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approximation of the angle. It had worked for Thomas Godfrey 300 years ago and it would work for her.
    “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Clay was whispering. “You’re getting everyone’s hopes up.”
    “We’ll have to go to the top of the hill. We need a good bit of horizon for the horizon glass. The more readings we can take, the more likely they can triangulate.” The parts of a sextant were coming back to her as her mind rescued more and more of what she had read.
    “When did you learn this?”
    Abruptly, she was afraid to tell him. She was certain she knew how to figure out where they were, but she wasn’t sure he would believe her. “Seventh grade,” she admitted. “It was in a geometry book I got at the library.”
    “You were never even tested on the material? What if you’re wrong? You could send them the wrong way.”
    “I know. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
    “But what if you are? I know you have this gift for numbers, but navigation is hardly the same thing.”
    “It is the same thing,” Holly answered. Her voice shook with certainty. “The very same thing. I can do this.”
    “Based on something you read when you were what, twelve?”
    “Eleven. It was just before my mother died. I remember it,” she insisted. She turned her back on him to start the hike up the hill.
    Jerri’s husband came with them, bringing the radio. Jerri picked a star and Holly used the telescope to focus on the horizon, then adjusted the pen arm until the reflection of the horizon and the reflection of the star crossed in the mirrors. Jerri’s husband radioed in the name of the star and Holly’s estimate of the angle the two arms formed.
    After a few readings to the pilot they were patched onward to a very excited radar officer at Edwards who knew exactly what they were trying to do. He radioed back when a reading seemed to fall outside of the circle he was marking on his map, and they would take another.
    And then they heard the distant throp-throp and it seemed like only minutes before they were exultantly slipping and sliding down the hillside toward their camp, now illuminated by the searchlight of the waiting helicopter.
    A paramedic was already trying to help Kevin. The copilot beamed at the three of them. “Who’s the lady with the sextant?”
    Holly held it aloft like a victor’s trophy. That was the memory she loved, the last time she had felt so sure that she had done the right thing and was thrilled simply to be alive. She shared a spontaneous high-five with the copilot and basked in his enthusiastic, “Excellent work!”
    Somewhere she still had the note from Kevin thanking her again, for he was certain that she had saved his life. She had kept the makeshift sextant, too, but it had been years since she’d seen it.
    She had not thought about that day for a long time. She wasn’t sure that she had realized before how dubious Clay had been about her abilities. She had known exactly what she was doing and he hadn’t trusted her yet. Today, she was certain, he would have no doubt. She had done the right thing in resigning. It had been a spontaneous but ethical decision, rooted in her values, not just quick action prompted by a special skill she possessed. She had stood up for Tori because her code of morality said she should. And that was something Clay would understand because he had taught her to do so.
    From high to low. Holly had to sit for a minute at the curb, clearing her mind for the imminent conversation with her aunt. Conversation between them inevitably led to confrontation, but Holly had, for the last few years, managed to avoid the harsh exchanges that had been so prevalent in her teenage years. She reminded herself that it couldn’t have been easy for her aunt to have taken in a child she’d never expected to care for, an eleven-year-old made sullen by grief.
    She felt the gentle, familiar tide of that grief, still. Lily Markham had been killed in a laboratory