The crowd remained in place, facing the soldiers as they closed in.
The loudspeaker boomed again: “YOUR VEHICLES AND PERSONAL BELONGINGS CAN BE CLAIMED AFTER DEBRIEFING.”
The crowd remained resolutely in place.
Lisa turned Allie to her. “Are they going to come for you now?” she asked,
“John left that up to me,” Allie answered. She looked lovingly at her mother. “Do you think if we’d just been regular people, Charlie would have come and lived with us and we could have been a family?”
Lisa smiled at Allie gently. “I know that would have happened.”
“I don’t want to go,” Allie said. “I want to stay with you.”
“Then stay,” Lisa said. “We’ve got a plan. We can get out of here, right now.” She saw that this was not possible, that even as Allie had voiced her hope, she had renounced it.
“It’ll be okay,” Lisa assured her.
Allie suddenly turned from her, quickly and abruptly, her eyes fixed on the crowd, the military force beyond them. A wave of stones arced out of the crowd and fell upon the soldiers and their vehicles. From beyond the crowd, small explosions sent tear gas canisters hurtling into the night air.
Lisa drew Allie into her arms. “We better get back inside,” she said.
Allie stepped out of her embrace. “No,” she said.
Suddenly a streak of light shot through the darkness, bold and radiant, as if carried on a comet, and in whose blinding wake the texture of the sky began to change.
The crowd stared upward in silent wonder at the celestial spectacle that raged above them, light flying into light, a play of unearthly radiance against the black field of the night.
Allie’s gaze was infinitely still as she turned toward the sea of faces-the stunned and silent soldiers, Mary and General Beers, hushed and awestruck as the light intensified all around them, growing brighter and brighter, as fierce and unknowable as the dawning of a brand-new world.
About the Author
Thomas H. Cook is the author of fifteen novels, including
