Yellow flame guttered out of the van’s loosely chained rear doors. Smoke, too, though rain and mist concealed it. The driver of the van apparently hadn’t yet noticed.
Then something inside ignited with a visceral
Findley and the gunman were still staring when Bose’s car barrelled out of the coffee shop parking lot. Findley saw it first: “Go!
Sandra saw Orrin lunge forward and grab the gunman’s right arm. Orrin who wouldn’t so much as step on a bug, Sandra thought. Unless he was provoked. He had wrenched the gun to a vertical angle when it went off. The bullet cut a flanged hole in the roof of the car, allowing in a fine spray of rain. Findley jerked open the passenger- side door and threw himself out, landing and rolling on the wet street. Sandra realized she should do the same. But she couldn’t bring herself to move. She had become a still point around which the universe was revolving. Her body was leaden and her ears were ringing.
She wanted to help Orrin, who had one knee braced against the back of the driver’s seat and was struggling to leverage the gunman’s arm backward. The pistol looped around like a rattlesnake looking for something to bite. Orrin grunted and redoubled his effort, clutching the gunman’s arm and pumping with both feet. The pistol went off again.
Then Bose pulled open the driver’s-side door. He moved with a speed that took Sandra by surprise. His Fourth reflexes, maybe. He reached in and gripped the gunman’s arm just as Orrin fell back, exhausted, letting it loose. Bose took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. He pulled out the gunman, who crouched in a pool of ponded rainwater like a cornered animal, clutching his wrist, teeth bared, looking at Bose and at the gun. Then he turned and ran. Bose let him go.
The burning van was the brightest light on the block, casting long and hectic shadows down the slick street. Sandra looked over at Orrin, who was slumped against the seat. He turned up his face, wincing with pain. “I’m all right, Dr. Cole,” he said. But he wasn’t. The second shot from the pistol had cut across his shoulder, furrowing a wound. Sandra looked at it professionally, as if she had been transported from this madness back to her internship. The med school basics. Apply pressure. The wound was bleeding, but not too badly.
She guided him out of Findley’s car and into Bose’s. When she straightened up Bose put a hand on her arm to keep her still and examined her face where the gunman had hurt her. She said, “It looks worse than it is,” then contradicted herself by spitting a wad of blood onto the wet sidewalk.
“We need to get away from here,” Bose said.
Findley stood in the road, staring at a figure across the street.
The figure was his son, Turk. Sandra imagined she could see waves of surmise and dismay working their way into Findley’s shocked consciousness.
“He knows what you are,” she said—sternly and loudly, though the words were slurred by her loose tooth and swelling cheek. “He knows all about it, Mr. Findley.”
Findley turned to her, his face a mask of rage and confusion.
Sandra ignored him. She was watching the boy now. The kid. Turk. The kid yanked the hood of his poncho up over his head and turned away from his father in a gesture that was eloquent with contempt. He was bound away from here, Sandra realized. She could read that in his body, the way he hunched his shoulders and straightened his spine. It wasn’t the way it had happened in Orrin’s story but it was the same, somehow. The boy was heading for his own unspeakable land… though perhaps not the one Orrin Mather had imagined for him.
Findley saw his son begin that long walk away from him. “Wait,” he called out, weakly.
But Turk ignored him. He walked past the window of the coffee shop, casting a reflection on the rain-slick, fire-bright asphalt. He turned a corner into darkness. Findley stared into the falling rain until there was nothing to see.
Sandra slid into the backseat of Bose’s car, looking for something she could use to bandage Orrin’s wound. Bose gave her a roll of cotton from the first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. Orrin had bled a lot—blood and rain had soaked the loose weave of his shirt—but a few sutures would close the wound. Sandra could do it herself, she supposed, if Bose decided they couldn’t risk an emergency ward. “Hold this here,” she told Orrin, putting his free hand on the cotton wad. “Can you do that?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm.
Bose drove past the burning van, a few barren blocks to the highway. The highway was almost empty of traffic and the storm was as dense as fog, a rain-slashed darkness. He drove at a steady pace toward the city he couldn’t see.
Chapter Thirty
Turk’s Story
We flew to Vox under a crazed sky. External temperature readings rose so high that the ship’s sensors began to sound intermittent alarms. Dawn was viciously bright, and the sun when it rose looked bloated and threatening. But it wasn’t the sun that had changed; it was the protective barrier surrounding the Earth.
During the first uneasy years after the end of the Spin, people had speculated about what would happen if the Hypotheticals withdrew their protection. The answer was so appalling as to be unthinkable. And whatever their purposes, however obscure their motives, the Hypotheticals had seemed intent on preserving human life; so we had accepted the illusion of normalcy and even begun to believe in it, which was presumably what they wanted us to do.
But I remembered what the astrophysicists had said. During the Spin the sun had aged almost four billion years. The sun was a star, and stars expand as they grow old, often enough swallowing the planets that surround them. Without the continuing intervention of the Hypotheticals, the atmosphere of the Earth would be scoured away, the seas would evaporate like puddles on a July afternoon, and the rocky mantle itself would begin to melt.
Now, at last, that protection had been withdrawn.
The influx of radiation was already driving the weather. We flew south to Antarctica at sixty thousand feet, dodging thunderheads that boiled into the stratosphere like black, fluid mountains. And as we approached Vox—as we dipped down into the buffeting winds and streaming rain—our aircraft informed us that it was pushing the limits of its performance envelope. A little more of this and it wouldn’t be able to fly.
“Cut it out of me,” I said to Allison.
We were in the forward cabin, watching the end of the world. She gave me a queasy look.
“I mean it,” I said. “You told me this vehicle would fly back to Vox by itself if I wasn’t controlling it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Then cut the node out of me.”
She thought about what I was asking her. “I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I mean… cleanly.”
“Then do it messy,” I said. “You promised me as much.”
She gave me a defiant stare, then dropped her head and nodded.
