the danger that came with allowing something to become the single pulse of your life: it drove you, gave you focus and purpose, but it could also derail you the moment it was no longer there. Melisa had been the light that lured him out of the darkness. He closed his eyes, and found himself back in the women’s shelter attached to the place he had washed up. Melisa was doing her thing, helping some poor woman who was not much more than a kid herself deliver a baby. The woman was Chinese and when the baby was finally born, wriggling and mewling into the world, Melisa whispered something to him: ‘Do you see them?’
She often did that: asked a question that made you ask one back.
‘See what?’
‘The threads. The Chinese believe that when a baby is born, invisible red threads shoot out and find their way to all the people they will connect with in their life. And no matter how tangled up they get as they grow, those threads never break so they will always end up finding their way to the people they were destined to meet.’
He imagined those threads now, connecting him to Melisa, twisting through the air and pulsing like veins.
‘That thing you said back there,’ Franklin’s voice rumbled like the tyres, low and serious, ‘the thing about something heading towards Earth, you think that’s a possibility?’
Shepherd opened his eyes and realized he must have been dozing. They were in flat country now, hardly any buildings, hardly any sign of life apart from the odd car heading in the other direction towards Charleston. ‘Statistically speaking it’s possible.’
‘So how come other telescopes haven’t seen it?’
‘Hubble can see further than anything on earth.’
‘OK, but presumably anything far enough out that only Hubble could see would take millions of years to get here.’
‘Not necessarily. There are a lot of theoretical objects in space, physics-defying things that we can imagine but have not been able to find or measure. One of them is known as a Dark Star. It has huge mass and travels at or near the speed of light. If one of these things was coming straight at us then the light from it would only just outrun the object. We wouldn’t know anything about it beforehand, not until it was about to hit because the object would arrive at almost the same time as the light, like it had just appeared out of nowhere.’
Franklin stared ahead at the road. ‘OK, say, for argument’s sake, one of these Dark Stars is heading our way, would that explain all this stuff that’s going on: the ships, the soldiers, the people heading home?’
‘It’s possible. We can see the effect the moon has on the sea and humans are sixty per cent water, our brains are nearer seventy-five per cent, so it stands to reason the moon must have some effect on us too.’
‘That’s for sure. If you ever work a midnight shift at a hospital or a police precinct during a full moon you’ll know it’s true. Everyone goes nuts.’
‘And the moon is only one tiny object. Imagine what effect a massive star would have on us all. We’re all related to each other on an atomic level – you, me the car, the stars – we’re all made of the same stuff.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the atomic building blocks that make up you and me are the same ones that burn at the heart of stars, and all of it came from the same place. Around fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. It started out as something called the point of singularity, smaller than a sub-atomic particle, incredibly dense and incredibly hot. Every single thing that is now in the universe exploded out from it and began to cool as it expanded, forming the protons, neutrons and electrons that, over time, became atoms and eventually elements. The first element was hydrogen. Most of the atoms in the human body are hydrogen. These elements then started to coalesce into huge clouds that slowly condensed to form stars and galaxies. Then heavier elements began to be synthesized inside stars and in supernovae when they died. One of these was carbon, the essential building block of all organic life forms. And this process is still happening throughout the still-expanding universe. Things are born. Things get torn apart. And the elements of those dead things become something else. Nothing lasts for ever, but nothing ever entirely disappears either. It just becomes something else.’
The sound of the tyres rumbled through the silence that followed. Outside the white, frozen countryside continued to slip by. The Interstate was practically empty now. From time to time a building or sign would loom out of the fog giving variation to the otherwise flat white landscape, but most of the time they might just as well have been driving along in a huge hamster wheel – always moving but getting nowhere. It was a fair visual representation of the limbo Shepherd was feeling, halfway between something and nothing, with no real concept of either. Maybe the world had already ended and this was purgatory, driving through the fog for ever with Franklin at the wheel, never knowing what had happened or whether they could have done anything to stop it.
A ticking sound punctuated the silence as Franklin hit the indicators and started to ease off the highway onto a side road. ‘Just taking a little shortcut,’ he said. ‘We need some gas and a bite. There’s a town up here.’
Shepherd looked down at the map, following the line of the road they had just taken until it stopped at a dot of a town called St Matthews. ‘We could have got gas and food on the Interstate. This is going out of our way.’
Franklin reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette and popped it between his lips. He stared ahead, his fingers tapping on the wheel, the cigarette hanging unlit in his mouth.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Shepherd thought back through all the wrong notes he’d picked up over the last few hours: the way Franklin had ushered the cop who had clearly known him out of the room back at the station; the way he had insisted on driving rather than flying up to Cherokee; even his suggestion to come to Charleston in the first place to interview Cooper rather than hand it over to other agents. ‘Sorry for what?’
Franklin wound down his window a little then lit the cigarette, blowing smoke out into the cold. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.
The soldiers immediately made themselves at home.
As well as the food and fresh fuel supplies – which they offloaded from the lorry with impressive and well-drilled speed – they volunteered to take over the grave-digging detail their arrival had disrupted. They also brought something far more valuable than any of these – they brought a laptop.
All the communications and technology in the compound had either been destroyed or looted, effectively cutting it off from the wider world. So while everyone else was out beyond the perimeter fence Liv traced cables from the dish on the roof of the main building and hot-wired the laptop into the compound’s satellite link.
Like any journalist Liv was a total information junkie and she’d been cold-turkey for days now so the first thing she did when she fired up the laptop and got online was call up some news sites. She scanned the headlines feeling the buzz of an addict getting a fresh hit. Since her brother had fallen to his death from the summit of the Citadel, Ruin and the story that had unfolded in the wake of his sacrifice had never been far from the news. It was her story too – and also Gabriel’s. She did a News search on Google with GABRIEL in the subject line.
