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With her juice and bowl in hand, she returned to the cafeteria, knocking the lights off with her elbow and pushing the door shut with her foot She sat down in the darkness at the end of one of the long tables and slurped on her late ecould be seen out there

Her spoon eventually scraped the bottom of her empty bowl, she finished the last of her juice, and not once had the man turned away from the wallscreen She pushed the dishes away froure reacted to this, unless it was mere coincidence He leaned forward and held his outstretched hand out at the screen Juliette thought she could rasp--but it was too dark to tell After a moment, he leaned over his lap, and Juliette heard the squeak of charcoal on expensive-sounding paper She got up, taking this , and strolled closer to where he was sitting

"Raiding the larder, are we?" he asked

His voice startled her

"Worked through dinner," she stammered, as if she needed to explain herself

"Must be nice to have the keys"

He still didn’t turn away from the screen, and Juliette reminded herself to lock the kitchen door before she left

"What’re you doing?" she asked

The rabbed a nearby chair, slid it around to face the screen "You wanna see?"

Juliette approached warily, grabbed the backrest, and deliberately slid the chair a few inches further from the man It was too dark in the roo She chastised herself for not coht before when there’d been ht She would need to becoood at her job

"What’re we looking at, exactly?" she asked She stole a glance at his lap, where a large piece of white paper faintly glowed in the wan light leaking frohs as if a board or so to part Look there"

The man pointed at the wallscreen and into a mix of blacks so rich and so deep as to appear as one The contours and shadowy hues Juliette could make out alhosts But she followed his finger, wondering if he weresilence that followed

"There," he whispered, exciteht Like soenerator rooone

She bolted out of her chair and stood near to the wallscreen, wondering as out there

The man’s charcoal squeaked on his paper

"What the hell was that?" Juliette asked

The ht see it again We’ve got thin clouds tonight and high winds That one there is getting ready to pass"

Juliette turned to find her chair and saw that he was holding his charcoal at arht had flashed, one eye winked shut

"How can you see anything out there?" she asked, settling back into her plastic chair

"The longer you do this, the better you see at night" He leaned over his paper and scribbled so what, exactly? Just staring at the clouds?"

He laughed "Mostly, yeah Unfortunately But what I’lance"

She peered up in the general area of the last flash Suddenly, it popped back into view, a pinprick of light like a signal froh over the hill

"How many did you see?" he asked

"One," she told hiht She knehat stars were--they were a part of her vocabulary--but she’d never seen one before

"There was a faint one just to the side of it as well Let low spilled over thearound his neck, a film of red plastic wrapped around the end It entle glow that didn’t barrage her eyes the way the kitchen lights had

Spread across his lap, she saw a large piece of paper covered with dots They were arranged haphazardly, a few perfectly straight lines running in a grid around them Tiny notes were scattered everywhere

"The problem is that they ht--" He tapped one of the dots with his finger There was a smaller dot beside it "--at the sa to Juliette, she saw that the , probably in his late twenties He s tiure that out"