest of the prison. She had a metal desk with a few knickknacks on it, and a chair in front of it, but nearer the door was a couch and a low table, which had a spinning orrery on it. There were a few shelves on the walls, and though the lights were the same electric strips as in the other rooms, they were just a little dimmer and just a little less white.

There were no books anywhere, Cal thought. Doctors usually had books. Her furniture was all made of metal, too. “Your world doesn’t have any trees, does it?” Cal asked, hands on his hips as he looked around. He didn’t remember seeing any outside the city.

“We have some, but not many,” Nadya said, turning the small chair in front of her desk to face the room and sitting in it. “Armageddon destroyed most of the world’s plant life. How did you determine that?”

“You know if you brought me some dessert once in a while I wouldn’t complain,” Cal said, when the guards brought his food. He always talked to them because it often got them to talk back, which was what he needed them to do. It had been three days now. He didn’t know how large a sample the beetle needed to translate what they were saying.

The guards hadn’t changed since the first day, and the darker skinned of the two said something back to him. The guards seemed to find it funny to talk to Cal, probably in the way people found it funny to talk to animals in cages.

“So you’ll bring me some cake next time?” Cal asked. “I promise not to use it to break out. Tell me what happened to the people you arrested with me and I’ll even share it with you.”