“Nothing? Well, that makes me feel better.” Roy rapped his knuckles on the bar. He poured Tupper a tall glass of Tanqueray and pushed it toward him.

Tupper picked up the glass and took a small, neat sip.

Roy winced. Nobody drank straight gin except drunk grannies and the children who finished their drunk grannies’ drinks after they fell asleep in front of the six o’clock news. But Tupper Paulsen’s little child was dead. He deserved a glass or two of gin.

Roy poked around beneath the bar until he located the small fridge with a tray of ice cubes in the freezer. He popped some out and plopped them into Tupper’s glass. It wasn’t an actual known fact that Tupper’s child was dead; Roy had made it up. But the house felt like a shrine to a life that was no more—the invisible cat, the Moses basket, the prettily decorated twin room. And where was his wife? The living child?

Was there something here he could use for Gold or Red or whatever this new book would be called? Ideas thrashed around in the muddy waters of his head. The family had lost its riches. The parents were hiding out from the debt collectors on their sailboat in the Bahamas. The girl remained stubbornly ashore, burying the only thing she had left—seventeen gold Krugerrands, gifts from her grandmother. Then maybe there was a hurricane or a tsunami or some other kind of natural disaster. The sailboat would be swept away. After the storm the night sky would be so bright with stars it looked like daylight, and that’s when his girl—Isabel, he’d always liked the name Isabel—makes her escape. She takes the gold and… Mars was red, the planet Mars. Red.

Immediately his mind shifted to space. Battlestar Galactica was his favorite TV show as a teenager. He and his best mate, Rupert Warwick, watched it religiously. There was even a Marvel comic book series—based on the show, but much darker and creepier—that they bought every month and read in one sitting. The show was hilarious and strange and exciting and seductive. Each episode began and ended with a godlike voice-over that was part cultish philosophy, part nonsensical gibberish. Captain Apollo and Lieutenants Starbuck and Boomer—three strapping space warriors on the last remaining battleship—one impossibly perfect and good, another reckless and wild, the last loyal and brave. Their home planet, Caprica, had been destroyed by the Cylons and now the battleship led a “ragtag fleet” of survivors, in search of a distant planet inhabited by other humans, a place called Earth. All the men smoked and drank and played cards, and the women were beautiful, especially Jane Seymour as Serina—at least, Roy and Captain Apollo thought so.