When he’d eaten, Kane stood in front of the bungalow and tried to remember the southern night sky. He found the Southern Cross, then the Jewel Box cluster beside it. He’d seen it once through a telescope. It was like a hundred sparkling blue jewels around a single red star. Just a bit farther to the right was the Coalsack, a dark nebula. Kane waited as more stars came into focus. The galaxies seemed to sink back, gaining depth. He thought of the early explorers reading these, their eyes on the stars as they sailed, as if the map of the world was written above them. The abandoned Dutch mariner had grown to fear the night sky; his diary made frequent references to the stars. Once his lamp had broken and he had no means of creating light, the stars had begun to appear terrifying. He associated them with the screaming of the birds, who he believed were accusing him of his crimes. A cursed place, Kane wondered, or simply blank, so that it became a mirror to your heart, with nowhere to hide.

Sink into the milieu: That was what he needed to do. What he was trained to do. Thomas’s warnings were a prescription for action. If there was something rotten at the core of Ascension, Kane needed to go there—that was his job.

At nine p.m. he walked back through Georgetown. People sat in their small homes eating meals, watching TVs. He wondered about bars, about prostitutes. He’d seen smaller communities support the trade, with a lot fewer military around. It was time to get in with the wrong crowd.

The Exiles Bar had a string of colored lights around its doorway; otherwise he wouldn’t have seen it was there. But he might have heard the laughter from inside. This was the bar where the police had been drinking when Petra Wade’s mother first tried to report her missing. Kane wondered who was in there now and how they’d respond to him. It seemed likely that this was where the two subcontractors had appeared from last night. Kane pushed the door and walked in.

The bar contained three people and none of them were the assailants from last night. One was the doctor Kane had met on the golf course, Derek Nulty, his bulky form propped on a stool that didn’t look adequate for it. Leaning against the bar beside him was a lean man tanned the color of hard wood, his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to reveal a shark’s tooth necklace. A young Saint polished glasses behind the bar. All turned to watch Kane enter, the drinkers with the unsteady glint of men interrupted in the midst of a joke.