And then there was Tupper. Beautiful, adoring, nervous, and anything but content. Sure, she and he had attempted contentment for a time. They’d bought their house. They’d prepared for a child, children. When the children didn’t come, she refused to succumb to the clichéd and obvious rabbit hole of fertility treatments, or adoption, or depression. She refused to discuss it at all. She simply made them. She made twins. Out of papier-mâché and birch bark and wool and felt. Then she staged their illnesses and untimely deaths—the one project she did not get paid for—and stashed them in a glass box. And then she moved on.

But she did need to go back. Tupper was probably wasting away, fretting over some quirkily adorable contraption like a penguin that dispensed mini marshmallows into your cocoa or a Chihuahua that farted hot sauce. And perhaps she was being too hard on their Cobble Hill neighbors. Perhaps she could incorporate them in some way. Perhaps they’d even be useful. More than anything, she needed the landline. Any day now the recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grants would be announced. Elizabeth had been making culturally relevant work for over twenty years. She was certain this was her time.

Roy read and reread the last paragraph he’d written, pressing his back against the stiff wooden barstool. Now what was he on about? Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? A storm. Something powerful enough to get Isabel up to Mars. A magical tornado, or a tidal wave, the crest of which would reach the Milky Way.

It would take about a year to get to Mars in a spacecraft—he’d looked it up. But since Isabel was traveling by natural disaster, she could pop up whenever he wanted her to. Because she was special and he was in charge. Now all he needed was for Ceran to get both girls pregnant. And for the bad guy—who was either a Russian stowaway or a mutant scientist—to swoop in and hold them hostage. Maybe the bad guy hides in the food-restocking rocket ship amongst the crates of bananas—no, bananas wouldn’t last—grapefruits and oranges and bags of rice and sultanas, and emerges on Mars, pretending to be a new scientist. He assimilates and slowly begins to kill everyone. Then, like a pack of stealthy coyotes, Ceran, Bettina, and Isabel lure him outside into Mars’s atmosphere, to which they are immune, and look on triumphantly as his head explodes.

Oh hell.