Axis

She had meant to keep up the relationship when they arrived back in the Port. But the Port had a way of subverting your best intentions. Problems that had seemed featherweight from the inside of a tent in the Mohindar Range regained their customary mass and inertia. Her separation from Brian was an established fact by that time, at least in her mind, though Brian was still liable to spasms of let's-work-it-out, well meant, she supposed, but humiliating for both of them.

She had told him about Turk, and while that stonewalled Brian's attempts at reconciliation it introduced a whole new vector of guilt: she began to suspect herself of using Turk as a lever—a sort of emotional crowbar against Brian's attempts to rekindle a dead fire. So, after a few uneasy meetings, she had let the relationship lapse. Better not to complicate what was already a complicated situation.

But now there was a decree nisi in the glove compartment of her car: her future was a blank page, and she was tempted to write on it.

The crowd on the patio began to react to the meteor shower. She looked up as three scaldingly-bright white lines scribed across the meridian. The meteors emanated from a point well above the horizon and almost directly due east, and before she could look away there were more of them—two, then one, then a spectacular cluster of five.

She was reminded of a summer in Idaho when she had gone stargazing with her father—she couldn't have been more than ten years old. Her father had grown up before the Spin and he had talked to her about the stars "the way they used to be," before the Hypotheticals dragged the Earth a few billion years down the river of time. He missed the old constellations, he said, the old star names. But there had been meteors that night, dozens of them, the largest intercepted by the invisible barrier that protected the Earth from the swollen sun, the smallest incinerated in the atmosphere. She had watched them arc across the heavens with a speed and brilliance that left her breathless.

As now. The fireworks of God. "Wow," she said, lamely.

Turk pulled his chair around to her side of the table so they were both facing the sea. He didn't make any kind of an overt move and she guessed he probably wouldn't. Navigating the high mountain passes must have been simple compared to this. She didn't make any moves either, was careful not to, but she couldn't help feeling the heat of his body inches from hers. She sipped her coffee without tasting it. There was another flurry of falling stars. She wondered aloud whether any of them ever reached the ground.

"It's just dust," Turk said, "or that's what the astronomers say. What's left of some old comet."

But something new had caught her attention. "So what about that?" she asked, pointing east, lower on the horizon, where the dark sky met the darker sea. It looked to Lise like something was actually falling out there—not meteors but bright dots that hung in the air like flares, or what she imagined flares would look like. The reflected light of them colored the ocean a streaky orange. She didn't remember anything like that from her previous time in Equatoria. "Is that part of it?"

Turk stood up. So did a few others among the crowd on the patio. A puzzled hush displaced the talk and laughter. Here and there, phones began to buzz or chatter.

"No," Turk said. "That's not part of it."

CHAPTER THREE

It was like nothing Turk had seen during his ten years in the New World.

But, in a way, that was exactly typical. The New World had a habit of reminding you it wasn't Earth. Things happened differently here. It ain't Kansas, as people liked to say, and they probably said the same thing in a dozen different languages. It ain't the Steppes. It ain't Kandahar. It ain't Mombassa.

"Do you think it's dangerous?" Lise asked.

Some of the restaurant's clientele evidently thought so. They settled their bills with barely-disguised haste and made for their cars. Within a few minutes there were only a few stalwarts left on the broad wooden patio. "You want to leave?" Turk asked.

"Not if you don't."

"I guess we're as safe here as anywhere," Turk said. "And the view is better."

The phenomenon was still hanging out at sea, though it seemed to move steadily closer. What it looked like was luminous rain, a rolling gray cloud shot with light—the way a thunderstorm looked when you saw it from a long way off, except that the glow wasn't fitful, like lightning, but seemed to hang below the billowing darkness and illuminate it from beneath. Turk had seen storms roll in from sea often enough, and he estimated that this one was approaching at roughly the local wind speed. The brightness falling from it appeared to be composed of discrete luminous or burning particles, maybe as dense as snow, but he could be wrong about that—it didn't snow in this part of Equatoria and the last snow he had seen was off the coast of Maine many years back.

His first concern was fire. Port Magellan was a tinderbox, crowded with sub-code housing and shacks; the docklands housed countless storage and transport facilities and the bay was thick with oil and LNG tankers, fu

He said nothing to Lise. He imagined she had drawn many of the same conclusions, but she didn't suggest ru

"It's not bright all the way down," she said.

The staff at Harley's started dragging in tables from the patio, as if that was going to protect anything from anything, and urged the remaining diners to stay indoors until someone had some idea what was going on. But the waiters knew Turk well enough to let him alone. So he stayed out a while longer with Lise and they watched the light of the flares, or whatever they were, dancing on the distant sea.

Not bright all the way down. He saw what she meant. The shifting, glittering curtains tailed into darkness well before they reached the surface of the ocean. Burned out, maybe. That was a hopeful sign. Lise took out her phone and punched up a local news broadcast, relaying bits of it to Turk. They were talking about a "storm," she said, or what looked on radar like a storm, the fringes of it extending north and south for hundreds of miles, the heart of it more or less centered on the Port.

And now the bright rain fell over the headlands and the i

Tyrell, the headwaiter at Harley's, was a guy Turk had briefly worked with on the pipelines out in the Rub al-Khali. They weren't big buddies or anything but they were friendly, and Tyrell looked relieved when Turk and Lise finally abandoned the patio. Tyrell slid the glass doors shut and said, "You got any idea—?"

"No," Turk said.

"I don't know whether to run or just enjoy the show. I called my wife. We live down in the Flats." A low-rent neighborhood some few miles along the coast. "She says it's happening there, too. She says there's stuff falling on the house, it looks like ash."