The Future Falls (2 page)

Gary had listened to her babble, taken a deep breath, and said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-one months?”

“Yes.” She chewed her lip while he thought. He might not have access to all the details, but he had information enough to draw the correct conclusions.

“Even if they free up the money, there's no way we—you, NASA—can stop an asteroid that size . . .”

“It's not so much the size, it's how close it is.”

“All right. There's no way you can stop an asteroid already that close in twenty-one months.”

“No.” Oh, they'd try—the entire international community of space scientists would try—but, realistically, no. Unrealistically, no. Actually, no. Deflection efforts required years of warning. They had less than two. NASA had compiled a list of options back in 2007, but time had passed and Congress had never approved the funds necessary to begin developing them.

“But you're not going to give up.” It wasn't a question.

She almost managed a smile at the certainty in his voice. “No.”

“Well, then, I guess we'd better make the next twenty-one months count . . .”

Charlie loved Red Dirt music. It had a raw power that sang under her skin and buzzed through blood and along bone. More than merely a distraction,
it was a cleanse and she desperately needed a few things washed away. It wasn't always pretty music, but she'd take power over pretty any day and she much preferred music meant for kitchens or cabins or smoky bars where her shoes stuck to the floor than music trapped by the engineered pattern of acoustic tiles.

If the family in Calgary wanted to believe she'd run from the occasionally cloying domesticity of Allie and her babies, well, Charlie was good with that. The actual reason was no one's business. Cloaked in their useful belief that
musician
meant
irresponsible
, she'd stepped out the back door and into the Wood and followed the music to Norman, Oklahoma, where she spent Wednesday night listening to the Damn Quails at Libby's, Thursday night at the Deli with Camilla Harp, and Friday in Oklahoma City at the Blue Door.

John Fullbright's concert, his first back at the Blue Door for a while, had been sold out for weeks, but Charlie was a Gale girl and a ticket returned in time for her to make use of it. Fullbright was amazing. His voice was a soft burr, a rough prayer, or shared laugh as required, and his roots were sunk so deep in Southwest Oklahoma he had almost a Gale connection to the place.

He wasn't so young that he reminded Charlie of why she was on the road, but he was young enough the words “old soul” were tossed about the room between songs. He wasn't an old soul, at least not so old it was obvious in his voice—Charlie would have been able to hear an internal age beyond Human norm—but he was undeniably talented.

“If you're Canadian . . .”

Charlie stared across the table at the burly redneck she was sharing with; she hadn't thought her nationality was up for debate.

“. . . you should hear John's cover of ‘Hallelujah.'”

“Leonard Cohen's ‘Hallelujah'?”

“No, Handel's ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.' Of course Cohen.” He erased his frown with another swallow from a root beer can full of bourbon. “That boy and that song'll strip the meat right off your bones. Closest thing to a religious experience you'll ever get in a place where your shoes stick to the floor.”

Hearing her own qualifier thrown back at her, Charlie grinned and hummed a quick charm onto his tattooed forearm, the sound slipping through pauses in the room's ambient noise. There were powers that respected a Gale charm, even this far south, and this man, who understood
what music meant, needed a little luck in his life. From the moment he'd sat down beside her, she'd been half afraid of a lightning strike from the metaphysical black cloud hanging over his head.

A few days later, the music led her to a campground on a river, emptied of the summer tourists and filled with family in all but blood. Although the days were still pleasant enough, the nights nudged freezing. Charlie barely noticed the chill as she jammed until dawn with old women and young men and old men and young women and banjos and mandolins and fiddles and a dozen guitars. There was even a set of pipes and although the piper got pelted with bottle caps every time he began to play, he was clearly a familiar and loved part of the circle. Charlie had to fight to keep her power from rising with the music. She let it go once, after midnight had safely passed and let her creation hang in the air for a moment after the last note had been played.

“Well, damn,” breathed the piper as wings and scales and fire dissolved into the night.

Then one of the banjo players picked out the opening bars of “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.”

And they were off again.

The next day Charlie stopped off at a coin laundromat in Austin—even Gale girls needed clean underwear—then stepped out of the world, back into the Wood, and listened for where the music would take her next.

Allie's song wove through a stand of rowan, berries formed in the Wood's perpetual late summer but never getting a chance to ripen. She could follow Allie's song home, only Charlie wasn't ready to go home yet—and not only because Allie's song sounded a little sharp. Allie wanted Charlie to stop wandering. To stay home for more than a few months at a time. To allow herself to be gathered in under Allie's newly maternal wing.

Jack's song moved through the crowns of the birches, never settling, skirting the line between the Wood and what passed for sky in a place that ended where the trees ended. Like Allie's song, Jack's song had always been separate from the family symphony—hardly surprising given the unique combination of Dragon Prince, sorcerer, and Wild Power. Charlie stood for a moment, wrapped in what was almost a symphony on its own, well aware that with very little encouragement, Jack's song would fill the Wood until it was the only song she could hear. “Oh, no, you don't.” Hands clenched so
tightly her knuckles ached, she concentrated on not hearing him, not veering toward him, pulled by the power of his song.

Fortunately, Charlie had been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack had been alive.

“Unfortunately,” she muttered, following a fiddle through the maples, “I've been walking the Wood for almost as long as Jack's been alive.” Irony was a bitch.

The fiddle joined a drum and led into the shadows under the oldest oaks where she lost the melody. Drums often led back to the aunties and she really wasn't in the mood to deal with that. Them. They'd poke and they'd pry and, while misdirection was possible, she'd pay for it later. Where the aunties were concerned,
later
was a guarantee. Avoidance had been working for her so far, so avoidance remained her best bet.

Spanish guitars. An accordion. A pipe organ that made the leaves on the alders quiver.

Curiosity almost sent her after a marching band, but the memory of the 2011 Rose Parade stopped her. Who knew massed potted roses would be enough greenery to give her an exit from the Wood? Or that the Rose Queen would be so high-strung? Although the screaming and the flailing
had
provided an opportunity for Charlie to slip away.

Power prickling under her skin, she cocked her head to catch something that sounded like a bluegrass mandolin. Richer. Fuller. A little like a cittern . . . No, a bouzouki. Flat picking “Snug in a Blanket,” interwoven around a bass guitar, a fiddle, and a bodhran. Irish then, not Greek.

Now
that
was a worthy distraction.

Grinning, Charlie followed the song in and around the willows and out of the Wood, humming a countermelody as she stepped out from between two browning verbena and down off a concrete planter. Fortunately, at 9:10, the optometrist behind the planter was closed, and although there were a fair number of people still out on the old, red-brick sidewalks, no one seemed to have noticed her arrival. The surrounding buzz said fairly large city, the traffic told her she was in the US, and the license plates of the passing cars declared specifically for Maryland. To be on the safe side—not that stepping out of a planter was even close to the weirdest thing she'd ever been spotted doing—Charlie sang out a quick charm to erase her arrival from the memory of anyone who might have seen her.

Then “Mama Mia”—from the Abba Gold album, not the Meryl Streep movie version—rang out from the gig bag on Charlie's back, demanding attention and re-attracting every eye for blocks.

“Family,” she sighed to the couple who stared at her as they passed. The nearer woman nodded in understanding. Slipping her gig bag off her shoulders, she dropped her butt down on the edge of the planter as she rummaged for her phone. She'd tossed it into a washing machine on her way out of the laundromat in Austin after fifteen minutes of her mother complaining about her twin sisters, twenty minutes of Auntie Meredith telling her about the weather in southern Ontario, and five minutes of her sisters declaring it wasn't their fault—where
it
remained mercifully undefined. Unfortunately, Gale family phones were hard to lose.

Not so much
smart
as
scary
after the aunties finished messing with the basics, these days the phones were handed out to every member of the family as soon as they turned fifteen. Although the general consensus was that the aunties used the phones in ways that would make James Bond shit jealous bricks, no one refused the gift—cheap, reliable cell service was far from the default on the Canadian side of the border.

“Okay, you've had three weeks to play around. Come home.”

“You sound stressed, Allie-cat.” Phone clamped between her shoulder and ear, Charlie tucked her guitar safely away and zipped the bag up.

“You know what would make me less stressed? If you came home. I know, I know, you're Wild—outside the family, beyond the laws . . .”

“Actually, I think that's Torchwood.”

“Charlie! I have something to tell you.”

“Okay.” Charlie slid her voice into a soothing register, not quite a charm, but intended to calm. “I'm listening. Tell me now.”

“Not over the phone.”

Ah. Allie didn't want the aunties to overhear and, being Allie, didn't care if the aunties knew it. Odds were high there'd been more problems between Auntie Bea and Auntie Trisha. Auntie Trisha's initiating first circle ritual as an auntie had been in Calgary with David, so her ties to the original branch of the family back in southern Ontario were significantly less deep than Auntie Bea's—or Auntie Carmen's or even Auntie Gwen's. As the heart of the family in Calgary, Allie constantly had to play peacemaker between the dominant
personalities. Not that
dominant personality
wasn't essentially a redundant description when referring to the aunties.

A door opened across the alley next to the optometrist's and the bouzouki music Charlie'd followed from the Wood spilled out onto the sidewalk, lifting her onto to her feet. “I'm chasing a piece of music right now, Allie, but I promise I'll be home later tonight.”

A red sign over the scarred wooden door identified the bar as Nick O'Connell's. A sign taped to one of the three big vertical windows announced that the bands started at nine-thirty and there was no cover. Gales didn't pay cover charges, but Charlie appreciated the thought. Slinging her gig bag over one shoulder, she opened the door . . .

“Charlie, are you going into a bar?”

...and hung up the phone, allowing the music to draw her into a narrow room; a long wooden bar along one wall, tiny tables along the other. The clientele seemed younger than she often saw in these kind of quasi pubs and the number of sweating bodies already in place defeated the cooler air that entered with her. The fans hanging from the high, pale ceiling merely pushed the warm air around.

The pass-through at the far end of the bar showed part of a second room. Specifically, a stage and musicians. The music pulled her forward.

As much dining room as bar, the inner room was twice the width of the outer, the ceiling half as high. The stage had been tucked into the front corner by the bar, the walls were lined with booth seating, and the rest of the room filled with small round tables. This room was significantly less crowded and two of the three tables closest to the stage were empty. Charlie'd seen enough girlfriends, boyfriends, techs, and roadies to know that the occupants of the third table were with the band.

The bouzouki player was a slender man in his late thirties, early forties, with brown hair that curled around his ears and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed aviator-style glasses. He wore jeans and sneakers topped by a blue flannel shirt over a dark gray T-shirt. A ten-string Irish bouzouki hung from his shoulder by an embroidered strap—it was the wrong angle for Charlie to get a good look at the headstock—and the finish had the kind of small nicks and scratches that told her it was both well loved and well played.