Not that Tess was one of those kids who lived in front of the video panel. Tess liked to play outside, though she mostly played alone, and Blind Lake was one of the few places on Earth where a child could wander unaccompanied with negligible fear of drugs or crime. This weekend, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. A crisp, sunlit Saturday morning gave way by noon to rolling asphalt-colored clouds and brief, violent squalls of rain. October sounding the horn of winter. The temperature dropped to a chilly ten degrees Centigrade, and although Tess ventured out once — to the garage, to root through a box of dolls not yet unpacked from the move — she was quickly back inside, shivering under her flannel jacket.

Sunday was the same, with wind gusting around the eaves troughs and piping through the bathroom ceiling vent. Marguerite asked Tess if there was anyone from school she’d like to play with. Tess was dubious at first but finally named a girl called Edie Jerundt. She wasn’t certain about the spelling, but there were, thank goodness, only a few J’s in the Blind Lake intramural access directory.

Connie Jerundt, Edie’s mother, turned out to be a sequence analyst from Imaging who promptly volunteered to bring Edie over for a play date. (Without even asking Edie, who was, Marguerite had to assume, just as bored as Tess.) They arrived within the hour. Mother and daughter looked so much alike they might have been Russian dolls, one nesting comfortably inside the other, distinct only in their dimensions. Both were mousy and wide-eyed and tousle-haired, features softened by Connie’s adulthood but concentrated, grotesquely, in Edie’s small face.