It happened on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, in the kitchen, while Rowan was supposed to be doing homework from the learning program and was instead, by her own admission, "thinking about the western corridor," a phrase she'd picked up from overhearing the adults and had decided, at six and a half, was an appropriately important thing to be thinking about.
She'd asked questions about it for a week. Careful ones, the kind that suggested she understood more of the adult conversations than anyone fully accounted for.
"How do you find a territory if nobody knows it's there?" she asked Sera, at the kitchen island, ostensibly working on a worksheet about counting.
"That's exactly the problem we're working on," Sera said. "Right now we just know there's a gap. We don't know what's in it."
"C
