The Future Falls (19 page)

They were smart people. They'd have floated half a dozen hypotheses by now. One or two would have hit close to the mark.

Sooner or later—sooner rather than later—they'd have to be told.

The men and women in the aerospace industry were good at keeping secrets. NASA employees and the employees of NASA-like organizations in other countries signed confidentiality forms, and NASA's media relations department walked a fine line between keeping the public informed of how their tax dollars were being spent and keeping the public from being bored and/or terrified.

But this secret . . .

Kiren wondered who'd break first. Who'd tell the wrong person. Who'd tweet
OBTW, we're all going to die
.

She'd told Gary and she couldn't really expect him to be stronger than she'd been. Although he probably would be. When they were kids, he'd always been able to keep a secret. To this day, Mrs. Bowen had no idea who'd released the class bullfrog into the wild. Which was, she supposed, why she'd told him. One of the reasons . . .

Eventually the number of people who knew would reach a tipping point, and the secret would be a secret no longer. There were social science equations to determine that exact number, although Kiren didn't find the math as comforting as usual.

The shuttle bus that ran around the Lab, to and from the east side
parking lot, ran only from 7AM to 6PM. At this point, she wasn't so much late for the last bus as early for the first one. Her office to the gate was a little better than three quarters of a mile and her pumps weren't exactly walking shoes. One hand wrapped around her lanyard, she stared up the hill and weighed hot water and her mattress against distance and sore feet.

Hot water and her mattress won.

“So much for Dhruv's belief I put my research before everything,” she muttered, beginning the long walk. Her ex-husband had been astounded when she hadn't miraculously become a traditional wife immediately after marriage. His second wife, Adrika, had produced three children and stayed home to raise them. As they all attended the Shri Lakshmi Narayan Mandir temple in Riverside, Kiren had come to know Adrika and the children and, quite frankly, liked them all better than Dhruv. Those three beautiful children, grown to be astounding young adults, were the future and she couldn't stand to think of them dying because of something she'd discovered.

“You're not responsible, you idiot.” Kiren scrubbed the palm of her hand over her cheeks. “Your discovery may have given them a chance to survive.” Which was all very logical and accurate and didn't seem to matter in the slightest. All at once, she couldn't stop crying.

So she walked and wept.

She should've put her jacket on.

It was easy to forget, tucked away in front of her computer, that JPL was the size of a small town. It had its own clinic, its own fire department, and an extensive support staff that kept the buildings clean and the grounds landscaped. It was, at 1AM, a small ghost town, the streets deserted and the only sounds coming from the Angeles National Forest pressed up against the perimeter fence.

Night birds. Raccoons probably. Coyotes definitely. There hadn't been a mountain lion sighting in years and . . .

She stumbled to a stop, head cocked, almost certain she could hear “My Hero, Zero” from the old
Schoolhouse Rock
videos.

A young woman holding a guitar suddenly appeared between two eucalyptus trees and paused in the circle of light under a lamppost. She pushed blue-streaked hair back off her face, glanced around, spotted Kiren, and walked toward her.

Kiren stumbled back a step, caught her heel on the curb, and nearly fell.
“Who,” she demanded, rubbing her nose over the back of her hand, “are you?” She fumbled for her phone, ready to call security, fully aware it would take them a minimum of ten to fifteen minutes to arrive.

The young woman stopped and held up both hands, the guitar hanging from the brightly patterned strap around her neck. “Dr. Mehta? Dr. Kiren Mehta?”

“What if I am?”

“Gary Ehrlich sent me. We have to talk about an asteroid impact.” She grinned suddenly and gestured toward Kiren's chest. “I like the shirt.”

The sun was pretty much up by the time Jack returned to the roof, making it somewhere between seven thirty and eight o'clock. He'd taken wing right after he'd told Allie that Charlie'd left, slipping away while she muttered about how Charlie needed to start thinking about other people once in a while. He'd wanted to leap to Charlie's defense, but he knew that under the full force of Allie's attention, he'd spill like a gutted boar and tell her what Auntie Catherine had Seen and what Dan had heard and what Charlie was trying to do about it. Wild to Wild, Charlie'd said. Not Wild to Wild to the whole family. So he'd left while Allie was still muttering about musicians and headed north to check the nearest wood bison herd—although at the last minute he'd decided not to hunt in case Charlie needed him.

A whole bison would need a couple of days to digest before he could change.

He dove out of the sun and snickered as the line of pigeons roosting on the edge of the roof exploded into the air, all wings and panic, instincts screaming hawk even though the only thing remotely hawklike about him was his current size. And that he'd be perfectly willing to eat pigeon had Allie not declared the birds on the roof off limits.

Cameron had finally explained all the sniggering around Allie's instructions on who he was allowed to eat and why. He didn't know a lot about the sex lives of dragons, his mother was the only female he'd ever met, but he knew it wasn't something dragons did. When a dragon said eat, they meant chew and swallow.

The last thing he expected to see as he came in for a landing was a
person-shaped bundle wrapped in an old quilt on one of the chairs, the fabric lightly frosted. He changed and had to take an extra moment to twitch the new body parts into place, his skin fitting less comfortably than scales lately. Looking back, he realized he'd been twitchy in his skin for about as long as he'd been setting fires thinking of Charlie. It was like his Gale half knew what he couldn't have while his dragon half insisted it was a stupid rule and dragons took what they wanted. Actually, both halves were in agreement that it was a stupid rule and that taking wouldn't end well. For anyone. But mostly for him.

His bare feet left steaming footprints as he crossed the deck toward the bundle. The quilt reeked of charms, a tangle of dos and don'ts, protections and warnings that made his nose itch and blocked the scent of the sleeper.

“Poke me again and you'll lose the fucking finger.”

Charlie. No mistaking her cheerful good morning.

“Aren't you cold?” he asked as she sat up, her scent released when the quilt fell to drape around her shoulders. He didn't think she noticed him inhaling, but even if she did, he doubted inhaling had been covered by the stupid seven-year rule.

Her teeth when she yawned were . . . pretty pathetic really, but teeth were one of the hardest comparisons to drop. “The quilt's charmed.”

“Yeah, I know. There's . . .” Half of them, he didn't recognize so he settled on, “. . . lots.”

“Gale girls used to make charm quilts to give their daughters.” She shifted around until she could free her arms but remain mostly covered. “My mother made this.”

It was fabric, but he still didn't understand how fabric came together without sorcery. Knitting, he understood. Enough of the aunties wielded needles to make figuring it out a matter of self-defense. “Have you made one?”

“I'm no one's mother nor do I want to be.” Her hair spilled through her fingers as she tugged both hands back through it, and her laugh sounded broken. “And in twenty-two months, what I want or don't want may be moot.”

“A cow's opinion?”

She looked at him then, and when she laughed this time the shards fell into place, making her laugh whole again. Jack relaxed, pleased with himself.

“I thought Dan heard six months and millions of people?”

“That's merely the intro, and there's one hell of a downbeat dropping in.” Charlie waved a hand. “Sit. Make some clothes or you'll freeze your ass on the chair.”

“I won't.” But he made some clothes anyway, careful not to pull the rare bits of uncharmed fabric from the quilt. The wooden slats on the other lounge sizzled when he made contact, the frost evaporating. “You went to see the bouzouki guy,” he prodded when Charlie sat silently and ran her thumb over a pink patch covered in purple polar bears.

“Gary. Good news is, he
was
the guy Dan overheard. Bad news, he has a friend at NASA who told him about the asteroid Auntie Catherine Saw. Impact in twenty-two months.”

Jack shook his head. “But Dan heard millions will die in six months.”

“Because six months is the outside estimate before someone else spots it and
hello, worldwide panic
.”

“Why would people panic if NASA can stop it?”

“NASA can't stop it.”

“But you said . . .”

“I was wrong, okay?” She shot him a narrow-eyed glare that reminded him of Auntie Bea—and he was not going to mention that. Not to anyone. Ever. “It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I went and talked to Gary's NASA friend and the rock that's going to hit us has been masked by a bigger metal heavy rock—totally different than heavy metal rock.”

“Annihilator.” Jack knew this game.

“Black Moor.”

“Coney Hatch.”

“Death Cartel. And you're going to lose when we get to J because there's no Canadian metal band that starts with J. So, moving on. The masking rock is how the following rock got so close without anyone seeing it. Masking rock will slide on by, following rock will . . .” Charlie whistled as she dove a hand toward the ground. “. . . blam. Just like Dan said. It's too close for NASA to stop. Although, credit where it's due, they're trying. Shut up.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“Not you.” Both hands drove back through her hair again. “If I have to listen to ‘End of the World as We Know It' one more time, I'm going to hit myself in the head with a brick.”

Jack could hear traffic. He could hear Charlie breathing. Charlie's heart beating. The pigeons gossiping. And, about a block away, a guy yelling, “Way to strut it, baby!” out of a truck window. He couldn't hear music. “Are you okay?”

“Not really. I told Gary I could stop it. I Sang the seabed, right? What's a big rock? Oh, sure, maybe you and me and Auntie Catherine would have to gang up on NASA to get me on the Orion capsule thing to get me close enough, but between sorcery and singing and, well, an auntie, that shouldn't be a problem, right? We could probably even manage it and make the six-month deadline. Except,” she continued before Jack could answer, “do you know what I realized, lying here? In space, no one can hear you sing.”

She sounded serious. But it sounded like a joke. “I don't know what that means.”

“Right. Okay. First, space is a vacuum. Sound doesn't happen in a vacuum. Second, we're raiding Roland's DVD collection and you're watching
Alien
. It's a haunted house movie in space with a monster even you, Your Dragon Prince-iness, will think is fucking terrifying, a kickass Sigourney Weaver and an orange cat.”

Jack knew whistling in the dark when he heard it. Charlie was slammed. He could almost see her control cracking and he half wished she'd lose it, break down, and need him to comfort her. On the other hand, he didn't ever want to see Charlie break down because that would be wrong. So wrong. Charlie was strong and she didn't give up. Ever. “So, what do we do? About the rock. Not the movie.”

“Do? Dr. Mehta, Gary's friend, showed me computer simulations of what's going to happen. If the rock isn't stopped, we die. If not all of us, most of us.”

“So we stop it.” It seemed like a simple solution to him.

“How high can you fly?”

When he was very young, when he was a Dragon Prince but not yet a Gale, he'd gone to the edge of the sky where the air was thin. His vision had grayed, his wings had folded, and he'd almost died. “Not that high. Not as far as the darkness.”

Charlie'd shrugged, like that was the answer she'd expected. “Then we learn to play the bouzouki.”

“What?”

“And we make a good-looking corpse.”

“Charlie!”

Her shoulders slumped and she sighed, her breath pluming out so thickly he was almost homesick for other dragons. “I don't know what we do, Jack. I can't sing rock a-buh-bye baby in space. You can't get there to devour it.”

He didn't think he needed to point out that he didn't actually eat rock.

“At least we know for sure why the FBI wanted Dan.”

“We do?”

“The longer the asteroid stays secret, the longer the world has before someone hits the panic button. Dan spilled that secret all over the internet and while Doomsday Dan the crazy street person can be ignored, the FBI's going to want to find out who told him and plug that leak.”