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North America. Because I’d feared for the Keen-Ears’ safety if their existence became generally known, I had not revealed that invisible animals turn visible in death, or that Evie’s puzzling bee had come to the New World with invisible humans who still farmed its descendants for honey.
    Helen listened (patiently, considering the irritating, unnatural voice in which I spoke) and spun. There wasgoing to be a long stretch of invisibility in her thread, where the Grand Tour cocoons spun out, and I wondered what she’d use it for. In her braids’ tips hung some dark, wrapped objects resembling cigars for dolls, and I envied her—artistic, enjoying life, with Truth Bats.
    â€œI had no choice,” I sniffled. “I deliberately misled Evie about those bees. What else could I do? Was I supposed to open the door to genocide? So I lied. My bats disappeared. All my life I’ve had Truth Bats. Now they’re gone, and anything I say, like ‘all my life I’ve had Truth Bats’—it doesn’t sound true. It sounds like I don’t know what. Helen, you know, the bats are not even comfortable with social fibs, and I’ve gone and told a big lie to my sister. That doesn’t sound true either. God, I want my bats back!”
    â€œPoor old God,” Helen murmured, guiding her evolving thread. “Well. What will bring your bats back?”
    â€œTelling Evie the truth. Until I do, my voice is polluted by deceptive stress,” I explained with unnerving glibness.
    â€œThen tell. Trust Evie. Don’t you trust your sister?”
    â€œShe has an obligation to science.” Helen tut-tutted as if the ambiguous ethics of scientific research were a minor tangle in her skein. Her voice, I noted wistfully, was mild, full, and wholesome as sweetgrass.
    â€œSophie, in your shoes, I would figure it this way. I would rather get back my bats, and have Evie find out about the Keen-Ears, than live with a lie and wait for some unknown person to discover them. You know it will come. You can’t hide a natural fact.” She licked her thumbsto feel the invisible thread as it passed through them. I threw back my head, inhaled the honeysuckle scent, and shut my eyes. After a while, the purr of the spinning wheel paused and Helen said, “Why don’t you go down to the barn and call her now?”
    A FTER I’ D CALLED E VIE from Helen’s barn, I ran up the porch steps, and my cousin rose to hug me. My joints were trembling as if I’d dropped a loaded barbell, but I had no time to linger. My sister, grasping only that I had urgent business, had said to drop by now, while she had an opportune moment. Helen wished me good luck. As I drove into town and hunted for a parking space around Evie’s campus, I rehearsed aloud phrases of apology and ethical pleas, all of which sounded like excuses and false promises; they left me feeling vaguely felonious as I trotted down the corridors of the Life Science Center, through the noise mix of freezers and centrifuges, past office doors, laboratories, and the absentminded or cordial faces of Evie’s colleagues and students. I found Evie in a small workroom adjacent to her main lab.
    â€œCome in,” she said. “Let’s talk while I feed the Worm.”
    Entering, my nostrils contracted. The dim room smelled of mold, with substenches that evoked thoughts of continents passing through the guts of earthworms. Around the walls, floor to ceiling, ran shiny brown tubing like a coiled snakeskin: this was the Worm. If you uncoiledit, you’d have a torus—a donut-shaped tube filled with silts, clays, sands, loams, and small wildlife: bacteria, fungi, nematodes. The Worm helped Evie to experiment with soil gases. Its “skin” was her invention, a polymer sheath containing molecular valves and electronic sensors. As soil gases within hit the valves, thumbtack-sized “scales” covering the Worm