In the pocket of Clara's gym shorts was a copy of the master key that her father used when game distress signals beeped from houses where there was no one home.
As if it was a dream, Clara remembered her father taking her with him when she was three or four years old. The musty smell of the dark house. The huge computer in the backroom. The safe path through the house. The way the back door opened. The nearly invisible outline of a door in the formidable wall, and the camouflage-painted machine with a propeller that occupied most of the back yard of the empty house in the hollow.