There really was a lake in Blind Lake, Tessa Hauser had learned. She thought about that as she walked home from school, following her own long shadow down the sparkling white sidewalk.

Blind Lake — the lake, not the town — was a muddy swamp between two low hills, full of cattails and wild frogs and snapping turtles, herons and Canada geese and stagnant green water. Mr. Fleischer had told the class about it. It was called a lake but it was actually a wetland, ancient water trapped in the stony, porous land.

So Blind Lake, the lake, wasn’t really a lake. Tess thought that made a certain kind of sense, because Blind-Lake-the-town wasn’t really a town, either. It was a National Laboratory, built here in its entirety, like a movie set, by the Department of Energy. That’s why the houses and shops and office buildings were so sparse and so new and why they began and ended so abruptly in a vast and empty land.

Tess walked by herself. She was eleven years old and she hadn’t made any friends at school yet, though Edie Jerundt (whom the other children called Edie Grunt) at least spoke to her once in a while. But Edie walked the other way home, toward the mallway and the administrative buildings; the tall cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, far away to the west, were Tessa’s landmark. Tess — when she was with her father, at least, which was one week out of four — lived in one of a row of pastel-colored town houses pressed up one against the next like soldiers at attention. Her mother’s house, though even farther west, was almost identical.