The relay was four hundred meters divided into four legs of one hundred meters, which was a description that ignored everything. Kemi ran the first leg because she was fastest off the block, not because she was fastest overall, which she was not. She ran fast and passed the baton to Deja, who received it running and did not look at it. Deja's job was to not think about the baton. By the third leg the race had separated into two races: the race between the other teams and the race within this team, which was the race to get the baton to Anisa in time. Tandy ran the third leg in the bad lane, the lane with the turn that widened, and she ran it the only way she knew how to run it, which was the same way she ran anything, with her head slightly down and her arms higher than the coaches wanted. The coaches had stopped trying to fix her arms. Anisa received the baton at position six of eight, which was a position she had never won a race from, but she ran the last hundred meters the way she ran all last legs, which was as if the other seven runners were not something she needed to consider. She finished second. The four of them stood in their lanes for a moment, not quite ready to collapse the race back into four separate people, before one of them walked over and the moment ended.

The pulse came in on a frequency Dr. Kim had not listed as active on her survey. It repeated at 4.2-second intervals, which was not a natural interval for any phenomenon she could immediately name. She ran the standard checks: equipment fault, local interference, satellite reflection. She ran them twice. She sat with the data for six hours without telling anyone, which was a violation of the protocol she had helped write. The protocol existed because an anomaly like this had been reported twice before in the history of the search program and both times it had turned out to be instrumentation artifacts that required significant institutional resources to rule out. She did not want to rule this one out. She understood, sitting with that feeling, that she did not want it explained. She had spent nineteen years hoping for a signal and now that she had something that looked like a signal, the thing she most wanted to protect was the looking. She reported it on the seventh day, after running every test she could run alone. The senior team convened. The artifact was identified within two weeks: a previously undocumented reflection pattern from a new communications satellite that had not yet been added to the registry. Dr. Kim wrote the amendment to the protocol herself. She noted, in the protocol's comment field and nowhere else, that the two weeks had been the most focused work of her career.