She was a fourteen-year-old girl. Her simple presence in mission control was an anomaly . . . but because she’d been hanging around for the better part of two days, she had grown transparent. None of the remaining men—and the one woman—noticed her at all.

Weldon did tune in to the news out of Bangalore. “Anybody have any idea what in God’s name is going on there?”

Capcom Travis Buell, who, after losing connection with Bangalore, had become the designated TV watcher in the center, said, “They’re calling the Bangalore site some kind of sinkhole.”

Weldon, Jones, and the others surrounded Buell at that point, so Rachel couldn’t hear what they were saying. But it was clear they were agitated: Bynum kept pointing toward one of the walls, with Weldon more gently indicating another corner.

They were talking about the Houston Object.

The TV news heads were still going on about Bangalore. “—as if it’s collecting material,” one of them was saying. “No one has been able to get close enough to say for sure, but the rotation is creating some kind of vortex, for want of a better word. It looks as though soil, grass, debris, air . . . it’s all being sucked into it.”

A second head—the anchor, Rachel remembered—took that very badly. “If it’s sucking up material, what’s to stop it from sucking up, say, a whole chunk of India?”

“Well, unless it’s a chunk of super-dense matter—”

“—Or a baby black hole—” a third head said.

“—Which we’ve never seen—”

“—Any more than we’ve ever seen a hunk of super-dense matter—”

The anchor lost it. “People, come on! This isn’t a lunchroom debate at Caltech!”

The first, more reasoned head then said, “Unless it’s some exotic matter, it can’t absorb or ‘suck up’ more than a few tons or dozen tons. It doesn’t appear to be some kind of, I don’t know, doomsday weapon.”

The second head couldn’t resist: “Come on, David, we don’t know what the hell this is.”

It wasn’t anything specific anyone on TV said. Maybe it was a combination of four images hitting her eyeballs combined with fatigue and those cryptic words from her mother. But Rachel Stewart suddenly knew that she had to get out of mission control.

She slid off her chair and, still invisible, left mission control.

She wasn’t entirely sure she could walk to the impact site. She was a bit fuzzy about its actual distance from mission control, but she knew it couldn’t be more than a couple of kilometers. She had walked distances as great as a single click in her life, on occasion, when forced. So how hard could it be to do two? Even in the suffocating heat of a late-afternoon thunderstorm?

“Don’t be like this.”

She turned and saw that Harley Drake, wheelchair and all, had followed her back to the Home Team. “Like what? Independent?”

“Just stop arguing.” Harley was red-faced and in a bad mood. Fine. Rachel knew he wouldn’t really yell at her. Her own father didn’t do that. Mom, well, yes. This was all about Mom.

And maybe there was a better way to get Harley to give permission. “Don’t you want to see what’s going on out there?” She turned to Sasha Blaine, who was a few feet away, concentrating on her Slate and quietly trying to pretend she could not hear everything. “Sasha, how about you?”

Blaine looked at Harley before answering—as if asking permission to speak. “Frankly, I’m dying to go out there.”

“What if it’s radioactive?” Harley said, though he didn’t sound convincing.

“The local fire and police will have the place surrounded, anyway, won’t they?” Blaine said. “If it’s dangerous, we won’t get close.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith in some overworked men and women in a very unusual situation.”

Blaine indicated her Slate screen. “There are people all over the Bangalore Object. They haven’t started vomiting or losing their hair.” Rachel couldn’t see much . . . the feed was from a phone, and Blaine’s screen was small. Nevertheless, it showed dozens of men in white shirts—the uniform of Bangalore, from what Rachel knew—moving debris with their bare hands.

What was most surprising was that the slowly rotating whitish dome of the Object was literally a few feet from them.

Harley looked around the Home Team, whose members had broken into their normal pairs and triplets, conferring, arguing, talking on phones.

Then he faced Rachel and Sasha. “Fine, whatever you want. I need air, anyway.”

The rain had let up for a few moments, though dark clouds to the south and east promised a new downpour. “We’ll take my rig,” Harley said, with no argument from Sasha or Rachel.

“Good. My rental is a kilometer away.” And Harley’s van was in one of the handicapped spots right outside mission control.

As Rachel walked around the van to the other side, Harley advised Sasha Blaine, “Watch out for my junk.”

“Big talker.”

Rachel was only beginning to contemplate the meaning of that exchange—good God, were they flirting?—when another group emerged from mission control: Shane Weldon and Brent Bynum, together with three of Jones’s horse-holders.

“Where are you sneaking off to?” Harley asked them.

“One guess,” Weldon said.

“Don’t you have a vehicle to launch?”

Weldon tapped his earpiece. “Josh and the Orbit Two team are totally on top of things. They don’t need me looking over their shoulders.”

“Who are you, and what have you done with Shane Weldon?”

Bynum snickered. “Seriously,” Weldon said. “I’m off duty for two hours.”

“So why aren’t you collapsed on a couch somewhere?”

Weldon smiled. “Why aren’t you?”

Harley was attaching his seat belt. Weldon and his crew still hadn’t reached their cars. “Race you,” Harley said, in best astronaut tradition.

There was no chance for a contest. There was barely any forward progress once Harley’s van left the JSC grounds and joined a polite and steady-but-slow flow of vehicles north on Saturn Lane. Blaine said, “Where are they all going?”

“The staging area for evacuation is the Harris County Courthouse. It’s a few kilometers west of here.”

“They’re still evacuating?” Rachel said.

“Inertia, maybe,” Harley said. “It might also be wise because, ladies, we’re in completely uncharted territory here. We have no idea what this Object is for, or what it might do.”

“I have an idea,” Blaine said. “It’s spinning and churning up soil, right?”

“Soil, air, pavement, and pieces of buildings, yeah.”

“I mean, think about what Keanu really is.” She waited. Rachel certainly had no ideas. “A space probe, right? Just like Mariner or Viking. These Architects sent it here to take images and readings of Earth and the entire solar system. Well, now that they know there’s life here, they’re sampling.”

“So these plasma balls are just some kind of advanced soil scoop. Don’t they have dirt and water on Keanu?”

“Maybe not enough, or not the right kind.”

Harley made a right turn onto Bay Area, a major street that paralleled the north boundary of JSC, then intersected Space Center Boulevard. That thoroughfare snaked around to the south and east . . . directly toward the impact site. The traffic here was all one way, the other way.

Harley smiled. “It might be better to perform a flanking maneuver here.” He drove right through the intersection of Space Center and Bay Area—a smart choice. Rachel could see that there was a roadblock a hundred yards south. No cars were getting through.

As Harley continued east on Bay Area, into the wooded lowlands flanking Armand Bayou, he glanced at Sasha Blaine. “Riddle me this: If our advanced civilization really just wanted to make a survey of this solar system, or a hundred solar systems, why would it send something as freaking large as Keanu?”