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Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker, Heart Berries, by Terese Marie Mailhot, Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison, The Chronology of Water, by Lidia Yuknavitch, Heavy, by Kiese Laymon, and Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.

The enrollment deadline for state-assisted health care had passed, she said, but they better make an exception.

You can use your free time to study for the LSAT.”

my bandmates, Nora and Toby, somewhere between Elton John and Nina Simone and James Blake.

Its third longest tentacle twitched. Yorrik noticed and tried not to read anything into it. It was always very hard to remember that other species did not encode their every gesture with vast banks of personal information. On an elcor, that tiny movement would have meant: You’re an idiot, I hate you, and if there were any justice in the universe, I would be in command of this entire vessel. But sometimes a tentacle was just a tentacle.

Anax Therion narrowed her huge reptilian eyes. There was an old human folktale involving a feline owned by someone by the unlikely name of Schrödinger. This feline was locked inside a sealed box with no entrance or exit. In the folktale, an impossible riddle was asked of the hero: Can you tell whether this feline is alive or dead without breaking the box? Anax had always liked humans. They thought everything was impossible. But the riddle was only a riddle for organics. For a computer, it was as easy as activating internal sensors.

“Yorrik, if what you’re saying is true, this is a fatal virus—”

“It isn’t,” insisted Non.

“—an apparently very fatal virus and you are trapped in a confined space with it.” All elcor hated confined spaces. It was the reason so few of them took to interstellar travel. But Yorrik was an exception, as he was to many things elcor. “Why aren’t you panicking?”

The elcor droned emotionlessly: “Panic: I am panicking.”

Yorrik had taken him to see a live performance of their favorite play to celebrate, and afterwards, they’d gone on a bar crawl through New Elfaas City that would go down in the annals of interspecies history. He’d taken immuno-supplements and antivirals for weeks beforehand to prepare for just what exactly a shot of krogan ryncol would do to his insides. Senna had rather liked what it did to his insides in the end. Made him feel like he was made out of stained glass.

All’s well, he thought. Strong wind and a following tide for all the ships at sea. Senna could see his breath fog blurrily in front of his face. Good. Fine. Back to sleep now. Sleep warm and good. Awake cold and bad. He blinked away the onslaught of interstellar and anatomical trivia and tried to shut down his optics again.

The batarian grimaced. “Right,” she said slowly. “Well, that’s just spectacular, Ysses, thank you so much for opening up to us and sharing your insight and unique point of view. Please never do it again.”