The chalk snapped on the third stroke.
Walter set the broken piece on the tray with the deliberate care he gave to all small things, picked up a new stick, and finished the equation. Behind him, twenty-two sophomore desks. He could tell from the quality of the silence — the specific texture of it, the way sound moved through occupied space differently than empty space, a sensitivity he'd developed in corridors aboard ships where knowing what was behind you was not academic — that perhaps seven of them were following. The other fifteen had already left, in the way that teenagers leave: bodies present, attention somewhere warmer.
He wrote the symbol for carbon.
Six electrons. Six protons. Six neutrons in the most stable isotope. He had explained this eleven times in the current academic year. He would explain it again. The universe was patient about such things.
"Carbon," he said, without turning around, "is the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass. It forms more compounds than any other element. Every one of you is approximately eighteen percent carbon by weight." A pause. "You are, in the most literal sense, starstuff. I'd encourage you to find that interesting, but I understand we're working against the bell."
Laughter from the three students who were paying attention. The rest continued their separate migrations. Walter turned and surveyed the room with the mild expression he had cultivated, over four years in this classroom, as a second skin. His actual expression — the one beneath it, the one that sometimes surfaced at 3 a.m. when he sat with the lights off — would have alarmed them.
He handed back the quizzes.
The drive home took fourteen minutes on surface roads because the highway interchange near Osuna was under construction again, orange cones arranged with a randomness that struck him, each time, as personally offensive. He drove a 2004 Pontiac Aztek in a shade of green that the manufacturer had called Forest Mist and that Walter privately called evidence of institutional failure. The air conditioning made a sound like small ambitions dying. He had meant to get it fixed in the spring.
The neighborhood materialized around him the way familiar things do — gradually, then all at once. He could have driven it without looking. Sometimes, at night, when Skyler was asleep and Flynn had been still for an hour and the house had settled into its particular quiet, he drove without destination, taking the grid of streets in expanding rectangles, feeling the electromagnetic pulse of the power lines overhead like a slow, irregular heartbeat. Not his heartbeat. The city's.
He pulled into the driveway at 4:47 p.m. The motion-sensor light above the garage did not activate. He made a note to replace the bulb.
Inside, the house smelled of the cilantro Skyler put in everything since reading about its anti-inflammatory properties, and of the particular industrial-grade cleaner she used on the kitchen tile, and faintly, at the bottom of everything like a ground note, of the house itself — old wood, sun-heated stucco, the accumulated atmospheric residue of a family living inside a space smaller than the family it contained. These were not unpleasant smells. They were simply the smells of the life he had made, which was a different thing from a life he had chosen, which was itself a different thing from the life he had been removed from without consultation eleven years ago and set down into, blinking, in a parking structure off Central Avenue with three dollars in a pocket belonging to a jacket he'd never owned before.
He was aware of the difference. He was aware of it the way you are aware of a tooth that has been pulled — the awareness located at an absence rather than a presence.
"Walter." Skyler was at the kitchen counter, sorting mail. She looked up at him with the expression that had, in the last eight months, become her primary expression in his presence: a kind of focused waiting, as if she were listening for a specific note in music that hadn't yet resolved.
"Skyler." He set his bag down by the door.
"There's chicken in the oven. Flynn's upstairs."
"I heard the car," Flynn called, from somewhere above them. His voice had the flat projection of a teenager who had determined that acknowledging a parent required the minimum viable effort. Walter had taught him this without intending to, by doing it first.
"How was school?" Skyler asked.
The question was addressed at the mail. Walter had noticed, recently, that she often directed conversation toward surfaces rather than toward him — a navigational adjustment so subtle that he doubted she was aware she was doing it. He was aware. He was aware of everything about Skyler these days with a precision that felt like its own kind of unkindness: the three-millimeter adjustment in the set of her jaw when she asked him something and waited for his answer, the way her hands stilled for a fraction of a second before she opened anything he might have touched.
"Fine," he said. "The third period class is getting worse."
"Mmm."
He went upstairs to change.
Flynn's door was open the width required to hear the hallway without being observed from it. Walter paused at the threshold, not enough to be a visit, just enough for the angle to show him his son in profile: earphones in, chemistry textbook open, a notebook beside it covered in his small precise handwriting, which he had inherited from Walter along with his eyes and his jaw and his tendency to go very still when he was working something out. The notebook was turned at an angle Walter couldn't read from the doorway. Flynn moved one leg, repositioning on the bed with the careful deliberateness that Walter had learned, over the last eight months, to distinguish from ordinary teenage restlessness.
The careful movements. The route from his bedroom to the bathroom that avoided the throw rug near the top of the stairs. The way Flynn always sat before reaching for something on a high shelf, as if he had quietly recalculated, sometime in the past year, every moment in which balance might be required.
Walter continued down the hallway.
He changed his shirt. He hung the chalk-dusted one on the back of the chair rather than in the hamper, a habit Skyler had asked him to break twice, which he kept forgetting because the truth was he did not forget it, he had simply concluded at some level below conscious thought that the hamper was not where the day ended. The shirt on the chair was how the day ended. He was aware that this was a small and unreasonable thing to care about. He was aware of many small and unreasonable things he still cared about.
Dinner was chicken and rice. Flynn ate with his earphones out, which meant he was in one of his cooperative moods, and told a story about his English class that had a punchline Walter laughed at a half-second late. Skyler asked about a test. Flynn mentioned a friend Walter hadn't heard of. Walter said the rice was good. Skyler said it was the same recipe.
Between each exchange, a silence that lasted approximately two seconds longer than comfortable.
Eleven years ago Walter had sat in a briefing on Kree tactical communication and noted that the most effective form of intelligence-gathering was not what was said but the interval between what was said and what should logically follow it. The interval was where the truth lived.
He ate his chicken. He did not examine the intervals.
After dinner Flynn took his plate to the sink, rinsed it with the particular care of someone who has been asked often enough that it has become automatic, and went back upstairs. His footsteps on the stairs were measured. Skyler watched the staircase after he'd gone up with an expression that Walter recognized because it was close to his own: a grief that had not yet found its proper shape, looking out of a borrowed face.
"He seems better today," Walter said.
Skyler turned back to the table. "He says his hands were good this morning."
"That's good."
"Yes."
She cleared the dishes. Walter dried. They moved around each other in the kitchen with the practiced economy of two people who have shared a small space for long enough that their bodies have developed an unconscious choreography independent of any intention. She handed him a pan. He dried it. She put away the spice jars in the order she preferred, which was not alphabetical but which followed some logic of frequency and proximity he had never bothered to decode.
When everything was put away she poured herself a glass of water and stood at the window looking at the dark yard for a moment before saying good night and going upstairs.
Walter stood in the kitchen for two minutes after the light upstairs came on. Then he went to the garage.
The garage was his. This was not a negotiated arrangement but an atmospheric one — Skyler did not come here, and Flynn came here only for specific purposes, and the neighbors had never been inside it because Walter had never invited them inside it, and so the space had accumulated, over four years, the particular density of a room that belongs fully to one person. A workbench. Shelves of containers organized by a system visible only to him. A stool. Fluorescent lighting that hummed at a frequency he found, on most evenings, almost companionable.
He sat on the stool.
The electrical panel was on the north wall, gray metal, slightly warm to the touch where it met the wire housing. He knew without looking at it: 200-amp service, split-phase, circuit breakers for every room in the house plus two outbuildings plus the small subpanel for the exterior lights and the irrigation system. He knew it the way he knew his classroom's layout and the grid of his neighborhood's streets and the approximate location of every active power line within a quarter-mile radius. Not because he was careful about such things, though he was. Because they spoke to him.
This was what remained.
Not the range. Not the endurance. Not the ability to orient himself in a debris field by the electromagnetic whisper of three-billion-year-old stellar material, or the capacity to track Carol's energy signature through eighteen inches of hull plating, or the sustained cellular regeneration that had once kept him functional through three days of pressure-suit exposure to unfiltered cosmic radiation. Those had attenuated to almost nothing in the first two years back. What remained was this: a low-grade sensitivity to electromagnetic fields, a kind of passive reception, the way old metal sometimes conducts weather.
He placed his palm against the panel.
The hum came up through his hand. Not signal — just current. Sixty cycles per second, the American standard, the dull respiration of a civilization that had learned to move electrons through wire without understanding, in any fundamental sense, what electrons were. He felt it: the house's full circuit, branching through the walls like a nervous system, reading as heat and faint vibration at intervals he had learned to map. The refrigerator on its own line. The HVAC cycling through its third hour of evening use. The small persistent draw from Flynn's room — laptop, bedside lamp, the medical monitoring device Skyler had ordered online and Flynn had accepted without protest, which was its own kind of grief to locate.
He held his hand against the panel and felt the grid.
It did not feel like anything else. It did not feel like standing in a current of actual cosmic energy, the deep carrier-wave pulse of interstellar space that Carol moved through the way a musician moves through a familiar key — knowing where every note was before she struck it, her whole body tuned. This was not that. This was sixty cycles per second in a grid maintained by the Public Service Company of New Mexico, and he was a chemistry teacher with chalk on his pants sitting in a garage at nine o'clock on a Tuesday.
He held it anyway.
For approximately three minutes he held it, feeling the current's familiar pulse, letting it settle into the space behind his sternum that had been empty since the year after he came back and the attunement faded out like a signal losing source. The hum was not nothing. It was not the pulse of a three-solar-mass star or the electromagnetic wake of a jump drive engaging, but it was something — organized, purposeful, a thing that could be read.
Then he closed his hand.
He took it off the panel. He sat for a moment with his palm turned up in his lap, looking at the lines of it. A chemist's hand. An ordinary hand. He turned it over and placed it flat on his thigh.
He turned off the garage light, went through the door into the kitchen, turned off the kitchen light, and went upstairs. Skyler was reading. He changed into the clothes he slept in. He lay down on his side of the bed. After a moment Skyler put her book on the nightstand and turned off the lamp.
In the dark, after a while, Walter said, "He seemed better today."
A long pause. Not hostile. Just the length of a woman deciding what to carry.
"Yes," Skyler said. "He did."
Walter closed his eyes. Through the ceiling and above it, the desert sky held approximately eight thousand visible stars. A hundred years of city light had dimmed them, but they were there. Most of them were dead already. Light traveling so far from its source that the source had burned out before the light arrived, and you were looking not at a star but at the last signal a star had sent before it went dark, crossing the distance at the only speed available, reaching you at last, fourteen billion years later, in New Mexico.
He'd read that in a book he'd owned before. He'd also seen it, once, from outside the atmosphere, with a woman who'd told him that looking at starlight was the closest most humans would ever come to corresponding with the past.
He did not think about that.
He breathed, carefully, until he slept.