“Oh, it seems like so much less,” he said casually. I could hear the smile in his voice. “Harmony,” he said, “since that stranger came by today, I’m worried that our world is very close to ending.”

“Yes,” I said.

“That man,” Dice said, “is a real threat. But all summer I’ve seen signs.”

“Yes,” I said. Though it was hard to recognize, in the peak of summer, how the world might be in danger. Hail had not shattered our tomatoes. Our bee colonies had not collapsed. No tornado had boiled into the holler and tipped our storage house into the ground. “I saw some men by the creek once.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Exactly.”

We were far from the power lines now. The night was dark like velvet. All around us was the hush of the primitive world.

“Here,” Dice said. We were in a treeless, tilting field. “Let’s settle here.” He lay down in the grass. I sat nearby. After a moment I lay down too, facing upward. And then I saw, for the first time in my life, the Milky Way. It bulged down toward me, so dense with stars it almost looked like an aurora. It sluiced all my tension away.

Next to me Dice began to speak. He said, “Here’s the truth about get relativity. It’s not that everything is good and bad at once. It’s that we can’t rely on our first reactions to make that determination. We must be more discerning. It’s a finer theoretical edge, do you understand? A finer cutting edge.” I’d never thought about it that way. Get relativity as a tool not for mixing emotions together but for precisely dividing them. I loved how he was discerning; he built this world because he was able to carve right from wrong with an edge so fine I couldn’t see it.

I let myself fall into his enchantment. He said universes may blossom like soap bubbles, their space-time so curved they are smaller than atoms. “I want to include you on an action,” he said. He reached and stroked my brow and his touch was different from everyone else’s in the world. “I want to know that you’ll do exactly what we ask.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re not sure,” he said. He was right.

“Dice,” I said. In the night, all alone, I knew I could be honest. “Is my mother really dead?”

“I believe that everyone in the fake world is as good as dead,” Dice said.

“Did she die when Bay came?” I pressed.

“She did not die when Bay came,” Dice said. His tone was as measured and calm as when I’d confronted him about his soap. “I said that because I love you. I want you to stay.”

“You could have just told me that,” I said. I wasn’t angry, I was relieved. I felt like laughing.