“Meaning her daddy bought this observatory for her so she’d be happy and out of the way, and even if she weren’t one of my best friends—which she is—I’d be defending her for the sake of maintaining our funding.”

I expected Graham to argue, if only for form’s sake. Instead, he grinned and said, “We have a guy in the Everglades whose grandparents gave him the funds to continue his research for a hundred and fifty years when they died. He counts alligators all day. Sometimes the people he works with have to fish him out of the alligators. I have never seen a man happier to get up and go to work every morning, and the people on his project don’t have to worry their grant will run out at the end of the year. I get where you’re coming from.”

“Good,” said David.

It did make sense, in a terrible way. More and more, science comes in two flavors: crowdsourced and privatized. Things that can be distributed over ten thousand hands get done on a shoestring, and things that are lucky enough to land a patron—or better yet, a rich kid with a genuine passion for the project and relatives who want to make them happy—get done with all the bells and whistles. It’s everything in between, the dull and difficult and less-than-profitable, that suffers.

David pushed the door the rest of the way open, declaring loudly, “We’re here, Toni.”

“Took you long enough.” Toni was sitting cross-legged in a desk chair with a laptop on her knees, leaning over it to type on a larger console. In case that wasn’t enough computing power, she had six more machines in easy view, and might well have a dozen more that were integrated into other systems or concealed by the towers of cardboard boxes.

One wall was dominated by black-and-white pictures and brightly colored cards covered in clearly handwritten notes. Pieces of string connected cards to pictures—sometimes multiple pictures for the same card—and pictures to each other, although none of the pictures had more than a single connection. I swallowed a gasp and pressed my knuckles against my lips as I spotted a familiar face among the gallery: my own.

I was one of three pictures with a piece of string connecting me to the card labeled WEST COAST. Of those three, I was the only one with a string also connecting me to WASHINGTON STATE.

I was also the only one of the three not connected to the card which read, simply, DECEASED. A startling number of pictures were connected to that card. An equally startling number of those pictures were of children, ranging from five or six years old up to their early teens.

“Sixty-three percent.”

I turned.