“You know, you attack your food,” Cruz observed. “You cut it in half like you’re the perfect little miss, then you go all Hungry, Hungry Hippo on it.”
“Did you just call me a hippo?”
Bellies full, they set off again, racing now toward the setting sun.
“We’re getting close.” Cruz indicated the GPS with her chin.
“Mmmm. We’re there, basically.” Shade switched to her instructional voice. “A degree of latitude is about seventy miles, a minute is a little over a mile, and a second of latitude is, give or take, a hundred feet. It works a bit differently with longitude, but if the calculations are correct, we’re looking for a rectangle about a hundred feet by eighty feet.”
“Ladies and gentlemen: the human Wikipedia. WikiShade.”
Shade pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, corn to their right, a fallow field of rich black Iowa topsoil across the road to their left. Shade pulled a smaller, portable GPS unit from her bag. “This will get us down to the seconds.”
She booted up the device and while she waited for it she deleted their destination from the car’s GPS.
“You’re kind of getting into this whole spy, cloak-and-dagger stuff, aren’t you?” Cruz teased.
“I kind of am,” Shade admitted, allowing herself a rare grin at her own expense.
The handheld GPS booted up and after a moment’s peering and muttering Shade said, “Okay, we go down that dirt road, go a half mile, and it shouldn’t be far.”
The sun was setting as they parked beside a wooden gate wide enough to admit trucks and harvesting combines. In fact there was a green John Deere combine parked maybe two hundred yards away, looking like some fantastic alien monster turned in for the night.
“Lucky timing,” Shade said. “Late enough the farmers won’t be working out here, and just an hour and a half to go.”
“An hour and a half?” Cruz whined. “People could be talking about me online and I wouldn’t even know.”
“Mmmm. And somehow you actually think that’s a bad thing.”
As early autumn darkness fell, they sat staring at the impact site—what Shade hoped and Cruz feared was the impact site—just an abstract rectangle within the larger rectangle of the unharvested cornfield. Cruz still harbored the secret hope that this was a wild goose chase, that Shade had made an error and the rock was going to land safely in Nebraska. Or somewhere.
But at the same time, despite her greater caution, Cruz had a second level of thought that whispered, It would be interesting though, wouldn’t it?
As if sensing Cruz’s ambivalence, Shade reached across to squeeze Cruz’s hand, something she had never done before. It was a little awkward, and at first it seemed forced or calculated—and with Shade you could never be sure—but Cruz squeezed back and they held that pose for a minute.
We are about to commit a felony, Cruz reflected, and all I’m thinking about is how that gesture is a girl-girl thing. How needy am I?
They sat in companionable silence as the sun disappeared and navy blue darkness stole over the field. The windows were down, it was not quite warm, but not cold either, and they heard a whole world of insect life, buzzing, droning, rising and falling like a stadium full of bugs doing the wave. High above a jet drew a coral line across the sky, picking up the sun’s dying brilliance.
“I hate to say it, but this is more fun than I’ve had in years,” Cruz said.
“I hate to say it, but me too.”
“If we don’t get arrested,” Cruz added.
“Ten minutes.”
“What if the calculations are off?”
“Then it won’t hit here. It will smash into some other field, maybe even a town. Could be miles away, could be on another continent.”
Shade touched the scar on her neck, drawing a finger along it, feeling the raised flesh, feeling the cross-hatching of the stitches. Cruz had noticed the gesture before, as she had noticed the faraway look that came with it.
They tried to stay cool and nonchalant, but the tension rose minute by minute. They made small talk, but it was pitiful, distracted stuff. They would start in on some teacher and lose the thread. They would start again on some fashion or celebrity, and again lose the thread.
Cruz asked her to dish on Malik: nope. Still, she did not ask the question her mind was screaming at her: Why are you doing this, Shade? What is the connection to the scar?
“This probably won’t work, not without the dome,” Shade said. It was the first negative thing she’d said, the first expression of doubt, and that tiny admission of worry, of fear, of vulnerability added new layers to Cruz’s affection.
Shade might be tough, determined, and at times perfectly ruthless, but there was a human in there.
“Or it will work,” Cruz said. “In fact, I bet it does.”
“Hope is the best form of torture,” Shade said dryly.
There was a persistent lump in Cruz’s throat that she could not swallow away.
“Three minutes,” Shade said, and there again Cruz saw the predator: the focus, the fearlessness, the hunger. No more stroking of scars, no more dreamy, faraway look.
Cruz felt herself teetering on the edge between hope and fear. That nervousness finally gave her the courage to ask. In a rush she blurted, “Shade, why are we doing this?”
Shade sighed and looked out through the windshield, more profile than detail in the gathering gloom. Finally, she said, “Like the man said who climbed Mount Everest, Cruz: because it’s there.”
“What’s there?”
Shade turned to look at her friend. The shark looked too. “Okay, you have a right to know. I was there the day the PBA barrier came down. I was right there, inches away. I saw that creature, the one they called Gaia. I saw what she did. It was . . . awful. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. You have no idea. People, little kids, cut up like pigs at a butcher’s shop. But the power . . . It was like watching a god, Cruz.” Then after a beat, she pointed at the scar. “It’s where I got this. A scared little girl with a great big knife.”
Cruz, confused and alarmed, said, “Wait, Gaia was evil, not a god.”
“Mmmm. They won’t be able to capture all the ASOs, Cruz. And if the rock has the same effects outside the dome . . . Well, the world may be about to become a very strange place. A very, very strange place. And what I saw that day . . . no one could stop that monster. No one could stop her but someone with an even greater power. Gods aren’t always good or kind. Some are monsters.”
“I’m not—”
“If it works there will be other monsters, Cruz. Other Gaias. And more people will be hurt. More people . . .” And for a moment Shade seemed unable to go on. Then her voice abruptly steely, said, “Thirty seconds.”
No, Cruz thought, that wasn’t quite the whole truth. It was related to the truth, but it was just the story Shade told herself.
“Time,” Shade announced, tension almost choking the word off. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
“I hope this works for you, Shade.”
“I know, Cruz. Four . . . three . . .”
And there it was in the night sky to their left, a spark, not very bright, like someone tracing a laser pointer across the sky. It was a tiny missile—the estimate was four kilos, just under ten pounds—moving at thousands