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book.”
    “Maybe you should.”
    “Why? What are you defending here?”
    “I’m not defending anything. But maybe God had something to do with last October. That doesn’t seem so ridiculous.”
    “Actually,” Jason said, “yes, it
does
seem ridiculous.”
    She rolled her eyes and stalked ahead of us, sighing to herself. Jase stuffed the book back in its display rack.
    I told him I thought people just wanted to understand what had happened, that’s why there were books like that.
    “Or maybe people just want to pretend to understand. It’s called ‘denial.’ You want to know something, Tyler?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “Keep it secret?” He lowered his voice so that even Diane, a few yards ahead, couldn’t hear him. “This isn’t public yet.”
    One of the remarkable things about Jason was that he often did know genuinely important things a day or two in advance of the evening news. In a sense Rice Academy was only his day school; his real education was conducted under the tutelage of his father, and from the beginning E.D. had wanted him to understand how business, science, and technology intersect with political power. E.D. had been working those angles himself. The loss of telecom satellites had opened up a vast new civilian and military market for the stationary high-altitude balloons (“aerostats”) his company manufactured. A niche technology was going mainstream, and E.D. was riding the crest of the wave. And sometimes he shared secrets with his fifteen-year-old son he wouldn’t have dared whisper to a competitor.
    E.D., of course, didn’t know Jase occasionally shared these secrets with me. But I was scrupulous about keeping them. (And anyway, who would I have told? I had no other real friends. We lived in the kind of new-money neighborhood where class distinctions were measured out with razor-sharp precision: the solemn, studious sons of single working mothers didn’t make anyone’s A list.)
    He lowered his voice another notch. “You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?”
    Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded.
    “One of them’s alive,” he said. “Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren’t saying much. But the rumor is, he’s completely crazy.”
    I gave him a wide-eyed look, but he wouldn’t say anything more.
     
     
    It took a dozen years for the truth to be made public, but when it was finally published (as a footnote to a European history of the early Spin years) I thought of the day at the mall. What happened was this:
    Three Russian cosmonauts had been in orbit the night of the October Event, returning from a housekeeping mission to the moribund International Space Station. A little after midnight Eastern Standard Time the mission commander, a Colonel Leonid Glavin, noted loss of signal from ground control and made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to reestablish contact.
    Alarming as this must have been for the cosmonauts, it got worse fast. When the Soyuz crossed from the nightside of the planet into dawn it appeared that the planet they were circling had been replaced with a lightless black orb.
    Colonel Glavin would eventually describe it just that way: as a blackness, an absence visible only when it occluded the sun, a permanent eclipse. The rapid orbital cycle of sunrise and sunset was their only convincing visual evidence that the Earth even existed any longer. Sunlight appeared abruptly from behind the silhouetted disc, cast no reflection in the darkness below, and vanished just as suddenly when the capsule slid into night.
    The cosmonauts could not have comprehended what had happened, and their terror must have been unimaginable.
    After a week spent orbiting the vacuous darkness beneath them the cosmonauts voted to attempt an unassisted reentry rather than remain in space or attempt a docking at the empty ISS—to die on Earth, or whatever Earth had become, rather than starve in isolation. But without ground