When you edited the night, you could think of words as stars. Stanley tried. There were a finite number of constellations—eighty-eight. Twelve of the eighty-eight made the zodiac. Such a formula might be enough for a system of personality. But the night couldn’t be built out of eighty-eight sentences. There were other problems. When he stared at the night sky, walking home from work, he never recognized the supposed-to-be-there shapes. How did Pisces resemble a fish? In none of his neck turnings could he find a crab for Cancer or a bull for Taurus in the stars that were said to be there, right there, in front of his eyes. When he went online and studied the animal shapes superimposed on the astronomical photographs, he became convinced that it was all a scam of a most childlike sort. These fish, crab, and bull were little more than wishes. Someone wanted the stars to look like something familiar. It was the same way other editors wanted the remnants of moxie to look. They were never content with the glittering agglomerations of reality. They had to have them look like something—panda bears, trusty steeds, Easter bonnets, pythons. Touching stories. Inspiring stories. Frothy stories. Cautionary tales.

He was more interested in galaxies. They contained trillions of stars, but their mass—almost 90 percent—was dark matter. He’d amended his earliest suppositions. He wanted to edit a galaxy into being. He wanted to find the reporter who could see the dark of it. He had faith, these days, in one new hire named Vera Hastings, a night-cops reporter on the Metro staff, the only one who reported directly to him.

She was someone who saw him clearly. Wasn’t that how it usually started? Stanley scolded himself. His conviction about a person’s notability was too often proportionate to that person’s understanding of him in the way he wanted to be understood. All right, then, he continued, walking down the street to the alley where he’d lived so much of his life. So that’s so. That doesn’t mean she couldn’t be special.

He found himself wanting to fit her into the Room’s abiding legend. It was Don Grady’s story, how he as a young, lowly Metro reporter assigned to cover a simple break-in saw more than was there. Through late-night door-knocking, unappealing bird-dogging, sideways and sliding begging, persistent talking to little-known men instead of highly placed chieftains, Don prevailed. He shamed the Room’s White House reporters. He deposed a noxious president. Stanley knew it could be done, or something like it, again. It was always a small thing—a break-in, a plane crash—that bumped through the surface. Underneath that hump in the continuum were white dwarfs and red giants.