Chapter 1 The Angle of Approach

Elias Vance had been president of the Westbridge High astronomy club for two years, and in that time he had never once been late to the observatory. Not when the buses were delayed by road construction. Not when his father's hours at the hospital shifted without warning. Not even during the winter of the great snowstorm that had shut down the entire district for a week. He arrived at 5:47 p.m. on Fridays, which was three minutes before the official meeting time of 5:50, because three minutes was the difference between setting up the telescope with calm precision and discovering that someone else had left the dome open and the primary mirror had gathered a fine layer of winter snow that took twenty minutes to gently wipe away with a microfiber cloth and compressed air. So it was with a particular kind of outrage that Elias arrived on this Friday in late March and found the dome already open, the telescope pointed not at the evening sky but at a precise, impossible angle that pointed directly toward the east side of campus, toward the science building where Mira Solano held court with her physics Olympiad team and her habit of making people in his club feel like amateurs. Elias stopped in the doorway of the observatory and set his backpack on the floor with deliberate care. He removed his glasses, cleaned them on his shirt, and replaced them. The telescope was still pointed at the science building. It was a Celestron NexStar 8SE, the school's only serious instrument, a gift from an anonymous alumnus who had been an engineer before he had been a philanthropist. It cost more than most cars. It was worth more than the entire science department's annual budget. And someone had pointed it at the second-floor window of the physics lab. "Mira," he said, because the only person who would be careless enough to do something like this was Mira Solano, and even then he was being generous with the word careless. The telescope was pointed with mathematical precision, which meant she had calculated the angle first, which meant she had been planning this. "What are you doing to the Orion?" The name was what the students called the telescope — Orion, after the hunter — because it was the only telescope they had and because Elias had named it in his first week as club president, a moment of romanticism he now deeply regretted. The official designation was the school's property, but the students had voted on Orion, and the vote had been unanimous except for one dissenting vote from a sophomore named Priya who had wanted to call it Hubble, which was fair but also historically inaccurate. Mira did not look up from her phone. She was sitting on the small bench that sat beneath the telescope control panel, her legs drawn up to her chest, her curly dark hair pulled into a messy bun that was losing the battle against gravity. She wore a physics Olympiad t-shirt that said E=mc squared in letters the size of his fist and a pair of sweatpants that had clearly been comfortable before she had grown into them. She looked, Elias thought, like someone who had been sitting in this room for a very long time and had not noticed the door open. "I'm calibrating," she said. "You're pointing it at my building." "You told me to join the club." "I told you to join the astronomy club because the administration requires a second extracurricular for your science Olympiad scholarship, not because I want you in my observatory." She finally looked up. Her eyes were dark brown, the color of espresso, and they were currently fixed on him with an expression he had learned over the school year to interpret as mild interest mixed with professional curiosity. It was not hostile. It was worse. It was the look of someone who had decided you were a problem worth solving. "You said join the club," she repeated. "You didn't specify which club. There are two clubs now. The astronomy club and the physics club, which is technically a branch of the science Olympiad team but we operate semi-independently because Mr. Henderson lets us. And the administration requires me to pick one. So I picked the one with the telescope." Elias stared at her. "The administration requires you to pick one club. Not the one with the telescope. Any club." "Well, that's arbitrary," Mira said, and her mouth did something at the corner that might have been a smile if you were generous about it. "Why should I be forced to pick a club without a telescope when the other one has the best telescope in the tri-county area? That's not equal opportunity. That's telescopic discrimination." "I did not — that's not a real word." "Consciousness?" "That's not even close." She stood up then, smoothed her sweatpants, and walked to the edge of the bench where the telescope controls sat. She reached out and touched the focus knob with one finger, the way a scientist touches a live wire — carefully, with respect, with the knowledge that the wrong move could cause damage. Elias watched her hand. It was a small hand, with short nails and a callus on the index finger from writing. She turned the knob a quarter turn to the left, then a half turn to the right, and the telescope shifted, just slightly, from pointing at the science building to pointing at a patch of sky that was beginning to darken into evening blue. "There," she said. "Calibrated. The alt-az mount was off by point-zero-three degrees on the azimuth axis. I fixed it." Elias felt something uncomfortable in his chest. It was not anger. It was the uneasy sensation of standing on ground that had just shifted beneath your feet, of looking down and finding that the ground was no longer where you had left it. Mira had fixed the telescope. Mira had fixed it without asking, without announcing it, without any of the ceremonial courtesy that Elias's entire personality was built around. She had simply decided something was wrong, had decided she could fix it, and had fixed it. "You can't just touch the equipment," he said. "I can. I did. It's fine. It's better than fine — it's accurate now." She pulled her phone from her pocket and looked at the screen. "The club meeting started seven minutes ago. Did anyone show up?" "I don't know. I just got here." "You should check. People might be waiting for you to start the meeting." "I'll check in a minute." She nodded, once, as if they had reached an understanding about something, and then she sat back down on the bench and returned to her phone. Elias stood in the doorway for a moment longer, his backpack still on the floor beside him, and then he picked it up and walked toward the door. He had to get to the meeting. He had to take attendance. He had to make sure the club was functioning properly despite the fact that someone had moved his telescope and fixed it without permission and was now sitting in the observatory as if she owned the place. But as he walked to the door, he noticed something on the telescope's digital display. The coordinates were not pointing at the evening sky. They were pointing at a set of stars that would not be visible for another two hours, at an angle that required the telescope to be tilted upward at a degree of elevation that was currently below the horizon. It was impossible. The telescope could not physically point at those stars until the earth had rotated far enough for them to rise. Unless the telescope was not pointing at stars at all. Unless it was pointing at something else entirely. Elias stopped at the door and looked back at Mira, who had not noticed his pause, who was still absorbed in her phone, her expression calm and unreadable in the dim light of the observatory. He wanted to ask her about the coordinates. He wanted to know what she had done and how she had done it and why she had done it. He wanted to know whether this was part of some elaborate plan to disrupt the astronomy club or merely the result of a mind that worked so quickly it could not help itself. Instead, he said nothing. He closed the door behind him and walked down the hallway toward the meeting room, his footsteps echoing on the linoleum, and he tried to forget the impossible coordinates and the way Mira Solano had touched his telescope as if it were hers to touch. He failed. ---