“Well, thanks. I’ll take a closer look at this when I get a chance.” Like, the moment Madeleine was out of sight.

The old mindcaster smiled. “Let me know what you find, Desdemona.”

“Hey, there’s something wrong with your TV!” Jonathan called. He was hunched over the giant set in the living room, a wood-paneled monstrosity that he’d spent the last hour freeing from a pile of thirty-nine-patterned fire grates.

Dess looked over at the machine and smirked. She was glad to see that Maddy didn’t harbor any grudges against television. Last Dess had heard, Madeleine blamed TV—and air-conditioning, of course—for the destruction of the midnighters fifty years before. Something about watching the tube instead of the kids.

Madeleine stared archly into the weirdly rounded screen. It looked more like a goldfish bowl filled with murky water than a TV.

“Chicken-fried baloney, Jonathan. It’s working fine.” She turned and strode from the room, adding over her shoulder, “Just takes a while to warm up. In my day, young people were more patient.”

Jonathan looked dubious, but something was definitely happening in the television’s depths: a flicker of light had appeared in the center of the screen. It grew slowly, like a fire spreading through a pile of damp leaves, until it filled the dark glass with a blurry image.

“Man,” he said softly. “Black and white.”

“Looks more like gray and gray,” Dess said. The screen was mostly full of snow. You could barely make out the weather guy standing in front of a map, the sweeping Doppler radar circling behind him looking very out of place on the ancient TV.

Jonathan turned a big dial that went ka-thunk, and the screen filled with static. As he searched in vain for a channel with a better picture, or any picture at all, Dess watched the little gray pixels dance. She remembered some weird factoid about those little dots of static, how they were the remnants of the most perfectly random thing in all of nature….

Finally Jonathan sighed and ka-thunked his way back to the local news.

Dess tuned out the anchor’s voice and took the last sip of her lukewarm tea, a tiny glob of leaves catching in her teeth. The details of the factoid came back to her now: there’d been something on the Discovery Channel (the only television that Dess ever watched) about how the snow on old TVs actually showed leftover radiation from the big bang, the explosion that had made the universe. That’s why the dots were perfectly random—they were the result of a perfect explosion.

Well, almost perfect. The big bang, after all, had left a few billion clumpy bits of matter that had turned into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The universe was lumpy, sort of like…tea leaves.

Or the blue time.

Dess’s eyes lit up. She looked down at the map Madeleine had given her. The new shapes scrawled across it were spirals and pinwheels—like galaxies, the dregs of the big bang.