The rasp of drawers opening and closing (and the discovery of the gun, and where it goes) makes for unobserved background noise. It's only when he joins her there at the window that Maureen reels the broad flicking point of her attention back from the brick and siding houses, the neatly parked cars, the morning frost thick on shingle roofs, and the sky unfolded above it like a cold blue cardstock backdrop.

She's seen a clear sky recently—on a remote planet, impossible distances away. What she hasn't seen in years is a clear sky over Earth. It's incredible that this the one that currently counts as entirely alien.

There's a buzzing in her head as she turns, eyeline fleeting across the man who has the decent to look more real than his photograph does, and then roving back across the contents of the room behind them as if a second (third, fourth, sixth) scan might yield a sensible detail instead of offering up matching terrycloth robes and dog-eared magazines, the tiny vase with a sprig of baby's breath and a bundle of small silk flowers on one of the two matching dressers.

Okay. Fact: They're not doing all that great so far. So: time to start improving the odds.

With that hum of overwork still between the ears, Maureen flips to the back page of the book. There's space to write around the triangle badge of the Civil Defense printed there, so she folds the back cover all the way around the rest of soft sided booklet and offers it to him.

"Let's find a pen."