Summary

Chapter 1 of Part 2, “Datura,” picks up with Leigh as she decides to take a job working with Amy in California at a secret lab. She stays with her mother for several months before moving to the United States and they develop a sort of intimacy they never had in childhood. Two years have passed since her voyage on Endeavour, and she remembers “excitement, determination, and the promise of something extraordinary about to be revealed” (125). In Chapter 2, she boards a plane bound for the United States and reflects on how little she knows about the job, only that she received a promise of unlimited financial backing for her research. After she gets off the plane, Leigh tells a border security guard she has come to the United States to work for NASA, although that is not quite right, and a man named Alex...