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Chapter 12 – Alice
Alice bolted upright in bed. She’d just felt a buzz – or heard a buzz – that yanked her from a dream. Outside, an ambulance passed. Its siren pulsed through the thick night air from seven stories below while flashes of light darted across the room then ran off with the fading siren sound. But the room didn’t quiet. Another noise, a ringing, stayed there with her. She ran a sleep-clumsy hand along her nightstand, raking her fingers to locate an alarm clock or phone that wasn’t there. Then, she looked at her wrist and understood where the sound was coming from. She raised her right index finger and tapped…
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Chapter 11 – Griff
A week passed in a strange blur of excitement and monotony. Some of the excitement came from piecing together just how they’d found themselves in this unexpected and unprecedented predicament. From radio reports, Griff learned that the blackout was the result of a gigantic solar flare – one that shot into Earth’s atmosphere like a billion hydrogen bombs and took down the power grid in the entire Northern Hemisphere. In a weird way, there was something exhilarating about this, that something so big and radical was going on, something significant enough to rock society to its core and cause a large-scale disruption of the status quo. Everyone knew that the…
Chapter 10 – Helios
Alan pushed back his chair and approached the whiteboard with a distant look in his eyes, marker in hand. Liz knew what was coming. She had seen that look before: Alan in his zone of thought. He began writing numbers, formulas, and equations and didn’t stop until the white board resembled a distant solar system. Every now and then, he would pause and turn his head just a little so his peripheral vision would pick up some signal from Liz or one of his other colleagues in the room – William, Kiara, and Abby – sitting comfortably around the high school conference room table. They, in turn, would nod their…
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Chapter 9 – V
Nine PM. People were leaving the meeting, mostly in groups of two or three. Some were chatting about the meeting, but most were talking about their plans for the weekend. The man, simply known as “V,” moved the “Caution Wet Floor” sign once again before picking up his mop and going back to work on the floor. Damn high school kids, he thought. Dirtier than pigs. Truth is, he kind of enjoyed the repetitive, mind-numbing work. He kept his back hunched, head down, a baseball cap covering his eyes. No one ever noticed the janitor. It was the perfect cover. Shame about the previous janitor. Luckily, when the school was desperate, V…
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Chapter 8 – Alice
Alice staggered off the bottom stair and opened the industrial door to the building lobby. She and Daisy, panting from their rigorous stair workout – running up and down the building’s nine stories four times in a row – emerged glowing, not just from sweat-soaked skin, but each from that inner victory light that comes with surviving torture. They took long pulls on their water bottles, and Alice cast a lusty look toward her favorite perch, the leather couch near the window, blissfully unoccupied at the moment. In the last few days, she’d spent so much time sitting there that Leo teased that her butt left an indentation. “Whoa! Whoa!”…
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Chapter 7 – Helios
Kiara Forrester drove her recently washed and waxed silver BMW down North Scottsdale road 15 mph above the speed limit on her way to Liz and Alan’s home, barely pausing at stop signs. She had meant to leave her reputation for lateness back in the lab in New Jersey, but it wouldn’t stop following her. She sighed and looked at the dash where the clock read 4 PM. Great. Liz’s email said the birthday BBQ started at 3:30 PM, and Jace was already nervous about meeting everyone for the first time. Pulling Jace out of the old neighborhood and moving to Arizona sounded exciting and adventurous at first, but as…
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Chapter 6 – Jace
The evening morphed into the kind of late summer night that picks up seamlessly where day left off. In the fading light, students tossed Frisbees on the green. Others sat on the grass in small groups, speaking in hushed tones, an occasional laugh carried on the light breeze. “This is just so weird.” Clare gazed at the field in front of her, elbow planted firmly on a small table, chin cupped in hand. “Don’t you think, Jace? Everything looks so normal, right?” A few muffled piano notes drifted through the stone walls of Mathey College. Sick of being ignored, Clare sat up and banged a hand on the table. “Jace? … Jace!” “Oh,…
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Chapter 5 – The Drennan Brothers
SatSphere. Jack Drennan sat slumped on a barstool with his elbows propped on the bar and his chin resting on tightly closed fists. He stared hypnotically into his tumbler of 16-year-old Lagavulin scotch, the two sacrilegious cubes of ice floating around the rim like a pas de deux. He left its twin untouched on the bar in front of the empty seat next to him. Fucking SatSphere. A nudge at his elbow wrenched him from the depths of his melancholic reverie. “Brother. Sorry to keep you waiting. Is our table ready?” Jack looked up over his shoulder at his older brother, Peter. Drops of rain wound snakelike patterns down his…
Chapter 4 – Helios
It had all the appearances of a chance meeting, the kind that occurs repeatedly at these types of conferences, but it wasn’t, not by a long shot. Elizabeth Hunter was an unheralded genius of astrophysics. She had done multiple studies on coronal mass ejection (CME) events and solar flares but had published only a few, with most of her findings disseminated during conference lectures such as this one. Dr. Alan Somerville had found a picture of her on the McGill University’s website, and he arranged to follow her to Paris once he confirmed she’d be speaking. He was desperate to meet her, to pick her brain. If her prediction was…
Chapter 3 – Griff
It was too early for the moon and too late for the sun. Griffin Hunter jogged the last few steps to the Belvedere lookout on Mont-Royal and paused, gazing upon the city of Montreal. A picture-perfect nighttime vista normally filled the skyline from this vantage point, but not tonight, not for the last three nights. While a few lights flickered like mischievous fireflies, most everything else was fading to black and fading fast. Griff took a moment to catch his breath, flipped on his headlamp, and turned to run back down the hill. He needed to get back to the apartment. It wasn’t safe after dark anymore. Griff negotiated most…
