“Do you know why I hired you, Starks?” he says, without turning around, as if I am too unpleasant for viewing. “Do you know why I brought you in from the colonies?”

“My aggregates at the combine?”

“Your interview. Remember what you said?”

Of course I remember. I told Po-Mo about the burglar who killed my family. I also told him about what happened in the Chaffee Planetarium when I was thirteen.

I was on my fourth foster family, the Zlolnierzes, Poles who didn’t like the Germanic name Otto and insisted on calling me Potap, and if I didn’t respond when they addressed me I got it with a plastic bag of drainage gravel. Back then, I told Po-Mo, the only thing I wanted—besides the lives of Mom and Dad and Tobias back—was to be left alone. Preferably in the dark. Preferably in silence. I went to movies, but two hours later I had nowhere to go. I went to the woods at the reservoir, but there were kids from school. Finally I discovered the Chaffee Planetarium. There were no janitors, no ushers. No one cared if you stayed for eight consecutive shows. Almost no one else ever went there. It was dark. It was quiet. It was solitary. It was perfect.

One day two other people showed up, a guy in overalls and a little girl, who I at first thought was his daughter. The guy had taken steps to assure discretion; they were sitting on the far side of the planetarium, he had scared the girl into silence— the whole time she didn’t utter a syllable; she didn’t move one muscle in self-defense—and he even laid his jacket over their laps. He almost got away with it.

But he hadn’t counted on someone with my audiometry.

Over the susurrus of the air-conditioning I heard the metallic creak of a zipper disjoining, tooth by tooth, in the darkness. I heard a tiny, frightened inhalation of breath and I knew, instinctively, even at fourteen, what was going on. I was too scared to confront the guy myself but I could see them, and I knew they couldn’t see me, so I tiptoed to the doorway and, with my heartbeat roaring in my ears and sweat cabling down my back, I flicked on the light and yelled at the top of my lungs. The guy sprinted to the door, past me, knocking me down, frantically working his fly. Security got him at the revolving door. In no more than thirty seconds the whole thing was over.

That was it: my first bust.

The girl’s name was...well, I shouldn’t say. But his name was Eugene L. Sikes, and he was her uncle. It had been going on for six months, since the day of her ninth birthday. But it wasn’t going to happen anymore. Not after I heard it. Not after I flooded the room with light.

Let me tell you: flicking on the switch was a powerful gesture. It sounds corny, but in that moment before I flicked that switch in that darkened planetarium, with the silvery pin-pricks of light glittering overhead, I felt a rush of something like supernatural possession; something was moving through me and it turned me, at least momentarily, into someone else. Not the guilt-ridden sole survivor of the family Starks, not the kid who keeps switching schools, not the kid who feels the most alone when around other people, not the miserable Potap, cowering before a bag of drainage gravel. I didn’t have a name for this new person, but I felt bigger. Courageous. Better.