Content Warning: This guide includes moments of and references to suicide, addiction, abuse, and domestic violence.

“Nineteen eighty-six, a terrible year. Right out of the gate that space shuttle blew up. Challenger. Took off from Florida, big crowd, a huge success for a minute or so-then pow, that rocket turns to a trail of white smoke.”

Labrino believes that Tashi’s Comet, like other comets, is an omen that predicts disastrous events. Rainy resists this assertion and sees it as a spectacle worthy of viewing. In fact, all the disasters in Rainy’s life over the course of the novel happen before the comet arrives.

“The term, French for skeleton, was popularized a decade earlier when a dozen Michigan laborers seemed to vanish […] night shift, dirty weather, they stepped out for a smoke and never came back. Ordinary American citizens, filling six-year terms for bread and a bunk under the Employers Are Heroes Act.”

The Employers Are Heroes Act and the necessity for workers to escape highlights the dystopian society that surrounds Rainy in the novel. The employer-employee relationship is predatory, and working conditions are so poor that laborers, in large numbers, risk death to escape.

“I didn’t much credit the Mosquito, a humid little twelve-pager of raggy pulp and irregular publication. It styled itself a rebel paper, making much of the danger it posed to what Kellan would call the astronaut class.”

Rainy dislikes the Mosquito, a newspaper, finding its proposed activism empty and ineffective. The newspaper prides itself on challenging the astronaut class of society, exposing their crimes and abuses against workers. However, Rainy doesn’t see how their work helps anyone.