Sam looked at his watch.

12:30.

Ninety minutes to go.

Forty-five minutes slipped by. Nothing happened. The fields were full of insect sounds, and the whisper of the corn shoots. Sam stared at the long arc of the Milky Way overhead. From time to time an airliner passed high above, its wingtip lights strobing in the darkness. After a while he saw something else moving in the sky: an unblinking speck of light, no brighter than a faint star, tracing a straight and slow path across the night. It couldn’t be a shooting star—those had to be much faster. He pointed it out to Dani.

“It’s a satellite,” she said. “You see a lot of them if you watch long enough.”

Sam watched until it faded out of view, far to the east.

“Those first couple weeks after I moved here,” Dani said, “when I got into stargazing, Lauren did, too. On Friday or Saturday nights, or any night after summer vacation started, we’d go out to that picnic table and just lie out there with a bag of chips and a six-pack of soda, and watch the sky for three or four hours. You know you can see shooting stars even when there’s not a meteor shower? Any ordinary night, if you keep watching, you see three or four of them an hour. You see a satellite every five or ten minutes. I know it might sound boring, but it wasn’t. They were some of the coolest nights I ever had. While they lasted.”

At twenty minutes past one in the morning, the big door on the side of the barn opened. There was a few seconds’ warning—a heavy metallic thud as some kind of latch was released—and then the door lumbered aside on its rollers, casting a harsh light out into the darkness. It opened only partway, to a width of five feet. The light streaming out projected a long, trapezoid-shaped glow across the bare ground of the barnyard, and though the direct light came nowhere near the two of them, Sam felt a moment of panic—even their own spot at the edge of the cornfield seemed brighter now than it had before. It felt as if anyone stepping out of the barn would see them at once.

Then he thought about it, and relaxed a little. Someone coming out of the barn would have eyes adjusted to its bright interior—the surrounding fields would look pitch-black from that point of view.

Hopefully.

Anyway, there was no point thinking about it. There was nowhere to run now if things went bad.

Sam looked at Dani. She had her binoculars to her eyes, every ounce of her attention fixed on the open barn door.

Sam raised his own and centered them on the opening. In the magnified view, the doorway looked like it was no more than twenty feet away from him.