When Laurence thought back to that summer now, his main impression was of the desert’s heat, smacking you in the face the moment you stepped out of an air-conditioned space. Laurence had toted an iPad as he’d shadowed Isobel, trying to make whatever she needed materialize without her even asking. A girl named Ivy, with long black hair and cherry lip gloss, had made out with Laurence behind the ozone-scented silos late at night. Milton hung around wearing a golf hat and shorts—Laurence had been startled to realize that Milton was that old guy in the turtleneck who’d yelled at him for touching the rocket at MIT. Milton had kept saying things like, “Making the leap from a planetary infestation to an interplanetary diaspora is the most important task the human race has ever attempted. It is quite literally do or die.”

Isobel hissed a little as the grappa hit her throat. “You followed me like a puppy, while I was desperately trying to hold it together. We all thought you were just a starstruck kid, but then on the last day you brought us that physics paper when we were all sitting on that sofa with the broken leg, watching Nine Inch Nails videos and crying.”

“The paper about gravity tunneling,” Laurence said. “I remember.” Some insane physicist from Wollongong had speculated about a method of interstellar travel. Milton had started to dismiss it, but then he’d read the paper a second time and started scribbling notes on his arm. And that had helped lead to Milton founding the Ten Percent Project, with the idea of getting 10 percent of the population off-world within a few decades.

“So don’t sit there and try to pretend that you’re just an innocent bystander,” Isobel said. “You helped start this. And maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the news: The world is on the edge of the cliff here.”

“I’m aware.” Laurence shifted backward and forward in his chair until the scuttling of the wooden legs became too annoying.

“So if you don’t want me to tell Milton that you’re pulling back, don’t pull back. Or if you want to go back to square one, you can tell Milton yourself. But don’t put me in the position of covering for you. And don’t try to have it both ways. Okay?”

“Okay,” Laurence said.

Isobel reopened her laptop so she could obsess over the satellite map some more, and the light from the screen gave her a spectral quality, like someone slowly phasing out of existence.