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hand on the door again, and the car sealed up and shut off. “Why does it work in the dark?” she asked.
    â€œMaybe it has some kind of start-up battery or something,” he said. “I don’t know.”
    â€œWe could drive in it,” she said hopefully.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhere’d they come from?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said angrily. “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s get out of here.”
    He squeezed back through the gap in the aluminum, and she followed. They shared another can in silence, then he kicked apart the remains of the fire and pitched their garbage as far as he could out into the desert. They got into Kellogg’s car and drove off. He kept himself from looking back at the shed.
    They were in the foothills by mid-morning, and as they climbed towards the mountains, they rose into a fog. When they stopped by a creek for lunch, the cloud was still translucent: greenish wisps that seemed to cling to the rocks and trees and even the asphalt, hovering like ghosts. Halfway through the afternoon, it was opaque, masking the road, lacing the sky with green banners that admitted less and less blue. As the green thickened around them, he slowed the car to a crawl, checking his location on the road by occasional glimpses of the pavement or the railing. The mountains were invisible now, the layers of green woven together impenetrably. As they moved forward, the shreds of daylight grew fewer and fewer.
    â€œRoll up your window,” he told Melinda, who hadn’t spoken since lunch. She nodded and obeyed the command.
    He advanced in tiny, halting jumps now, as the drifting fog revealed hints of the road. The nose of the car was barely visible ahead of them. Even the air between the windshield and his face seemed dim.
    â€œYou can’t hardly drive,” said Melinda.
    â€œNo,” he said. “Good thing we aren’t in one of those solar cars, huh? No sunlight coming through this fog.”
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” she said. “You can’t hardly drive either way.”
    Finally he had to stop completely. When he turned to look at Melinda, the space between them held a banner of green. She waved at it with her hand, only partially dispersing it.
    â€œIt’s coming in here,” she said.
    â€œA car’s not really airtight, even with the windows up.”
    â€œMaybe one of those solar cars would of been.”
    He laughed. “Maybe.”
    He got out and stood beside the car. There was no depth to the green; it was like staring at a sheet of paper. He raised his hands in front of his face and couldn’t see them. As the wind blew the fog down from the mountain, the last patches of visibility were blotted out.
    Melinda felt her way around the car and took his hand. “Maybe we should turn around.”
    â€œLet’s walk a little,” he said.
    â€œOkay.”
    Holding her hand, he left the car behind and found the band of gravel that marked the edge of the road. Keeping the gravel underfoot, they set out up the road, through the blinding green.

 
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    Moon clutched his daughter’s hand tightly as they sat in the green of the waiting room at White Walnut. Someone was rustling papers at the desk, but it had been more than an hour since Moon first made contact with the receptionist, and she’d sent him to this seat. His daughter’s moist hand squeezed back at his, and they went on waiting. Moon could hear the hum of the generators that maintained the huge facility, and he was so close that he imagined he could smell the rare and valuable translucent air.
    It was years since Moon had seen anything but the green. Only the White Walnut laboratory had the technology that made sight possible again, and Moon had never before got even this far into the facility. His daughter didn’t remember sight at all. That was the point of his efforts: to get her inside. To get her