Jess and Vince took the afternoon flight to Vegas, a stubby twin-engine prop that jumped and dipped along the airstream like an overeager salmon. Sitting by the window, Jess looked down at the skin of the earth below, the molten outbreaks of fire at the edges of Los Angeles, then farther south to where the landscape simplified to the single curved line of the horizon. Zero Zone was somewhere on that line. She wondered what shape it was in. The rancher had died a year after the raid, and the last Jess heard his property was tangled in litigation between distant family and the county, a fight over a now infamous stretch of land. She had no idea if the structure remained standing, but she still felt it out there, the room and whatever had happened inside. What she once might have called the art of the thing but which she now had no words to describe.

In the seat beside her, Vince took a shaky breath. He looked a little blanched. A thin film of sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Sorry,” he said, closing his eyes. “I’ve never flown before.”

Jess took his clammy hand and squeezed, holding on through the last half hour of the flight, until the plane’s wheels bumped along the runway.

They checked into a small motel a half mile from the Strip, neighboring rooms on the second floor. Jess came back from the vending machine with a couple of Cokes and found Vince out on the walkway, leaning against the metal railing. Two families were down at the courtyard pool, the parents in lawn chairs drinking cans of Coors, an adolescent girl and a pair of boys splashing around in the deep end.

Jess handed Vince his Coke. More than ever he seemed like a child playing cowboy. Costume, gesture, frame of mind.

He looked out over the railing, the pool and the long horizon beyond, the uppermost peaks of the hotels and casinos.

“What if Martha Reed’s not here?” he said. “Or works at a different place? Look at all of them.”

“We’ll find her,” Jess said. She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. It had been two years since Zero Zone. Martha could be anywhere.

The sun dipped below the horizon in a final orange bloom. Down at the pool one of the boys lit a sparkler, dancing along the concrete patio, waving the stick, the cascade at its tip like a shimmering white dandelion head.

Vince said, “Why did you build that room?”

The sky’s color slipped away, the new twilight creating a monochrome world, grayscale, a living newspaper photograph. Jess heard another sparkler light, a fizzy flare-up and then the phosphorescent hiss. It was the girl this time, tracing oversize letters in the air that faded as soon as they were drawn.

“I lost someone,” Jess said. “And I wanted to make something that spoke to that loss. Or maybe I was looking for a place to put it, as if I could contain it out in the desert.”

“I never should have let Izzy leave,” Vince said. “Or I should have gone with her. I can’t stop thinking about her in that room with those people. I should have been in there with her.”

Jess turned to him. In the new night his face was scarred with shadows and dark lines, and she saw now what all of this had done to him, the love and worry and regret.

A pulsing glow sprang up over the rooftops a few blocks away, the lights of the casinos jumping to life.

“Let’s go find Martha,” Jess said.