Everything on the narrow street outside the Charming Cat Cafe looked perfectly normal. Even the cafe itself, strange as it was, looked inconspicuous. A young man, probably in his early twenties, was standing outside the establishment and handing out fliers. He was wearing a headband with black cat ears on it that almost seemed to look natural as the color matched his short and messy hair. Everything looked exactly like Josh remembered it the last time he’d walked down this street. Only now he was the weird thing in the picture. His arm and forehead were still bandaged and he was flanked by Margot and Sara, while Connor trailed behind and looked over the top of everyone’s heads at the various other pedestrians. They moved like a small security detail, which felt strange to Josh. It was like he had bodyguards.

Since it had been explained to him that Gul was something of a valuable individual, Josh half expected to see bulky men in black suits waiting outside the cafe. But he felt like the only thing that stood out.

“Time?” Margot asked as they came to a stop a few feet away from the man handing out fliers.

“Twelve past.” Sara answered after a quick check of her watch.

Josh performed a quick scan of the other pedestrians in the area, looking for someone matching Gul’s unusual description. A complete lack of body hair might have sounded out of place initially, but Josh quickly realized that it would be almost impossible to recognize someone from that trait alone in a crowd, even a small one.

Margot, noticing Josh’s nervous searching, put a reassuring hand on his good shoulder. “Don’t worry about finding them. They’ll be here exactly when they said. Just steel yourself for when they do.”

“Right. Steel myself.” Josh muttered to himself, the recitation did nothing to calm his ever increasing nerves. “Where are you guys going to hold up while I’m in there?”

“Sweets shop across the street?” Sara shrugged as she gave her own answer, but the response of “back alley” and “corner bodega over there” overlapped her.

“How about I watch the back of the cafe, while you two stay out front?” Margot said with a quiet sigh. “If anything goes down, it probably won’t be an armed assault from the street. So you’ll all be safer in a more public space.”

“You better get back there then, it looks like they’re here.” Connor said quietly as he nodded his head off in the direction of the opposite side of the street.

“Good eye, Connor.” Margot whispered before rushing off towards a side street.

There was no further advice or instruction given. Margot merely disappeared. Josh had been distracted by the indication of their anticipated contact, and hadn’t even seen Margot vanish into the gentle flow of pedestrians. But what Josh did see was the nonchalant approach of of a small group of four people that were keeping in a tight pack.

Two of the group looked almost exactly alike; men in their twenties with short sandy blond hair, both on the the taller side, but not the tallest of the group, and both with the same lightly tanned skin and vibrant blue eyes—Josh was surprised he could even discern the color from so far away, but that only spoke to their potency. The shortest of the four looked to be a girl, possibly in her teens, perhaps older—Josh had to pause and think about ascribing an age based on appearance after learning how irrelevant the aging of marked individuals was—her face was partially obscured by messy, thick black hair; the only other distinguishing trait Josh could see from across the street was that she had a wide frame, though she didn’t actually look big. The last of the four stuck out the most to Josh, and it was for the exact reason he thought he wouldn’t have been able to recognize them. The final member of the group was a tall androgynous individual, well over six foot tall, fair skin, and glaringly bald. The baldness wouldn’t have stood out so much, were it not for their pale white skin contrasting with the black hoodie pulled up casually over half of their head. Josh dared not make any other assumptions about them.

A short walk up the street put Josh right next to the androgynous individual as the door to the cafe was held open for them by the man handing out fliers. Gul, or at least Josh was pretty sure that it was Gul, stepped aside and gestured for him to enter first.

Josh didn’t want to be the one to talk first, it felt strange to introduce himself to a total stranger. But as Gul stepped through the door and led him to a booth in the otherwise empty cafe, it became clear that this was not going to proceed as he had expected.

There were a dozen cats roaming freely throughout the main serving room of the cafe, but the building smelled surprisingly nice. Even better, the cats all seemed well behaved and not at all bothered by new customers entering their space. They were a surprise, it was a cat cafe after all, but it was definitely not the atmosphere that Josh had anticipated. It was actually quite calming, even though Josh wasn’t particularly fond of cats or pets in general.

Without a word spoken, a charming young woman behind a small counter near the door offered both Josh and Gul a nod and made her way over to pass out menus. Two cats followed behind her and lingered at the foot of the table after she made her leave.

Josh couldn’t take it anymore.

“Please say something.”

“You have no idea how strong the impulse to reply with ‘something’ and nothing else is. It must be a human instinct to toy with pitiable things.”

Gul’s voice was mild and methodical. Their words were evenly paced, and their tone was as androgynous as Josh expected. They spoke like a scientist observing a lab rat; at least, Josh felt like a lab rat under their careful eyes.

“Ooh… no.” Josh said with mortified sigh. “This was a bad idea.”

Gul, unexpectedly, chuckled in response. “You were expecting nothing but business, I take it. But I hope you can forgive me for practicing my ability to socialize; I do not get to do so often.”

“My life has been turned inside out over the course of a week. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel like I can socialize.”

“I forgive you.” Gul responded in a dull voice. “Would you like to eat at all? Perhaps hold a cat? I understand they can be quite calming.”

Gul, as they spoke, reached down to the side of the table and hefted one of the trained cats that had followed the hostess. In a somewhat clumsy movement, the cat was placed on their lap. The beast seemed to sense something was odd about Gul, but didn’t jump to freedom. It stayed put on their lap and purred quietly, but was otherwise frozen in place.

“Fascinating.” Gul muttered under their breath.

“I think…” Josh glanced down at the menu. “I’ll have a drink when the hostess comes back. But can we talk about this?”

“I’m not an almanac, but I realize that you have questions… and I would like to know a few things myself.” Gul motioned for the hostess to come back without looking away from Josh. “I think I will try an espresso. I don’t now what that is, but it sounds exciting.”

“What can I get you two?” The hostess seemed to have just missed Gul’s mention of espresso, or, if not, was being polite.

“I would like an espresso… and some of these… biscuits.”

“Alright, espresso and… biscotti?”

“Is that how you pronounce it? That makes sense. Yes. Biscotti.”

“And for you, sir?”

The hostesses address of sir for Josh and no initial address to Gul was not lost on Josh. “Lemon ginger tea, please.”

“I’ll get that right to you,” the hostess said with a strained smile. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

Josh nodded politely and Gul mimicked the gesture nearly identically. For a moment there was a careful silence at the booth, with the only noticeable sound coming from purring cats.

Gul was the first to speak. “Do you mind if I see under your bandages? I wasn’t aware that your mark had spread to your cranium.”

“My…” Josh’s hand went to the bandages on his head. “No, this is from when I smashed my head into a pipe… It’s a long story.”

“Joshua, everything is a long story. I wish I had time to hear all of them, but today I came here to hear your long story.”

“You heard about the dreams, right?”

“Margot told me about that, yes.”

“The last time it happened, I couldn’t wake up. I thought I could force myself awake, and it worked. I had been sleepwalking though, so it didn’t go as painlessly as I had intended.”

“Vivid dreaming is common among marked peoples; somnambulism less so, but still more common than with unmarked peoples.”

“I haven’t had a dream since then, though. Margot says that’s because being around more marked people has been protecting me. I still think it might be because I’ve got a minor concussion.”

“Would you like me to check to see if you have a concussion?”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“Then no.” Josh paused as he remembered that he had been told that Gul would be more particular and demanding of his respect. They seemed to have completely forgotten to introduce themselves and Josh’s attitude didn’t seem to be bothering them.

“You’re worried about something.”

Something about the abruptness of the statement caught Josh off guard. He didn’t feel like he’d been all that expressive, and he was pretty sure that Gul wasn’t a mind reader. But they had still picked up on his confusion and quickly developed anxiety almost immediately.

“My apologies.” Gul frowned mechanically as they spoke. “I believe you were told things about me and I am flouting your expectations. But, frankly, I expected you to hear enough about me that I could focus on my investigation of you rather than my own introduction. I am practicing being less self-centered.”

Josh couldn’t help but curl his lip in frustration at the way this meeting was going. Gul was every bit as odd as he had been told, but not in the ways he had specifically been warned about. The lack of hair was easy enough to get over after a little bit, though Josh found himself glancing about at Gul’s various physical features whenever he felt he’d been holding eye contact for too long and it began to grow awkward. Gul seemed to be almost perfectly generic, despite their obvious strangeness.

“It’s fine.” Josh said with a heavy exhale. “I just, I guess I just expected things to be more…”

When Gul realized that Josh couldn’t find the word he was looking for, they pitched in with “Satisfying. Perhaps you expected I would have all the answers to your questions and that I would tell you everything you wanted to know."

"Yeah, I guess that's it."

"But I am not a satisfying person. I consider myself to never be satisfied with anything, not until I have explored everything there is to know about something. Perhaps you heard an anecdote about my choice in form from Margot. But maybe she didn’t mention that I didn’t choose to exist this way without trying all of my other options first.”

“That’s… a lot of trying options.” Josh had to swallow hard to center himself. He didn’t know how else to reply to that kind of information. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing people just talk about out of the blue.

“And I'm still trying options. Like this skin tone. It is slightly too white for my liking now that I see it in the light of your world." Gul seemed distracted as they glanced down at themselves, but quickly refocused. "But, I’m here because I want to learn; not because I want to continue my testing or teach you or advise you on your life decisions. But I’m willing to trade information for information.”

With a slow nod, Josh began to dredge his mind for the questions he desperately wanted answered but had fled from thought.

“I would still like to see your arm, if that’s all right with you?” Gul’s thin and hairless brow furrowed as they leaned forward across the table.

Josh was about to unravel a portion of bandage over his arm when the hostess returned with a small platter carrying tea cups and a plate of pastries. She offered a silent scrunched expression at the sight of Josh’s bandaged arm, as though she had just noticed that he was injured, but didn’t actually comment on it. Josh was grateful for both the sympathy and the discretion.

As soon as the hostess left their booth, Gul leaned back over the table to get a better look. Not wanting to draw too much attention, Josh held his hand out over the table instead so that Gul didn’t have to lean forward so far. And, careful no to agitate the skin beneath, Josh began to unravel the bandage that ended around his wrist. He was grateful that he had separated it into segments, as unraveling any of the bandage on his hand would make a tangled mess that would be hard to get back in place.

“Fascinating.” Gul muttered as they fixed their eyes on the still dewy sheen of Josh’s arm; it hadn’t had much time to heal since he had wrapped it, but it felt better. “So you removed it. And it looks like it took a significant amount of skin with it.”

“That makes two times I’ve removed a mark. The first time it was like a temporary tattoo and it peeled off like a sunburn. Just the top layer, and the skin was dried out so it came off easy. The first time, the skin under the mark got blotchy, like… like that one skin condition.The only thing that’s coming to mind is alopecia, and I don’t mean that…”

“Vitiligo?”

“Yes. That. Blotches of skin in a different tone, lighter than mine. And that all peeled off too. But the second time it all happened, I’d woken up from a nightmare and it was like it was a real mark. It was solid, fingertip to shoulder, and the skin was completely different. All lighter toned, it was like I was wearing a sleeve.”

“Interesting.” Gul muttered with a nod as they beckoned for Josh to hold out his hand. “And the lighter skin? That came off with the mark both times?”

Josh let Gul take his hand and watched carefully as they pulled it closer to them. There was a shrewd sort of analytical focus to Gul as they looked closely at the skin. But Josh carried on, as if trying not to make a big deal about what Gul was doing. It seemed like the simplest way to move forward.

“Yeah. Like it was part of it.”

“And your dreams,” Gul bit their lip in, what Josh thought looked like, excitement. “Every time you had one of these dreams, it was linked to an instance of a mark appearing?”

“Yes. It happened three times, actually. But the first time, the mark went away on its own.”

“But you had the mark in the dreams first, and then they came with you when you woke up?”

Josh sat back, incidentally pulling his hand free from Gul’s grip in the process, and tilted his head down in thought. He hadn’t thought about it like that before. Had they come with him from his dreams. Dreams weren’t real though, they didn’t have form, they were just thoughts. But the marks had appeared on him in dreams and then been there when he’d woken up. He had always thought they had just appeared, that he’d done it to himself somehow because of his dreams. But what if they had followed him like they had a separate intelligence?

“I don’t know? I was aware of them in the dreams, but I don’t know when they showed up on my arm.”

Josh took a sip of tea to calm himself. It was delicious and the steam wafting off the top of the liquid was soothing as it swept over his face.

“That is a test I would be eager to hear the results of…” Gul muttered, more to themselves than to Josh. “If you are willing, I would ask you to perform an experiment. Fall asleep away from Margot’s safety, and the presence of her students, but have them nearby so that they can observe you in the midst of one of these dreams. I would like to know when the mark appears.”

Josh frowned at the possibility of enduring another dream. They had only gotten worse the more he’d experienced them. But learning how it worked could help unravel how it worked and why it was happening. That Gul wanted to know the same things didn’t matter as much to Josh, but if he did experiment with it he might as well tell them any results.

“I’ll think about it.” Josh said with a nod. “But it’s only gotten worse each time I dream.”

“That is something else I’d like to know more about. These dreams. I understand that you’ve said there was something else in them. Some kind of other presence. Describe it to me.”

Josh took another gulp of tea and let out a long slow breath before offering his description. “The first time, the first dream, I was in a bubble. Not a big one, just like a small room. And I reached out of it to touch another bubble, and an arm reached out of that bubble to grab hold of mine. It was… wrong. I don’t know how else to describe it. It had a different mark on it… Actually. That first time. That first time when I reached out of my bubble, my own arm changed then too. The mark had been clear, the skin had been different, and the color of the mark was… shiny, somehow.”

“We’ll come back to that... probably. Tell me about the other mark and the thing that had it on its arm.”

The way that Gul said ‘thing’ felt strange to Josh. It felt like they were familiar with whatever it was, at least a little.

“It had a human silhouette, but the skin was grayish and damp. The mark looked like… like. I drew it actually, when it was fresh in my mind I drew it.”

Josh began to rummage through his backpack. He’d almost completely forgotten it was still strapped to his back. The only things in it were loose junk paper and the one notebook, but it felt like he had to really dig to get his hands on the notebook. As soon as he did manage to hold on to it, he ripped it free of the backpack and held it out while he flipped to the proper page.

Gul hummed while they looked at the crude drawing Josh had made while delirious. “How accurate would you say this is?”

“I’m… uh, not an artist. So it’s not great. But I still get chills when I look at it.”

“Joshua, seeing this makes me uncomfortable.” Gul closed and pushed the notebook back across the table to Josh. “This is the first time I’ve seen something like that before. And, as you know, marks look the same to everyone but everyone sees them differently. But I have heard it described before, just as you saw it; or nearly like this, at least. I heard it from someone else, who, in turn, had heard it from a secondary source.”

“Do you know anything else about it?” Josh was suddenly very hopeful. He hadn’t expected Gul to know about this other mark, but it was at the heart of his deepest fears and any information could be a comfort.

“I have a hypothesis,” Gul said with a hum, as if trying to decide whether or not they were willing to share it. “You are aware that this reality, this universe, is one of a near infinite amount, yes?”

“Yeah, like leaves floating in a pond.”

Gul nodded encouragingly, “yes. An apt metaphor you no doubt heard from Margot. I explained it to her just so when she was undergoing a process similar to what you are undertaking now. She witnessed me passing a mark on to someone else, much the same way you witnessed her passing a mark on to Sara. But there are some things Margot would not know, or would not be able to tell you about the other reality from which these marks stem, because I have not told her.”

Gul paused amid their explanation. They took a sip of their espresso and nibbled on a biscotti. There was still a clear air of indecision about them, as if they had a ready answer but were unwilling to share it. But something clicked. Amid the chewing of food and the sipping of coffee, Gul reached a decision.

“That world and this one, they overlap a great deal.” They let out a deep sigh, hesitation still in them but being forcibly shoved to the side. “The cause of this I would only explain to you in a place where I feel absolutely safe to do so. But the important information here, is that our two worlds are different worlds. They are overlapped, but they are distinctly separate. They form a clot of sorts in the fabric of existence. A clot which occasionally becomes clumped with other smaller pockets of abstract and foreign reality; other different and separate places and things that graze the outsides of our conjoined worlds. The majority of these small pockets are subsumed by either your home reality or mine, but some remain attached and dormant to the point where we cannot detect them. And I suspect you have made contact with one such pocket.”

“And I’m not the first.” Josh muttered to himself.

“I suspect not. Though if it is the same pocket of space and the same being within it, what you have made contact with is far more ancient than nearly anything I have ever heard of.”

“Are you telling me I’ve established some sort of connection with an evil ancient monster?”

“Not at all.” Gul frowned as they spoke. The expression was more confused than unhappy, but verged on frustration; not at Josh, but at an inability to communicate. “It is hard to tell you what I’m trying to now; communication is so limited here. But I can tell you it isn’t evil. If it makes sense, I would call it different. Uncomfortable. Even among people from our world, there are stranger ways of existing that are alien to us, that confound us and instill fear in our minds as a defensive instinct. I don’t think any mind, regardless of where it originates, is equipped to handle understanding an existence that is purely alien.”

Josh wanted to ask so many questions, but there was only one that he needed answered right then and there. “How do I get rid of it?”

“I’d love to answer that question, but I can’t.” Gul shrugged. “But I’m sure there are other questions you have, I still have plenty of my own.”

“What about the dreams themselves. Those are kind of normal for marked people, right? Why am I getting them without a mark?”

“No clue.”

“Alright… what about the skin change?”

“That could be any number of things. Marks are complex and reflect the person they become part of, indelibly linked to their entire existence. I’d wager, and I could be completely wrong, that when you became aware of marks your fate changed entirely. Consequently, you are only just now feeling a connection to your new future. And your future identity is asserting itself in the past as a means of self-defense.”

Gul’s explanation didn’t make any real sense to Josh. The words themselves were words, and they kind of conveyed an idea, but it didn’t process. It sounded like Gul was suggesting some kind of time travel was at play, but also not.

“Okay. That’s one theory I guess. Whatever that actually means.” Josh grumbled out the words with his face in his hands. The closeness of his wrist to his face reminded him that his arm was partially exposed and the bandage was unraveling slightly. “You didn’t have any more tests or observations to make about my arm, did you?”

“Just a question.” Gul pulled back their own sleeve on their left arm to reveal their own mark. “The last mark you removed, it went across more of your arm than this? Finger tip to shoulder, you said?”

Josh’s eyes passed over the mark on Gul’s arm, with only mild curiosity at first, but one quick observation led to another. Gul’s mark seemed to encompass less of their arm than Josh seemed to remember Margot’s and Sara’s and Connor’s. What was stranger was that the spiral pattern on Gul's arm, the one Josh had seen several times up that point, had a slight wobble to it. It was still the same mark, Josh could tell from the way that he felt when he saw it. But there was something wrong about Gul, something different that went far beyond their odd lack of hair and androgynous persona.

“Joshua?” Gul tilted their head to the side, their expression hollow and curious.

“Uh… yeah. Yes. All the way up my arm.” Josh took that as the cue that he didn't need to keep his arm exposed and began to wrap it back up.

“The same pattern?”

“The same spiral I see on your arm.” Josh was going to leave it at that, but then he corrected himself as he thought about it. “Actually, it didn’t have the bands at the top and bottom. At least not that I saw. But, I mean, there wasn’t really a top and bottom to it.”

“Of course, of course.” Gul said easily, nodding as if it were the most natural conclusion in the world. “A spiral, you said?”

“Yeah, four lines that spiral around the arm from the bottom band up to the top.” Josh wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to ask what Gul saw, but it felt like the right follow up. “What does the mark look like to you, if you don’t mind sharing?”

Gul didn’t respond right away. They pulled their arm in close to them and looked down to it like it was a baby being held close to their chest. A gentle stroke of their fingers across the marked skin seemed to snap them back to reality.

“Stars. The way stars look up close. As I said before. It’s difficult to explain some things with the limits of the languages here.”

“That sounds… fascinating.”

Gul’s comment had caught Josh off guard and he didn’t know how else to respond. ‘Fascinating’ definitely wasn’t the word that he wanted to use. ‘Creepy’ was, but he couldn’t just say that.

“You find it unnerving. That’s fine.” Gul muttered.

Josh was about to open his mouth and ask the question that came to mind, but as soon as the muscles on his face moved, Gul interrupted him.

“My mark does not give me the ability to know the thoughts of people. Not exactly. My mark grants me empathy beyond what most creatures experience. It enables me to learn and to intuit.”

“Do I even need to say anything then? Or can I just sit here and silently react to anything you say and you can just keep gathering information.”

Gul put a piece of biscotti over their pale, thin lips as if it was replacing a finger tapping in contemplation. “We could have a conversation like that. But it would be hollow and devoid of contemplation. Most intentional human thought processing occurs while constructing verbal conversation, while physical expression forms through instinctual response.”

Making conversation with Gul was becoming harder and harder. It seemed the more they talked, the more bizarre Gul reacted. Josh was about to give up, when something occurred to him.

“Pardon my asking, but do you have many drawn out conversations with people from my world?”

Gul seemed almost flustered, but most of what Josh detected was a conscious effort to conceal something. “Not many. Why do you ask.”

“It’s just that you’re very observant, but not very good at conversation. So, it stands to reason that you haven't had many drawn out conversations to gather experience from.”

“You’re quite observant yourself.” Gul said with a gentle frown.

It wasn’t an unhappy frown, at least it didn’t convey that they were upset. If anything, Josh felt the full weight of Gul’s curiosity in that frown. And, for a moment, Josh fully understood why he had been warned so thoroughly about Gul. He could tell, or at least he felt like he could tell, what was going through Gul’s mind and it wasn’t a pretty picture; it was the cold and calculated desire to dissect something and meticulously record all of its parts.

By the time Josh realized that he had reacted to Gul’s frown, it was too late. They had exchanged a small conversation of expressions before Josh could really understand what was happening. But even when he tried to wipe his hands over his face to loosen his facial muscles and neutralize any expression he was showing, Gul had already seen what he was thinking.

“I’m not going to do anything to you, Joshua. But, I believe you've garnered some insight into the methods I use to learn.” Gul looked slightly ashamed as they spoke, but there was still an underlying curiosity and confidence that unnerved Josh. “I am a student of existence. I can’t help but be curious about everything, because I want to learn everything. It’s part of my mark and it’s part of my very nature.”

“That’s not exactly what I’m afraid of.” Josh didn’t know where he was going just yet, his thoughts hadn’t quite caught up to the situation. “I have a purely selfish question to ask you that doesn’t benefit your curiosity at all.”

“Why would I answer it then?”

“I can offer you something purely for your curiosity in return.”

Gul’s eyes lit up, and it dawned on Josh just how ironic Gul’s choice of location was. At that moment, the hairless, pale, and lithe creature sitting across the booth from him looked very much like a hairless cat. Their eyes were alight with a glint of curiosity that Josh had only ever seen in a cat peering over the edge of a table at something wandering underneath. It was just as much curiosity as it was preparation to pounce.

“I’m listening.”

“I still have the sleeve of skin with the mark that I removed. Not with me here. But if you wanted access to it… for research purposes, I’d be willing to give you that.”

Something dark and powerful crossed Gul’s face as Josh made his offer. It wasn’t insidious per se, but it wasn’t benevolent either. It was almost like a lust for understanding. Gul’s frown had spoken volumes about their desire to understand and the lengths they would go to, but this… Josh wasn’t exactly sure what Gul had just shown him. He didn’t even have a proper word for the feeling it was that he’d seen or how he felt because of it. It was, to use the term that others around him had used before, alien.

“And your question?”

Josh paused. He hadn’t known if he’d ever actually get a chance to ask the question that had been on his mind since the moment he’d been clued in to the existence of marks and other worlds. But he felt, at that moment, with the promise he had offered Gul, he could ask them anything at all, even something personal and unutterable, and he’d get an answer.

“Why is this all happening? Why do marks exist? Why is it that both of our worlds are like this?”

It took three questions to express what it was Josh meant. He understood why he was caught up in the mess, he understood what the mess was—at least partially—but he didn’t have a clue as to why it was happening. And that was the most important part. It was what was keeping him teetering on the fence. If the answer was right, then he knew there would only be one choice. And it was the choice he had been putting off for as long as he could.

“That’s a very good question…”

Gul was interrupted by commotion outside; loud noises, the crashing of something big and metal, and then a loud sharp snapping noise. A gunshot.

Josh instinctively looked to the front of the cafe, out the glass window towards the street. But there was nothing wrong outside the window. The three people that had arrived with Gul were pretty clearly stationed outside, but at the noise Josh saw them bolt to attention and the two taller identical men made a B line to the side of the cafe.

It took Josh a moment to remember what it all meant, but it clicked as soon as the two men bolted for the side alley. That was where Margot had gone to keep watch. Panic welled up in Josh, guilt and fear that he had been the cause of something terrible. But Gul seemed as calm as they had been the moment they walked in.

“Perhaps you should see the events unfolding outside for yourself, and then at least part of your question will be answered.” Gul turned to signal the hostess, who was now cowering behind the front counter of the cafe. “Check please.”