Her eyes roamed the perimeter of the light. She didn’t even know what direction she’d stumbled from; she was completely turned around. What was it she had touched? Had it come from the mattress? The wall?

The lantern cast a ghostly flicker in a circle three feet around her. Beyond it, the dark made her eyes hurt. Was there a body in there with her, someone Gretchen had already murdered?

Susan rubbed her palms hard against her thighs, and then wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged herself. She could feel her heartbeat pounding in her chest so hard it felt like her rib cage might split. She made herself inhale a deep lungful of rank air, then exhaled and concentrated on slowing her heart.

Go to your calm blue ocean, Bliss would always say. Like it was easy. Like everyone loved the tropics. Calm blue oceans made Susan think of drowning. Susan had to find something else. She glanced up over her knees.

*   *   *

Susan held her palms over the Coleman lantern, and pretended it was a campfire. She was camping with her dad. They were in the Trinities, and they were looking up at the stars. Susan could feel the thrumming in her chest slow as she pictured the scene. She kept breathing. They were sitting outside of their tent, on the soft ground. The Coleman was their only source of light other than the stars. Her dad had a book open and he was reading to her by lantern light. Susan closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against her kneecaps. What book was it?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Susan half laughed, half sobbed. She knew the first lines by heart.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Susan opened her eyes. This wasn’t right.

This lantern wasn’t like her father’s at all. What had she been thinking? His had been similar, yes, but it had been tin, and fueled by propane. This one was plastic, and …

Her pulse was throbbing again.

Susan leaned forward and flipped the lantern upside down. The light shifted to the floor, illuminating a dirty gray expanse of concrete, but she could still make out the battery compartment on the underside of the lamp. She turned the lamp upright, squinting in its direct light, and turned it in her hands, searching for the answer. She found the sticker near the bottom of the lamp’s base, a few inches below the Coleman logo. Four D cell batteries, it read. Run time: 175 hours.