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imitating those self-centered posers, and yet Roell was equally excited by the new, loud, patriotic tone sweeping the country. Was that because the soldiers had body armor and guns? Or did he enjoy the primal feeling of us-against-them?
    The media had created fan clubs for the war, which wasn’t a war, although it made great material for TV, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.Facebook! The relentless updates were motivated by ad revenue and subscription rates, which Roell was too naive to realize despite wanting to be so streetwise.
    More important, Roell’s dyslexia didn’t slow him on the net. The boy’s ability to bang through his favorite sites and half-coherent text messages were proof to Marcus that he should apply himself harder in school, but they’d butted heads on the topic too many times, so Marcus tried again.
    “Something’s happening with our sun that we can’t explain,” he said. “If our data’s correct, the solar wind is accelerating—”
    “Nobody cares, Dad.”
    “They should. If the sun—”
    “Check it out.” Roell held up his phone to display a photo of a plucky U.S. sailor gazing at an ocean. “Our guys are in trouble, and all you care about is outer space.”
    Marcus stopped himself from barking a response. When he was younger, Roell had loved
Star Wars
and Bionicles. He’d read the books with his father, watched the movies, and papered his bulletin board with drawings of Jango Fett and LEGO robots.
    “I’m not trying to scare you,” Marcus said, trying to scare him, “but the sun shouldn’t radiate like this unless it’s pre-nova. Do you know what I’m talking about? The sun gives off a lot more than visible light. Among other things, it emits an outgassing of charged particles called the solar wind.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Here’s the spooky part. The surface of the sun averages ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit—but above it, the corona runs as hot as five million. That’s like a lightbulb making the air around it hotter than the glass. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. The sun’s gravity is so extreme, it should pull the solar wind back into itself, but the corona superheats the wind beyond the point where gravity can hold it.”
    Marcus didn’t add that no one fully comprehended how. Science also couldn’t explain why the solar wind hit its topmost speeds. One model proposed co-rotating regions within the solar wind where expanding rings of charged particles smashed into each other, creating shock waves as fast as twenty-five hundred kilometers per second.
    Even in normal conditions, the levels of ionizing radiation striking Earth could rise or fall by a factor of thousands. What would happen if the sun’s magnetic field was entering a phase in which it relaxed or stiffened? Either phenomenon would allow larger, more frequent blasts of charged particles to escape…
    “Come with me,” Marcus implored his son. “At the very least, you can get your messages, okay?”
    Cell transmissions weren’t permitted in the area. The array was so sensitive, it registered the tiny electrical pulse generated by starting a car. Roell was free to access his social networks on their computers, which used landlines, but Marcus had insisted Roell turn off the wireless functions on his iPhone.
    “Fine.” The boy pulled himself from the sleeping bag.
    Marcus pretended not to watch as he dressed. Jeans. Sports jersey. Roell was a great-looking kid. They’d done that much right. Roell had Janet’s cheekbones, which gave him a regal look despite the loose jersey, as if he was too good for any clothes.
    He had deep black skin unlike his father’s. Marcus had three white ancestors in his family. They were Roell’s ancestors, too, but no one would ever guess. The difference was another unspoken source of tension between them. Skin color was important among Roell’s classmates and on the street.
    The street was where Roell had learned his slouch. Walking through the hall, he scuffed