The first summer after. I've been the biggest sister for eleven months now. Mom and Dad have planned the vacation carefully, conforming to the recommended necromancies. Rent the same house; come at the same time; look for her in the places she was most attracted to. Do, in other words, every thing we did when we lost her. We are all outfitted with apparatus that might, from a distance, be confused for bulky sunglasses; tiny mics on wires run from the stems of the glasses into our ears. The sphere will not reach our brains directly for three years. Until then, we will hug the phantom on our lenses as we would a soap bubble, conquering our own self-consciousness because the world is not yet used to people reaching for things that no one else can see.

The necromantic consultation comes in the classical mode, with warnings for our own souls. Kieran and I have to learn them secondhand from Mom and Dad: She may not remember dying. She may not know that she is dead. She may be afraid, angry, aphasic; her real-time 3-D rendering may leave something to be desired when the storms blow south from Canada. Kieran, eight, has technical questions about the video and audio hardware, the transfer protocols. I just want to know why we have to go to that horrible house, that horrible beach, ever again. My dad says "We just do, honey," and I reject the answer with extreme prejudice. Kieran gets scared and has to leave the room with Dad, so now it's me and Mom, sitting on the next in a sequence of crappy couches in the next in a sequence of never-quite-unpacked living rooms. She scoots over and tries to put an arm around me, but I pull away.

"Here's the best answer I know, Eileen," she says. "There are three big reasons we have to go back. First, and this is the one I don't understand very well, it's easiest for the company to—" She swallows. "To simulate your sister in a place where she's actually been. Has she ever been here?"

"No," I answer, as sullenly as I can.

"Will she ever be at the next place we live, or the place after that?"

I give her a look of dull fury that says I get it. She plows on.

"Second, the company can only do it in places where they have a really strong signal. The beach is one of those places, I think because so many rich people from Chicago have weekend homes there." We are presently quartered at Hill AFB in Ogden, Utah, where Dad is interim chaplain, not that I know the word "interim" at this time, and Mom substitute-teaches and tutors math and physics. She's trained to work on airplane instruments, and she does when she can, but manned aircraft are rarer every day, and it's hard to respecialize when you can barely stay in the same place for half a year at a time. "And, third..." She sighs. "The bandwidth—the data transfer is expensive, Eileen. Even if we stopped moving, and we lived in a place with good signal, a month is all we can afford."

And so we go, in a few weeks, back to the horrible house, and then the horrible beach. The boardwalk crests the dunes and the water's edge comes into view. The sky above the lake is brilliantly stained, now, the silhouette of skyscrapers visible against the fiery orange-rose of sundown, but the sun itself has not yet touched the water. We all remove our shoes at the end of the boardwalk, conscious of ceremony, and together we walk on the loose, warm sand of the dune-path and down toward the water's edge until the sand firms and cools with lake-water.

Instinctively I break away from Mom, Dad, and Kieran the way I did that morning; instinctively, I think, they hang back, as they did then. I look back at the three of them, goofy in matching glasses over stricken faces. There was one other warning for the necromancy: It may not work. She may not come.

The sun is sinking fast, a perfect half-circle. The water laps at my feet. Rose does not appear. I struggle not to cry.

A voice rings, tinny but known, in my ears: behind me and to the left. "Leen?"

Kieran says "Cooooool"; Mom gasps; Dad says "Rosie."

I'm ten. Rose is, miraculously, fourteen.