“I don’t know. There ought to be something we can do.” She still felt exhilarated after her derring-do in the river. Who’d have ever thought little Kimmy had that in her? “How about going out on the town?” she said.

“Absolutely.” He made drinks for them, swallowed his, excused himself, and went back to his bedroom. Minutes later he reappeared in a lemon-colored jacket. “The new me. What do you think?”

“Dazzling.”

“Bought it last week. For a special occasion.”

“Good. It should put us in the right frame of mind for taking the next step.”

“Us? How do you mean us?”

She canted her head and gazed steadily into his unblinking eyes. She was sending out a subliminal call for help and she knew it and Solly knew it. “I wouldn’t put any pressure on you, Solly,” she said.

“Of course not. And what,” he asked cautiously, “would the next step be?”

“To find out what happened to the relationship between Kane and Emily.”

They went to a show. Dancers, live music, a celebrity troop of singers, a comedian. The place was packed. Afterward they strolled along the skyways, enjoying the fountains and the bistros.

They stopped by the Top of the World for dinner. But they’d hardly been seated when a text message came in from Matt: We understand police found Amara’s body in Severin. Some of us are wondering how it happens that Institute personnel are involved.

“Some of us” translated to Philip Agostino, the onetime physics whiz who’d realized his tastes ran more to power than to science and who was now director of the Institute. “I suspect,” Solly said ominously, “there’ll be some fallout.”

After the experience in the river, trouble with her boss seemed of minor consequence. Kim ordered a bottle of wine far more expensive than she could afford, filled both glasses, and raised hers to Solly. “For all you’ve done,” she said.

Later, back in the hotel room, she looked again at the final conversation between Kane and Emily, as the Hunter approached Sky Harbor. The lights were dimmed in the pilot’s room, and they spoke in the casual manner of longtime colleagues.

“Thanks, Markis.”

“For what?”

“For getting us back. I know we put some pressure on you to continue the mission.”

“It’s okay. It’s what I would have expected.”

“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”

She stopped it there, backed it up, went to get Solly, who was trying to read in another room, and reran the line.

“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”

“Okay.” She went to a split screen, Emily and Markis again, from a conversation seven weeks earlier, shortly after Hunter had departed St. Johns. “Watch.”

Neither spoke. Emily squeezed Kane’s shoulder and slipped into the right-hand seat.

“We’re right on schedule,” he said.

She leaned toward him, as close as the restraints would permit. “Maybe this’ll be our time.”

“I hope so, Emily. I really do.”

“Listen to his voice,” Kim said. “Watch the body language.”

The two sat several minutes, talking about incidentals. But the manner of it, the tendency of each to reach out and touch the other broadcast their mutual passion. Kim froze the picture at a moment when they gazed soulfully at each other.

“I don’t know,” said Solly. “What are you trying to prove?”

“Inconsistency.”

She replayed the conversations in her mind and stared out at the skyline.

“Let me change the subject,” said Solly. “The Institute called a while ago. Harvey’s asked for some time off. They need a replacement pilot.”

“For—?”

“Taratuba.”

The black hole near the Miranda nebula. The genesis candidate. The Thomas Hammersmith was scheduled to leave in eleven days.

There was a suspicion, but little hard evidence, that Taratuba had created a false vacuum, had collapsed into a new big bang. A baby universe. The event, if it had in fact occurred, would have erupted into a different space-time continuum, forever separated from this universe. But theory held that if it were in fact happening, Kung Che radiation would be detectable around the hole. It might be a chance to touch the fires of creation. To make some progress on precreative conditions.

“You’d be gone quite a while,” she said.

“Several months.” He looked at her. “What do you think? Does it make a problem for you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I mean, this thing has lain fallow for thirty years.”

“Of course.”

“You think there’s anything to it?” he asked.

“To what?”

As if he’d been reading her thoughts: “Alternate worlds. A place where you and I are sitting in this same room, having this same conversation, except maybe we’ve figured out what’s going on.”

She shrugged. “Not my field, Solly. But I’d like to compare notes with the other Brandywine.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “I wonder,” he said suddenly, “if there’s a place out there where we’re lovers?”

He blurted it out, as if he had to say it before some prohibition intervened. He looked uncomfortable in the wake of the remark, and she knew he would have called it back if he could.

She took his hand, not knowing quite what to say. There’d always been an unspoken understanding between them, a distance created by the knowledge that they would not risk a long friendship to a sexual encounter. But there were occasional hints, suggestions from Solly that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the status quo. Still, he was all the family she had, and she did not want to lose him. “I’d hope so,” she said cautiously, smiling, but using a neutral tone.

While Solly called the desk and booked tickets on the Snowhawk in the morning, Kim parked herself in front of the display and began running the Hunter logs again. Emily and Kane.

I love you, the early encounters said, the passion reciprocal. There was no way to miss it.

And: “As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”

The nonverbal cues were almost professionally correct, no suggestion of sexual tension, no touching, no wistful smiles. Nothing. Even the voices were friendly but detached. Pass the coffee.

“It’s all wrong,” she said aloud.

“If you figure it out,” said Solly, stretching, getting up from the sofa on which he’d been spread out, “let me know. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Kim put up her split screen again, Kane and Emily from early in the mission on one side, Kane and Emily saying goodbye on the other. She ran both sequences forward at normal speed, then backed them up and ran them again at one quarter. And then she saw it.

My God.

She reversed it and watched it again. There was no question.

She knocked on his door. “Solly.”

He came out with a sigh, securing his robe, wearing an expression of infinite patience. “Yes, Kim?” he said, emphasizing the aspirate.

She killed the sound and ran it for him. “Watch the seats,” she said.

He lowered himself onto the sofa. A table lamp burned steadily beside him. “What am I looking for?”

On the left side, the early conversation, the encounter coming to an end and Emily shifting her weight and beginning to rise. Kim stopped the picture.

On the right, the talk also winding down. Again Emily shifting her weight and getting up. Kim restarted the sequence, both images synchronized, both in slow motion. In each, Emily flicked the harness open with a graceful left hand and used the other to push off the chair arm.

She hit the pause function. “Do you see it?”

“I give up,” said Solly.

“Look at the seat.” The polymod fabric in the early sequence contained the unmistakable imprint of a human bottom. On the right, it was perfectly smooth.