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dinner.
    “Birgid, you are looking beautiful,” Burnofsky said. He took her hand and kissed it, old school, and he made it work. He was a wreck of a human being, but he could elevate his game on occasion. And he liked Birgid. He was jealous of our happiness, but not in any malicious way.
    Birgid took his coat. If I remember, this would have been December, just before Christmas. Stone and Sadie had gone to visit their grandparents for a few days.
    Carla was not with Karl. I asked after her.
    “Oh, she’s actually got a job, believe it or not.”
    “A job? She’s just a teenager, isn’t she?” Birgid asked.
    “Oh, it’s a little internship sort of thing at Armstrong.”
    “Making snow globes?” I asked, trying to sound witty but ending up seeming churlish.
    “Something like that,” Karl said. “What smells good?”
    Birgid smiled. She had not lost her smile. At this point she’d been through two surgeries and one round of chemo. So her blonde hair was short, having just started to grow back. A close observer would have noticed a hollowness around her eyes. A very close observer might have noticed that she moved with more care than she once had, a physical caution. She was a woman who had learned that the worldis not a soft and welcoming place, but a place of sharp edges and petty humiliations.
    But still, she smiled.
    “I made something I found in a Gordon Ramsay cookbook,” she said. “It’s a sort of shepherd’s pie. Comfort food. As cold as it is, I felt something comforting would be …” She faltered, shrugged, and finished with “… comforting.”
    There was a flicker of sympathy in Burnofsky’s rheumy eyes. He knew, of course, that she had cancer. And he knew that I was desperate to use my biots to save her.
    We drank some wine. We ate. We talked banalities of politics and sports and some show at the Met and some lecture at the Y. Birgid told a story about how Sadie had fought for the right to say “crap” at school. (Sadie won the point; she usually does.)
    Then Birgid grew tired. Her endurance was coming back, but she was still very easily tired. She left the “gentlemen” to our whiskey, like something out of
Downton Abbey
.
    “Why a kilometer, Karl?” I asked.
    He nodded. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”
    “You’re weaponizing nanotechnology,” I accused him bluntly.
    He didn’t deny it. He didn’t admit it. He just said, “And you’re violating at least three separate laws, Grey.”
    “You know why,” I said. “What you’re doing—”
    “Is dangerous?” he supplied. “But creating new life-forms isn’t?”
    “They’re neutered, incapable of reproduction,” I pointed out.
    “The gray-goo scenario isn’t the only danger,” he countered. The gray-goo scenario was the nightmare scare story of nanotechnology: What if nanotech biots or nanobots were capable of reproducing? Their numbers would grow quickly from a handful to thousands to millions to billions. They would obliterate the planet.
    “No, it isn’t the only danger,” I said. “Have you considered the possibility that these things could be used to kill?”
    “Crude,” he sniffed.
    “Or they could be used to …” I hesitated, seeing anticipation in his eyes. He wanted me to guess.
    I frowned. What was he thinking of? What was Armstrong up to? But I came up with nothing and fell back on assassination.
    “You can’t let your research be turned into a weapon,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s wrong. Because in the wrong hands it could create chaos. Paranoia.” I waved my hand in the air in a gesture meant to suggest chaos.
    “Are mine the wrong hands?” He held out his hands, bony fingers covered in loose parchment skin.
    “No one should have that power,” I said, sounding self-righteous.
    He leaned forward, and I saw something hard and pitiless in his eyes that I don’t think I had ever noticed before. “Don’t be naïve, Grey. Don’t be a goddamn child, you’re too