Three days pass since Gene has gone missing. Simultaneously, Seth Moreno is avoiding Julia for some reason, although she does not know why: “We had not exchanged a single word since the day we saw the whales” (218). Until one day, Julia passes Seth on her way home from school and he invites her to watch the infamous Orion astronauts’ return to earth. After having been stranded in space since “the slowing” began, the Orion astronauts are finally being brought back by NASA in a highly publicized event. Their spacecraft is set to streak across Southern California at three minutes past four o’clock on its way to Edwards Air Force Base. Julia accepts Seth’s invitation to watch this event together.

They go to his roof, and Seth begins to ask her why she was being “kind of weird” the last few days (220). Julia realizes that she may have been signaling to him that something is wrong: “They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I wanted most in the world” (221).