The windblast threw the helmet from her head. Her earplugs disintegrated and flew like buckshot out a shotgun. Two pens in her pocket became stilettos that scored her chin. Her wallet fired through the bottom of her G-suit, along with a water bottle that busted out of a zippered pocket—missiles both. The laces on her boots plastered into the leather; one of them got through to her ankle, making an arabesque wound. Her watch sank into her wrist until the wind whipped it, and her skin, away and into the atmosphere.

One leg was twisting out of its socket in her right hip. Tendons snapped, one, two; another held. She could not feel any of it. In minutes she saw the city below, old houses in rows, the bowed Potomac, memorial stairs lit white beside it.

There was a crash. The night editor saw it at the top of his screen. Before he could open that story, another story arrived.

The first story said inhabitants of the Watergate heard something in the Potomac like the sound of a ship running aground. The second story said a bus smashed a truck in Potomac, the Maryland suburb. An explosion heard for miles wracked this affluent enclave of the nation’s capital just after midnight. Stanley remembered how he had edited a story the night before last, removed enclave. Someone else had excised it from his copy when he was just starting, the youngest reporter of all. Back then he thought the word couldn’t be used because it sounded like “clavicle,” or collarbone, a long bone curved like the italic letter f. Some editors let enclave stand. He’d built a vocabulary without such chiffons. It was a language of straight timber.

It hadn’t made him a newsman. With more than four decades behind him, he was instead a repository, the memory of the newspaper that had judged him wanting. He knew on which Washington street one murder unfolded and another almost did, which lobbyist’s first partner was someone else’s third, how the vote on appropriations changed something in conference when someone was Speaker. He had accumulated, first on spiral-bound paper, then in steel-case Rolodexes, and later on peach index cards in oak recipe boxes, a way of finding who to ask and what had happened and where they’d been and when they’d mattered. The city-states and principalities he’d chronicled knew nothing of him, but his enlarged understanding had made him their defender. Sometimes, he felt like moat and parapet. The attackers were hyperactive reporters, seasoned editors with tin-cup recollections, the paper itself—an organism sensitive to status, especially its own, but deaf to smaller bells.