And, as much as I want to talk, as much as I want to demand answers to questions worth asking, I hear the tone in his voice, and I bite my tongue. I take a deep breath and give the thumbs-up to Emily and Stan, who are watching me with terrified eyes.
“I know you talked to Mom before they started herding everyone north. Reports about what ultimately happened have been scarce, so I’m guessing whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The last broadcast we heard said that one of the AROs tossed a pod at a drone, and then some kid soldier fired off a rocket without orders. I swear to God, I thought you were dead. Your mother worries you might be. Me, though, I didn’t see the champion of my heart getting blown up in a governmental cluster, no matter what sort of payloads were involved.” He pauses now, and I almost venture to say something, but then I miss my chance. “I just want to tell you,” he says, “everything. About that day, about Callie. We were up there to check on those anomalies,” he says, “which you already knew. And I’m sure you noticed those same anomalies for yourself when you were up there. We were there on a grant, a government grant, which is also probably no big surprise to you now.
“There weren’t any docks there back then. We had to beach the boat, and I made two interns stay with it, planting themselves in the frozen sand, clinging to ropes, with nothing but the vague hope of getting course credit tethering them there. We landed where the new docks are now, which is why the new docks are there now. There was this hole in the ground, and we heard some sounds coming up out of it. Did you see the shed? They built a shed over it. Not even I know what the hell they found in there or what they were looking for. But we made our way there, among those goddamn trees, covered in snow and ice. And we stayed for a while, taking photos. We made it past the hills. The hills sing. I don’t know if you heard them. They sing. Not like a song. They resonate around the trembling expanse.
“And the ice field is trembling, viciously. I go out, and I test it. Because the readings don’t make any sense, and the sky doesn’t make any sense. It’s purple and yellow, but only over the field. We can see the sky going gray all around this, just normal and flat and endless like the sky gets out there. And the air smells like lightning. Which I told you I hoped you would never get to smell. There’s always a change with lightning around. It’s this sort of math you can’t predict. And it always, always alters something. Irretrievably. And then this guy . . . this guy just pops up out of the ground. He stares at us. All he does is stare. And the ice is breaking apart, and I’m standing on it, because the readings don’t make any sense here, because even though it’s quaking, it’s more than stable enough to stand on.
“The guy stands there and stares on and on, and then the pods come up. All at once, they poke out through the ice. It was like watching one of those time-lapse films of plants pushing their way up out the soil. Except the soil is a field of solid ice staying solid above a core that’s just barely not magma. Just barely. They look like flowers. Like flowers wrapping a gift. And then they unwrap. They open. One pod at a time. And the sound of thunder is everywhere. And I see, at my feet, a baby. And my own baby girl, she’s back home, safe in southeastern Pennsylvania, on Carpenter Street. I pick up the baby girl in front of me, and I look in her eyes, and I have no idea what I’m seeing, but I can’t look away from her. And I can’t leave her there. If I am to believe the readings, then I should believe that the island is falling apart, but when I look around and feel myself standing there on that troubled earth, that’s not what I believe will happen at all. That guy is still there, staring at us. He looks like he’s about thirty years old, give or take a couple of years. And like he doesn’t know a thing about babies. And I just go. I run from pod to pod, my students hustling along beside me, helping me grab these babies. Some of them, Lorna . . . Have you ever seen premature babies? How small they are? Some of these kids just . . . they were like dust. Their skin looked like it was built to never see the sun. They were so pale it was like I could see through them, see their little hearts not beat but just give out. Just give out right in front of me, Lorna.
“We kept running, and we grabbed as many as we could, tucked them in our jackets. I had maybe six in there, holding them close, trying so hard not to crush them, to just keep them warm and alive.
“We saved them, we thought. That’s what we thought we were doing. And Callie. I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t. Maybe that’s selfish as hell. I think it is now.