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stare at me like I’m not even there. Like I’m a picture of someone else.
    “I’m okay now,” I said. “You should try to get some sleep.”
    He nodded. “Yeah. I’ll do that. Look, Marco, you weren’t dreaming about
her,
were you?”
    “No, Dad. Why?”
    “Because the first thing you said when you woke up was ‘Mom.’”
    “I guess I was confused.”
    “Do you ever? Dream about her, I mean?”
    “Sometimes,” I admitted. “But they aren’t nightmares.”
    He almost smiled. “No. I guess they wouldn’t be, would they?” He picked up the little framed picture of my mom that I keep on my nightstand. Then he got that twisted look of sick grief I had seen on his face every day for the last two years.
    Part of me is mad when I see him that way. Part of me just wants to say, “Dad, get it together. Let her go. She’s dead. She doesn’t want us spending the rest of our lives mourning.”
    But I never do say that.
    After a few minutes, he got up. He made some last remark about how I shouldn’t be worried about bogeymen, and left. I knew he would sit out inthe living room alone, and eventually fall asleep in his chair.
    I lay there in the dark and tried to get the dream out of my head. But it’s hard to forget a nightmare that’s true.
     Ax held up a small mess of electronic components for all of us to see. It looked sort of like an exploded remote control, but smaller.
    It was the next day. We were out in the woods, grouped together beneath a huge, old oak tree. It was like a strange sort of picnic. Jake and Cassie had each brought hand tools for Ax to use — screwdrivers, a solder gun, a battery-powered drill, a hammer, wrenches, pliers, and of course we had the electronic parts we had stashed in the trash before the lobster incident.
    Rachel had brought sandwiches. I’d brought a six-pack of Pepsi.
    It was a nice day, sunny and warm. I needed a nice day. I needed sunlight. I’d had a bad night, with too little sleep.
    “So, Ax,” I said. “What is it?”
     he said with satisfaction.
    “All it needs is a Z-Space transponder,” Jake said wearily, rolling his eyes at me.
    I think Jake may have been a bit freaked out by the lobster incident, too. He seemed snappish and kind of unfocused. Not at all Jake-like.
    “And since we can’t get a Z-Space transponder, it’s basically useless, right?” Rachel asked.
    
    Rachel threw up her hands. “Then what exactly are we doing?”
    Jake just shrugged. Cassie sidled up next to him and gave him a small sideways hug. No one was supposed to notice. But right away Jake’s harsh look mellowed a little.
    That wasn’t doing anything for
my
bad mood, though. “Well, I’m guessing that in about two centuries or so, humans will discover zero space and make transponders. Whatever
they
are. But in the meantime, I’m going to have a sandwich.”
    Tobias came drifting down through the branches and leaves of the tree, almost silent. He landed on a low branch of the oak. he reported.
    Not for the first time, I realized how tough Tobias’slife is. He shares all the same dangers we do, but he also has all the dangers that come from being a red-tailed hawk. Golden eagles sometimes prey on hawks. They are bigger and faster than he is.
     Tobias asked.
    “We have a completely useless distress beacon,” Rachel said. “We need a transponder that probably won’t be invented on this planet for a century or two.”
     Tobias said.
    “What about Chapman?” I asked. Chapman is the assistant