When he caught up with Melody, she was sitting on a dormer a few houses down across the street, facing out into the pine barrens. No moon that night but a wealth of stars again. “Where did you go?” she said. “I thought you’d been called back.” He told her about falling through the roof, and about the weird transaction of money for insects.

“I’ve seen it a few times lately,” she said. “Some kind of new drug. Big with the wealthy. Massospora, it’s called—a parasite that infects the rear ends of cicadas. It actually eats away their hind part and forms a shell around that area and produces a fungus. When ingested by humans, the fungus has the effects of psilocybin—like magic mushrooms. There’s a component of the chemical makeup that’s also an amphetamine.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I spend all night looking over people’s shoulders and reading what they read on the computer or in a book, I overhear conversations in dark corners, and I’ve seen quite a few of those drug sales going down in the last year or so.”

“There’s something wrong with it,” said Owen.

“You think?” she said, and then they sat in silence for a while and took in the beautiful night. He asked her, “What’s your life like during the day?”

“Oh, I work at a job. I have kids. I’m married. This year will be our fifteenth year.”

“What’s your husband’s name?”

“Marcus.”

“Does he know you’re a sleeper?”

“Why should he? This is my private thing. Like Shiela Tobac’s web of words.”

“Have you moved through genius to insanity?” he asked.

“Only at the holidays when the in-laws show up.”

They visited a veteran who couldn’t sleep. A photo of him and his unit somewhere in the Middle East hung on the wall across the room from where he sat at a table. He smoked cigarettes one after the other, and had three packs stacked up on the table next to a neat pile of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The copy in his hands was from 1999. The pages turned rhythmically and he silently moved his lips with each word. It wasn’t so much as if he was taking in the story but more that the act of reading was a ritual that sustained him or took his mind off something.