A few embers glowed in the room’s tiny hearth.
She stepped to his bed, a single like in her room, covered with a thick quilt and soft down pillows. Pulling back a corner, she slipped inside, sliding along his naked hard body, only now waking him.
He reacted suddenly, startled, a hand grasping her forearm in iron fingers, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Recognition softened his grip, but he didn’t let go. His eyes reflected the hearth’s glow.
“Sei—?”
She cut him off with a finger to his lips. She was done with talking, with trying to put into words what she felt, what he felt.
“What are—?”
She replaced her finger with her lips and answered his question.
Living.
26
November 20, 4:04 A.M. JST
Airborne over the Pacific
Jada jerked her head up as the jet hit an air pocket. Her chin had been resting on her chest, her laptop open before her. She had drifted off as she worked, waiting for some data to collate.
“Push your seat back and get some real sleep,” Duncan recommended, sitting next to her. “Like Monk.”
He thumbed back to the third occupant of the jet’s leather-appointed cabin, who was snoring in a steady drone to match the plane’s engine.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she scolded, covering a yawn with a fist. “Just thinking.”
“Really?” Duncan lifted his arm, revealing Jada’s other hand clasped to his. “Then may I ask what you were thinking about?”
Her face flushed with heat as she jerked her hand back. “Sorry about that.”
He smiled. “I didn’t mind.”
Embarrassed, she glanced out the window and saw a sweep of clouds and water under them. The clock on her laptop said they had been in flight for a little under three hours.
“We just passed Japan,” Duncan said. “Another five hours should have us landing in California.”
As she stared around the cabin, she remembered another plane, another luxury jet. She had begun this adventure in Los Angeles, flown to D.C., then off to Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and now she was headed back to where it all started.
A full circle of the globe.
All in an attempt to save it.
She hoped it wasn’t her farewell tour. If what Duncan saw through the Eye was real, then the entire planet was at risk.
Her eyes drifted to the box on the table. Before departing Ulan Bator, she had sealed the Eye in a makeshift Faraday cage, a box wrapped in copper wiring, to insulate its electromagnetic radiation from interfering with the jet’s electronics. Passing his hands over the box, Duncan had confirmed that her efforts had indeed bottled up the worst of the radiation. But such a cage would have no effect on the Eye’s larger quantum effect.
That was beyond any prison of copper wire.
Noting her attention, Duncan asked, “So why am I the only one who could see the destruction through that Eye?”
Glad for the distraction, she shrugged. “You must be sensitive to whatever quantum effect the Eye manifests. That makes me believe that what happened to the Eye also affected the glass lens of the satellite’s camera, allowing its digital image sensor to record that peek into the near future as light passed through that altered lens.”
“And what about me?”
“As I mentioned before, human consciousness lies in the quantum field. For some reason, you’re more attuned to the quantum changes in the Eye. Whether because you made yourself that way with those magnets in your fingertips . . . or because you’re extrasensitive.”
“Like St. Thomas with his cross.”
“Possibly, but I’m not going to go around calling you St. Duncan.”
“Are you sure? I sort of like the sound of that.”
A small alarm chimed on her laptop, as a new folder popped onto her desktop screen. It was the latest update of data from the SMC, sent via satellite.
Finally . . .
“Back to work?” Duncan asked.
“There’s something I want to check.”
Tapping open the folder, she read through the documents. She planned on building a graph of the comet’s path, tracking its corona of dark energy. Something continued to nag at her, and she hoped more information would jar loose whatever was troubling her.
She began collating the pertinent information and plugging it into a graphing program. She also wanted to compare the latest statistics and numbers to her original equations explaining the nature of dark energy. Her equations beautifully married her theory concerning the source of dark energy—the collapse of virtual particles in the quantum foam of the universe—to the gravitational forces it created. She knew that was the crux of the problem at hand. She could summarize it in one word.
Attraction.
The virtual particles were drawn to each other, and the resulting energy of that annihilation was what imbued mass with the fundamental force of gravity. It was the fuel of weak and strong nuclear forces that drew together electrons, protons, and neutrons to form atoms. It was what made moons circle planets, solar systems churn, and galaxies spin.
As she worked, she began to note errors in the SMC’s equations, assumptions the head physicist had made that were not supported by this latest set of data. She began to work faster, sleep shedding off her shoulders. With growing horror, the truth began to materialize before her mind’s eye.
I have to be wrong . . . I must be.
Her fingers began furiously tapping, knowing a way to double-check.
“What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.
She wanted to voice it aloud, to share it, but she feared doing so would somehow make it more real.
“Jada?”
She finally folded. “The physicist back at the SMC, the one who did the initial estimates determining when we’d cross the point of no return . . . he made a mistake.”
“Are you sure?” Duncan looked at his watch. “He said we had sixteen hours. Which still leaves us about another nine hours.”
“He was wrong. He was basing his extrapolations on the fact that the comet’s gravitational anomalies were increasing in proportion to its approach toward the earth.”
“And he was wrong about that?”
“No, that part was right.” She tapped to bring up the graph she had been compiling earlier. “Here you can see the comet’s corona of dark energy being pulled earthward as it swings nearer, growing an ever longer reach.
Jada continued, “Likewise, the curve of space-time around the earth is responding to that gravitational effect. That curvature is bending outward, the two drawing together, slowly creating that funnel down which that barrage of asteroids will tumble.”