The Circle

Bailey said as they approached the tank. Stenton stepped into view
     and Bailey shook his hand, and then Stenton turned to Mae.
    “Mae, so good to see you again,” he said, taking both her hands inhis. He was in an ebullient mood, but his mouth frowned, briefly, in deference to
     Mae’s recent loss. She smiled shyly, then raised her eyes. She wanted him to know
     that she was fine, she was ready. He nodded, stepped back and turned to the tank.
     For the occasion, Stenton had built a far larger tank, and filled it with a gorgeous
     array of live coral and seaweed, the colors symphonic under the bright aquarium light.
     There were lavender anemones, and bubble corals in green and yellow, the strange white
     spheres of sea sponges. The water was calm but a slight current swayed the violet
     vegetation, pinched between nooks of the honeycomb coral.
    “Beautiful. Just beautiful,” Bailey said.
    Bailey and Stenton and Mae stood, her camera trained on the tank, allowing her watchers
     a deep look into the rich underwater tableau.
    “And soon it will be complete,” Stenton said.
    At that moment, Mae felt a presence near her, a hot breath on the back of her neck,
     passing left to right.
    “Oh, there he is,” Bailey said. “I don’t think you’ve met Ty yet, have you, Mae?”
    She turned to find Kalden, standing with Bailey and Stenton, smiling at her, holding
     out his hand. He was wearing a wool cap and an oversized hoodie. But it was unmistakably
     Kalden. Before she could suppress it, she’d let out a gasp.
    He smiled, and she knew, immediately, that it would seem natural to her watchers,
     and to the Wise Men, that she would gasp in the presence of Ty. She looked down and
     realized she was already shaking his hand. She couldn’t breathe.
    She looked up to see Bailey and Stenton grinning. They assumed she was in thrall of
     the creator of all this, the mysterious young manbehind the Circle. She looked back to Kalden, looking for some explanation, but his
     smile didn’t change. His eyes remained perfectly opaque.
    “So good to meet you, Mae,” he said. He said it shyly, almost mumbling, but he knew
     what he was doing. He knew what the audience expected from Ty.
    “Good to meet you, too,” Mae said.
    Now her brain splintered. What the fuck was happening? She scanned his face again,
     seeing, under his wool cap, a few of his gray hairs. Only she knew they existed. Actually,
     did Bailey and Stenton know that he’d aged so dramatically? That he was masquerading
     as someone else, as a nobody named Kalden? It occurred to her that they had to know.
     Of course they did. That’s why he appeared on video feeds—probably pre-taped long
     ago. They were perpetuating all of this, helping him disappear.
    She was still holding his hand. She pulled away.
    “It should have happened sooner,” he said. “I apologize for that.” And now he spoke
     into Mae’s lens, giving a perfectly natural performance for the watchers. “I’ve been
     working on some new projects, lots of very cool things, so I’ve been less social than
     I should have been.”
    Instantly Mae’s watcher numbers rose, from just over thirty million to thirty-two,
     and climbing quickly.
    “Been a while since all three of us were in one place!” Bailey said. Mae’s heart was
     frantic. She’d been sleeping with Ty. What did that mean? And Ty, not Kalden, was
     warning her about Completion? How was that possible? What did
that
mean?
    “What are we about to see?” Kalden asked, nodding to the water. “I think I know, but
     I’m anxious to see it happen.”
    “Okay,” Bailey said, clapping his hands and wringing them in anticipation. He turned
     to Mae, and Mae turned her lens to him. “Because he’d get too technical, my friend
     Stenton here has asked me to explain. As you all know, he brought back some incredible
     creatures from the unmapped depths of the Marianas Trench. You all have seen some
     of them, in particular the octopus, and the seahorse and his progeny, and most dramatically,
     the shark.”
    Word was getting out that the Three Wise Men were together and on camera, and Mae’s
     watchers hit forty million. She turned to the three men, and saw, on her wrist, she’d
     captured a dramatic picture of their three profiles as they all looked to the glass,
     their faces bathed in blue light, their eyes reflecting the irrational life within.
     Her watchers, she noticed, were at fifty-one million. She caught the eye of