Day One

6:59 P.M.

AS HAWKE GOT CLOSER to Pier C, he noticed smoke coming from the Jersey light-rail station.

His heart sank as he saw what looked like a bad accident, debris everywhere. Some kind of explosion had ripped out the guts of the buildings that had lined the water’s edge, exposing the heart of the station. There was more carnage inside; trains had probably smashed into each other at the tunnel entrance, or buses, or both.

Doe had blocked the tunnel from this side, too. Cutting people off, isolating New York, experimenting in some twisted way. Eliminate two-thirds of the population, leaving those you need still alive, and do all of it without anyone truly understanding who was behind it all, or why.

Energy sharing will only delay the outcome…, she had said. But a reduction of consumers by sixty-three-point-four percent, combined with advances in fusion energy production that are predicted with ninety-eight-point-six percent certainty, would oscillate the current string enough to enter an alternate path.

He motored closer, watching carefully; a few emergency workers were helping the injured at the scene, but it was a crippled operation. It took him a few moments to realize why. They were working without their familiar tools. There were no vehicles with flashing lights, open ambulances, cardiac machines. The people weren’t carrying tablets and nobody was talking on phones. He scanned the shore for the girl who had served him coffee that morning (so long ago, it seemed, light-years away) but didn’t see her red-streaked hair among the others. She was either long gone or buried somewhere beneath the wreckage.

Hawke still had grease smeared across his cheeks, and his clothes were dirty and torn. But he must have looked like everyone else who had been through hell today. Nobody noticed him as he ran the little boat up to the esplanade that jutted out into the Hudson, tied it off and climbed to land. Nobody cared as he raced like a madman down the esplanade’s still beautiful, tree-lined walkways to Sinatra Drive, turning left and racing to Newark Street, running hard, his shoes pounding on the sidewalk. Keep focused on that sound, he thought, just keep going, as his breath wheezed in his aching lungs, do not think of Robin and your son, your unborn child and what might have happened to them. He’d been gone from home for less than twelve hours; it hardly seemed possible that everything that had happened had been during such a short span of time. He wondered if Robin would notice the differences in him, the way he felt them himself. Would he seem like a stranger, a different man entirely, one who had been through a war and come back withered inside and broken? And what would they do once they found each other? She might not think it was possible to make it to open water without being discovered.

Or maybe she wouldn’t even want to go.

* * *

The door to their building was open.

Hawke stood in the shadowed gap, breathless, peering inside. The landing was still, silent, dark. He pushed the door wide, stepped inside, saw the list of names and the buzzers for entry, the interior doors closed tight, more darkness beyond the glass.

Within the intensity of his emotions, the familiar had become strange; things he had never noticed before drew his attention. The brown carpet was worn in a straight line, the wallpaper water stained and faded. It looked like a different place, even though it was the same.

His nerves were singing, his breath too shallow and fast. He forced himself to slow down, calmed himself enough to function. It wouldn’t do Robin or Thomas any good if he lost his mind now, not when he was so close to finding out what had happened to them.

The power was out, the buzzers not working. The electronic lock for the interior doors wasn’t working, either, but he hadn’t really expected it to be that easy. He kicked at the glass until it broke, the sound too loud in the quiet of the building.

He climbed through the opening, drew the gun from his pants, moved through the lobby and bypassed the elevators, which were surely not running now. The stairs were blanketed in gloom, and empty. He took them as quickly as he dared, spiraling up through the dark. Finally, he reached the door to his floor, pushed it open with a soft click and slipped through, caught it before it closed and let it tick shut.

At the end of the hall, gray light filtered in through a small window. Hawke’s dream that morning came back with a vengeance; his son being ripped away from his arms by silvery tendrils snaking down from the sky. The memory left him shaken, momentarily unable to move his feet toward his own apartment, terrified of what he might find there.

Their door was open just a crack. The jamb had been forced, the latch shattered.

Hawke looked at Lowry’s door, also hanging open. And he knew.

Lowry had been here.

* * *

Hawke pushed the door open with the tip of the gun, called Robin’s name, quietly at first, and then louder. Nothing. The front hall was empty. Time slowed down; details sharpened; smells assailed his nostrils. He saw everything in extreme clarity as his fear turned seconds to minutes, minutes to hours. He stepped inside. A clanking hiss made him clench his teeth and nearly scream before he realized it was the radiators giving up the last of their heat. Shadows clung to corners like cobwebs, but on the far wall a bit of light fell, enough to see the spray of blood that speckled the paint.

A small, helpless cry escaped Hawke’s lips. Tears filled his vision, blurring the bloody spray, blackened in the shadows and light. The camera image he’d seen hadn’t been faked. Which meant that the rest of it had probably been real, too: Robin’s panicked phone call, the video of the shadow across the screen as the laptop was lifted, the image moving across the ceiling before someone abruptly snapped it closed.

The shoe he had seen in that brief glimpse before the laptop’s camera was cut off, just the tip visible through the bedroom door…

A bedroom door that was now shut tight, its knob coated red.

He held the gun up in a trembling hand, scanning the empty space, kitchen and living room, the overturned lamp still on the floor, other signs of disarray. A plastic cup had been knocked from the counter. Thomas’s blocks were strewn across the living room. There was more blood staining the carpet near the spatter.

As Hawke moved forward toward the bedroom, louvered doors sprang open and something exploded out of the hallway closet beside him, a wild-eyed, screeching, bloodied apparition holding a knife overhead. He turned with the gun, his heart hammering, finger nearly squeezing the trigger before recognition lit him up like an electric shock; he ducked to one side as she descended upon him and the blade slashed down; he caught her knife arm with his own forearm in a swift parry, knocking the blade away before he wrapped her in a bear hug, his beautiful wife, screaming and then sobbing into collapse as he gently said her name, over and over.

“I’m here,” Hawke said, whispering it into her hair, trying to calm her trembling, rigid body with his embrace, his tears mixing with her own. “I made it; we’re okay now; everything’s going to be all right.”

But Robin didn’t respond or seem to hear him, her eyes unfocused as, behind her, Thomas emerged from the closet, and Hawke let her go before gathering his boy in his arms, safe and whole and unharmed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

7:20 P.M.

WHEN HE HAD CALMED DOWN enough to think, Hawke checked Robin and Thomas over carefully, found the blood that coated their skin was not their own. They had no cuts on them, no signs of physical trauma. He touched Robin’s belly gently, found the swelling there, no apparent pain; the baby seemed to be okay. But Robin wouldn’t speak a word, and Thomas simply kept his arms locked around his father’s waist, unwilling to let him go. Thomas kept his eyes squeezed shut for a while, tears leaking down his cheeks, and when he finally opened them his pupils were dilated with shock.

Hawke whispered to him as the last of the sun’s rays slipped through the living room window, his voice