"Someone took 'in charge' lessons when I wasn't looking," Gretchen said when I sat back down next to her. The words were classic Gretchen, but the voice was very, very shaky.

"We were just under attack," I said. "If someone doesn't pretend like she knows what she's doing, people are going to start freaking out. That would be bad."

"Not arguing," Gretchen said. "Just impressed." She pointed to the PDA. "Can you send any messages? Can we find out what's happening?"

"I don't think so," I said. "The emergency system overrides usual messaging, I think." I signed out the owner on the PDA and signed in under my account. "See. Enzo said he sent that poem to me but it's not there yet. It's probably queued and will get sent once we have the all clear."

"So we don't know if everyone else is okay," Gretchen said.

"I'm sure we'll get an all clear signal soon," I said. "You worried about your dad?"

"Yes. Aren't you worried about your parents?" Gretchen asked.

"They were soldiers," I said. "They've done this before. I'm worried about them, but I'm betting they're fine. And Jane is the one running the emergency messages. As long as they're updating, she's fine." The PDA switched over from my mail queue to a scrolling note; we were being given the "all clear." "See," I said.

I had Hickory and Dickory check the entrance of the shelter for any falling debris; it was clear. I signed out from the PDA and gave it back to its owner, and then folks started shuffling out. Gretchen and I were the last to head up.

"Watch your step," Gretchen said as we came up, and pointed to the ground. Glass was everywhere. I looked around. All the houses and buildings were standing, but almost all the windows were blown out. We'd be picking glass out of everything for days.

"At least it's been nice weather," I said. No one seemed to hear me. Probably just as well.

I said good-bye to Gretchen and headed to my house with Hickory and Dickory. I found more glass in surprising places and Babar cowering in the shower stall. I managed to coax him out and gave him a big hug. He licked my face with increasing franticness. After I petted him and calmed him down, I reached for my PDA to call Mom or Dad, and then realized I had left it over at Gretchen's. I had Hickory and Dickory stay with Babar—he needed their company more than I did at the moment—and walked over to Gretchen's. As I walked to her house, her front door swung open and Gretchen burst through it, saw me and ran to me, her PDA in one hand and mine in the other.

"Zoë," she said, and then her face tightened up, and whatever she had to say was lost for a minute.

"Oh, no," I said. "Gretchen. Gretchen. What is it? Is it your dad? Is your dad okay?"

Gretchen shook her head, and looked up at me. "It's not my dad," she said. "My dad is fine. It's not Dad. Zoë, Magdy just called me. He says something hit. Hit Enzo's homestead. He said the house is still there but there's something big in the yard. He thinks it's part of a missile. Says he tried to call Enzo but he's not there. No one's there. No one's answering there. He said they just built a bomb shelter, away from the house. In the yard, Zoë. Magdy says he keeps calling and no one answers. I just called Enzo, too. I don't get anything, Zoë. It doesn't even connect. I keep trying. Oh God, Zoë. Oh God, Zoë. Oh, God."

Enzo Paulo Gugino was born on Zhong Guo, the first child of Bruno and Natalie Gugino. Bruno and Natalie had known each other since they were children and everyone who knew them knew that from the first moment they laid eyes on each other that they would be together for every single moment of their lives. Bruno and Natalie didn't argue with this idea. Bruno and Natalie, as far as anyone ever knew, never argued about anything, and certainly didn't argue with each other. They married young, even for the deeply religious culture they lived in on Zhong Guo, in which people often married early. But no one could imagine the two of them not being together; their parents gave their consent and the two of them were married in one of the best-attended weddings anyone could remember in their hometown of Pomona Falls. Nine months later, almost to the day, there was Enzo.

Enzo was sweet from the moment he was born; he was always happy and only occasionally fussy, although (as was frequently explained, much to his later mortification) he had a marked tendency to take off his own diapers and smear the contents of them against the nearest available wall. This caused a real problem one time in a bank. Fortunately he was toilet-trained early.

Enzo met his best friend Magdy Metwalli in kindergarten. On the first day of school, a third-grader had tried to pick on Enzo, and pushed him hard down to the ground; Magdy, whom Enzo had never seen before in his life, launched himself at the third-grader and started punching him in the face. Magdy, who at the time was small for his age, did no real damage other than scaring the pee out of the third-grader (literally); it was Enzo who eventually pulled Magdy off the third-grader and calmed him down before they were all sent to the principal's office and then home for the day.

Enzo showed a flair for words early and wrote his first story when he was seven, entitled "The horrible sock that smelled bad and ate Pomona Falls except for my house," in which a large sock, mutated by its own horrible unwashed smell, started eating its way through the contents of an entire town and was thwarted only when the heroes Enzo and Magdy first punched it into submission and then threw it into a swimming pool filled with laundry soap. The first part of the story (about the origin of the sock) took three sentences; the climactic battle scene took three pages. Rumor is Magdy (the one reading the story, not the one in it) kept asking for more of the fight scene.

When Enzo was ten his mother became pregnant for a second time, with twins Maria and Katherina. The pregnancy was difficult, and complicated because Natalie's body had a hard time keeping two babies in it at once; the delivery was a near thing and Natalie came close to bleeding out more than once. It took Natalie more than a year to fully recover, and during that time the ten- and eleven-year-old Enzo helped his father and mother to care for his sisters, learning to change diapers and feed the girls when his mom needed a rest. This was the occasion of the only real fight between Magdy and Enzo: Magdy jokingly called Enzo a sissy for helping his mom, and Enzo smacked him in the mouth.

When Enzo was fifteen the Guginos and the Metwallis and two other families they knew entered a group application to be part of the very first colony world made up of citizens of the Colonial Union rather than citizens of Earth. For the next few months every part of Enzo's life, and the life of his family, was opened up to scrutiny, and he bore it with as much grace as anyone who was fifteen and who mostly just wanted to be left alone could have. Every member of every family was required to submit a statement explaining why they wanted to be part of the colony. Bruno Gugino explained how he had been a fan of the American Colonization era, and the early history of the Colonial Union; he wanted to be part of this new chapter of history. Natalie Gugino wrote about wanting to raise her family on a world where everyone was working together. Maria and Katherina drew pictures of them floating in space with smiley moons.

Enzo, who loved words more and more, wrote a poem, imagining himself standing on a new world, and titled it "The Stars My Destination." He later admitted he'd taken the title from an obscure fantasy adventure book that he'd never read but whose title stayed with him. The poem, meant only for his application, was leaked to the local media and became something of a sensation. It eventually became sort of an official unofficial anthem for the Zhong Guo colonization effort. And after all that, Enzo and his family and co-applicants really couldn't not be chosen to go.