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his teeth, “Let’s get it over with.”
    “I’d rather be waterboarded,” Henry says, smiling back. The camera snaps nearby. His eyes are big and soft and blue, and he desperately needs to be punched in one of them. “Your country could probably arrange that.”
    Alex throws his head back and laughs handsomely, loud and false. “Go fuck yourself.”
    “Hardly enough time,” Henry says. He releases Alex’s hand as Shaan returns.
    “Your Highness,” Shaan greets Henry with a nod. Alex makes a concentrated effort not to roll his eyes. “The photographer should have what he needs, so if you’re ready, the car is waiting.”
    Henry turns to him and smiles again, eyes unreadable. “Shall we?”
----
    There’s something vaguely familiar about the Kensington Palace guest quarters, even though he’s never been here before.
    Shaan had an attendant show him to his room, where his luggage awaited him on an ornately carved bed with spun gold bedding. Many of the rooms in the White House have a similar hauntedness, a sense of history that hangs like cobwebs no matter how pristine the rooms are kept. He’s used to sleeping alongside ghosts, but that’s not it.
    It strikes further back in his memory, around the time his parents split up. They were the kind of married lawyer couple who could barely order Chinese takeout without legally binding documents, so Alex spent the summer before seventh grade shuttled back and forth from home to their dad’s new place outside of Los Angeles until they could strike a long-term arrangement.
    It was a nice house in the valley, a clear blue swimming pool and a back wall of solid glass. He never slept well there. He’d sneak out of his thrown-together bedroom in the middle of the night, stealing Helados from his dad’s freezer and standing barefoot in the kitchen eating straight from the quart, washed blue in the pool light.
    That’s how it feels here, somehow—wide awake at midnight in a strange place, duty-bound to make it work.
    He wanders into the kitchen attached to his guest wing, where the ceilings are high and the countertops are shiny marble. He was allowed to submit a list to stock the kitchen, but apparently it was too hard to get Helados on short notice—all that’s in the freezer is UK-brand packaged ice cream cones.
    “What’s it like?” Nora’s voice says, tinny over his phone’s speaker. On the screen, her hair is up, and she’s poking at one of her dozens of window plants.
    “Weird,” Alex says, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Everything looks like a museum. I don’t think I’m allowed to show you, though.”
    “Ooh,” Nora says, wiggling her eyebrows. “So secretive. So fancy.”
    “Please,” Alex says. “If anything, it’s creepy. I had to sign such a massive NDA that I’m convinced I’m gonna drop through a trapdoor into a torture dungeon any minute.”
    “I bet he has a secret lovechild,” Nora says. “Or he’s gay. Or he has a secret gay lovechild.”
    “It’s probably in case I see his equerry putting his batteries back in,” Alex says. “Anyway, this is boring. What’s going on with you? Your life is so much better than mine right now.”
    “Well,” Nora says, “Nate Silver won’t stop blowing up my phone for another column. Bought some new curtains. Narrowed down the list of grad school concentrations to statistics or data science.”
    “Tell me those are both at GW,” Alex says, hopping up to sit on one of the immaculate countertops, feet dangling. “You can’t leave me in DC to go back to MIT.”
    “Haven’t decided yet, but astonishingly, it will not be basedon you,” Nora tells him. “Remember how we sometimes talk about things that are not about you?”
    “Yeah, weirdly. So is the plan to dethrone Nate Silver as reigning data czar of DC?”
    Nora laughs. “No, what I’m gonna do is silently compile and process enough data to know exactly what’s gonna happen for the next twenty-five years. Then I’m