“Christ,” he said.
“Go back to Tangent,” Paige said. “I don’t know what’s coming, but you need to be there when it hits. It probably matters more than either of us realizes. Go.”
He nodded, leveled the cylinder, turned it on, and hit the delayed shutoff. Black smoke churned from the iris.
In the seconds he had to wait for the light cone to vanish, Travis faced Paige again. He stared at her eyes.
She was beautiful.
She always would be.
He’d known that the day he met her.
He wondered now if he would ever see her this age again. In their own timeline, however it might play out, what chance did they have of growing old together?
He saw the reflections in her eyes sharpen. She blinked at a sheen of tears.
Then the light cone vanished, and he turned away from her and didn’t look back. He sprinted for the opening and vaulted through into the smoke plume.
Sirens. Shouting voices. Blue and red flashers strobing through the smoke. He held his breath and ran, and came out into clear light beside the gutted husk of the jet. Fire crews were laying streams of water and foam into it. Travis hardly noticed them. He scanned the onlookers gathered at the periphery of the scene, most of them near the terminal. He saw Garner, and sprinted toward him as fast as he could move.
Chapter Forty-Six
Paige stacked the pine boughs close to the fire. Hopefully they’d dry within a few hours. The fire was hard to keep going. Everything was waterlogged.
The night had been hell. From Garner’s building they’d gone south as quickly as possible, which wasn’t very fast through dense trees and over broken concrete, all in perfect darkness. For the first fifteen minutes Paige had told herself that everything could still turn out okay. They would hear a series of shots from the Remington far behind and above them, and then they would hear Travis calling, and with any luck at all he’d have the other cylinder when they met up.
It was a lot to ask for, and they didn’t get any of it.
By the second hour, still making their way south, both she and Bethany had stopped saying anything hopeful or encouraging. Then they stopped talking altogether. Neither knew what the hell to say.
Occasionally they passed by places in the darkness where the rainfall seemed to be splashing down into deep water. They had no idea what the places might be, but the thought of accidentally stepping into one was terrifying. They were wet enough from the rain, though at least the trees kept them from being completely soaked. To fall into standing water and be drenched to the skin, with no means of drying off or getting warm, would be serious trouble.
Finally they just stopped. They had no idea how far south they’d gone, or even if they’d held to their intended path. They felt out the lower branches of a thick pine, made their way up ten or twelve feet, and found a raft of boughs spaced tightly enough to serve as a platform.
They lay in the darkness a long time, trying to fall asleep. They heard animals moving through the forest below, sometimes passing directly beneath where they lay. Maybe just deer. There was no way to tell.
Paige slept. She woke sometime later, the city still pitch-black, the rain still coming down. She heard Bethany crying, trying not to make any noise, but failing. Her breath was hitching and her body was shaking hard enough to move the branches. It was as terrified and lonely a sound as Paige had ever heard. She pulled Bethany against herself and held on tightly. It seemed to help.
When they woke again it was morning. The rain had stopped but the overcast and the chill were still there, pressing down on the ruins.
They climbed to the ground. Paige saw at once where they were. The southwest corner of the park. She also saw what the pockets of deep water were. Subway stairs. The access to Columbus Circle Station was flooded to within a few feet below street level. Not from the rain, Paige was sure. It was only the natural water table of the island, in the absence of pumps to keep the tunnels clear.
With daylight they found dry wood: a dead sapling in the partial shelter of an intact stone entryway. They broke it into kindling and piled it on the dry concrete below the entry. Paige used a sharp-edged rock to carefully deform and take apart one of the SIG’s .45 ACP bullet cartridges. She spread the powder in a fine layer beneath one edge of the kindling, and set the cartridge’s primer at its center. Then she slammed the rock down onto the primer. The powder flashed, and a few of the twigs’ ends smoked and glowed for a second, but nothing else happened.