She looked around for the elevator just as the lights began to dim. She steadied herself on the railing and looked down into the atrium far below.
The string section began a playful little composition that sounded like birds chirping.
Then foil confetti began to snow from the machines hanging beneath the skylight—fluttering down in a thick, mirrored swarm. The lasers punched into the cloud and it pulsed, developing a heartbeat. It looked alive, playful.
The atrium erupted in applause.
Holograms blossomed from the floor, sprouting up toward the falling foil—three-dimensional tree trunks that grew in accelerated time lapse, branches reaching toward the skylight. The outstretched holographic limbs contorted as they rose and touched the falling foil confetti, and the transformation was complete.
For an instant, the Guggenheim was a lush translucent forest, heavy trunks of computer-generated old-growth trees ascending into the thick canopy of foil foliage overhead.
The gentle chirps generated from the violinists changed pitch and turned into the calls of exotic birds, each voice different.
The room disappeared, and Dana was transplanted to an ancient point in time, before man began to tiptoe toward the happenstance of evolution.
She began to clap with the rest of the partygoers.
Then—
Dana’s mind had time to register the flash.
And the initial instant of the explosion.
But everything disappeared when she was destroyed by the shock wave.
2
Montauk, New York
Lucas Page was out on the deck, turning things over in his mind. It was past two A.M. but he had lost track of time to one of those warm fall nights that made him feel like winter might never arrive. He sat in the big cedar chair with a cup of coffee that had passed peak-consumption temperature hours ago. His beaten leather mail bag was on the deck under his chair, filled with term papers that he needed to go through, but his attention was focused on the broad misty strip of the Milky Way. The rhythm of the surf scratched at the beach and he suspected that this was as close to meditation as he could get—something the doctors, in the vague but polished nomenclature of their profession, had tried to convince him could be a useful tool during times of stress. But when the voices started up, there was no convincing them to be quiet; they operated on their own schedule. And the hour he spent watching network news earlier gave them all the excuses they needed for a little emotional mischief; there was nothing like a flashback to start the voices chattering.
His head was back on the big deck chair and he focused his good eye on the stars. Out here, beyond the visual noise of the city, he could get a pretty good view of the sky if the weather was in a giving mood. The telescope was out, but it was really for the kids, part of his oft too-aggressive attempt to teach them a little more about the universe. They had taken turns peeking up at the cosmos after supper, but Lucas was still thinking about the explosion back in the city, and the kids had eventually drifted back into the house. Evidently he was no fun to be around when he wasn’t paying attention to them.
Lucas preferred the human eye over the telescope out here because it pulled focus and let him take in the Big Picture without zeroing in on details—a hard-wired problem with his thinking since childhood. His attention wandered from star to star, constellation to constellation, unconsciously and automatically mapping the movements as the minutes ticked by. He was staring at the Seven Sisters and could see five of the girls—not bad with the naked eye at this time of year—when Erin came out.
She sat down in his lap, careful to put her weight on his good leg. “Hey, Mr. Man. I thought you might have gone for a swim.”
He smiled into the dark; the water out here was never warm, but this far into October it would be at hypothermia temperatures. Also, with or without his prosthetics, Lucas had all the hydrodynamics of a cast-iron sewing machine. “Can’t sleep.”
“So you’re staring up at the sky?”
“I am.”
She nodded over at the telescope. “Why aren’t you using your fancy coatrack?”
“That’s for the kids. I don’t like it. Too much chromatic aberration.”
“Of course. Chromatic aberration. Silly me.”
He smiled and leaned forward, putting his face in the thick red hair that fell over her chest and the blue Wonder Woman T-shirt. She was warm and smelled of that Bvlgari perfume that was a big part of the mental snapshot he carried around. “I’m just thinking about things.”
They had both been involved in a silent dialogue from the moment they saw the news, and even though things was not much of an answer, it was enough.
“How long will we be hiding out at the beach?” She leaned her head back on his shoulder and followed his line of sight up to the sky.
He reached over to the other chair and took the blanket off the back with his right hand, doing a decent job of covering her. “We’re not hiding out.”
“Okay.”
“We’re waiting. Events like this often come in multiples. Right now I’m more comfortable out here, where statistically there isn’t much of a chance of our children being blown up.”
Their silence indicated that they agreed on that one point.
Erin pulled her feet up onto his lap under the blanket. “The hospital hasn’t called, which means we didn’t get any of the survivors.”
“That’s because there weren’t any.”
By the way she stiffened, he could tell that she hadn’t thought of that as an option. “How do you know?”
The cell phone footage aired on CNN and the telephoto shots of the Guggenheim on Fox had provided the broad strokes: the skylight and front doors had been blown out, but there was relatively little damage to the outside of the building. When you factored in more than five hundred victims so far, it meant that the blast had been designed to affect soft bodies, not hard surfaces. And there was only one kind of explosion that provided those two very specific data points. “Trust me.”
“Is that why you’re sitting out here, looking up at the sky that you seem to prefer over us humans much of the time?”
He could tell that she had reached the end of her rehearsed dialogue, which meant that she would either go back inside or ask him what she had been trying not to.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “You think they’ll call you?”
And there it was.
“I don’t do terrorists. At least not this kind.”
“Are you sure this was terrorism?”
“I’m not certain of anything at this point other than a lot of people were killed.”
“What humanity needs is a little more humanity.”
“What humanity needs is to finish what it started and go extinct.”
“Don’t be a cynic. I can live with your sarcasm, because a lot of the time it’s funny. But you’re too kind to be a cynic.”
“They’ll mobilize the entire American intelligence community to nail these people down. They might pull everyone out of mothballs, but this isn’t my field. This particular subset of people has a pretty standard operating procedure, and they’re not that smart—it’s just a matter of time until they get caught. The office might ask me to look at a few things. If that happens, I want you and the kids to stay here.” That was as honest as he could be.