The Chronoliths

She looked at me a long time, her expression evolving through incredulity, suspicion, gratitude, relief, guilt. She said, “Daddy?”

It was all I could manage just to say her name. Which was probably for the best. It was all I needed to say.

She came out of the blankets and into my arms. I saw the bruises on her wrists, the deep cut that ran from her shoulder almost to her elbow in a track of clotted brown blood. But I did not ask her about these things, and I understood the wisdom of Ashlee’s advice: I couldn’t un-wound her. I could only hold her.

“I’m here to take you home,” I said.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes but she said, almost inaudibly, “Thank you.”

Another breeze kicked up the flap of the tent, and Kaitlin shivered. I told her to get dressed quick as she could. She pulled on a pair of ragged denims and a cheap serape.

And I shivered myself, and it occurred to me that the air was a little too cold for this sun-hammered morning — u

Outside, Hitch was calling my name.

“Get her into the van,” he told me, “and you best be quick about it. This wasn’t part of the deal — I bargained for you to talk, not to take her away.” He turned his face into the wind. “I get the feeling things are happening a little faster than we pla

Kaitlin tumbled onto one of the van’s back benches and wrapped a loose blanket around herself. I told her to keep her head down, just a little while. Hitch locked the door and went to corral Ashlee.

Kait sniffled, and not just because she was close to tears. She had caught something, she said, a flu or possibly one of the intestinal diseases that were circulating through Portillo as the crowds grew thirstier and the water sellers less scrupulous. Her eyes were filmed and a little vague. She coughed into her fist.

Outside, tents and canvas shelters clapped in the stiffening wind. Hajists began to crawl out, evicted by the noisy weather, dozens of bewildered pilgrims in Kuinist gear and torn clothing shading their eyes and wondering — begi

And maybe it was. The Kuin of Jerusalem had appeared more decisively than this and with less warning, but it was a fact that Chronolith arrivals varied from place to place (and time to time) in their intensity, duration, and destructiveness. Sue Chopra’s calculations were based on somewhat problematic satellite data and could have been skewed by several hours or more.

In other words, we might be in mortal danger.

A gust rocked the van and provoked Kaitlin’s attention. She pressed her face against the side window, gaped at scalloped clouds of Sonoran dust suddenly billowing inward from the desert. “Daddy, is this — ?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

I looked for Ash, but she was hidden by the increasingly anxious crowd of hajists. I wondered how far west of central Portillo we were, but that was impossible to estimate… a mile, say, at best. And there was no telling precisely where the Chronolith would appear, no way of calculating the perimeter of the danger zone.

I told Kait to stay under the blanket.

The crowd began to move then, almost as if the hajists had reached an unspoken consensus, out of this dirt-pack lot toward the co

Hitch appeared to be arguing with Ashlee, and Ash was arguing with her son, her hands on Adam’s arms as if she were begging him. Adam stood resolutely still, enduring the embrace, while the wind whipped his blond hair in front of his eyes. If the haj had been hard on him, he didn’t show it. He looked impassively from his mother’s face to the darkening sky. He retrieved what looked like a rolled thermal jacket from his backpack.

I don’t know what Ashlee said to Adam — she has never discussed this with me — but it was obvious even at this distance that Adam wouldn’t be coming back with us. A lifetime of frustration was written into the body language of that encounter. What Ashlee couldn’t admit — tugging at her son, pleading with him — was that Adam simply didn’t care what she wanted; that he hadn’t cared for a long time; that he might have been born unable to care. She was simply a distraction from the deeply interesting event that had apparently begun, the physical manifestation of Kuin, of the idea or the mythology in which he had invested all his loyalty.

Now Hitch was pulling at Ashlee, trying to bring her back to the van, his face screwed up against the abrasive wind but his gestures nearly frantic. Ashlee ignored him as long she could, until Adam broke away from her and only Hitch’s support kept her from falling to her knees.

She looked up at her son and said one more thing. I think it was his name, just as I had called Kaitlin’s name. I’m not sure, since the roar of the wind and the noise of the crowd had grown much louder very quickly, but I believe it was Ashlee’s keening of her son’s name that cut through the thickening air.

I got behind the wheel of the van. Kaitlin moaned into her blanket.

Hitch dragged Ashlee to the vehicle and pushed her inside, then climbed into the shotgun seat. I found I had already started the engine.

“Just fucking drive,” Hitch said.

But it was almost impossible to make rapid progress against the tide of hajists. If Adam had camped any closer to Portillo we would have been locked in. As it was, we were able to crawl toward the margin of the road and make slow but steady progress westward, the press of pilgrims thi

But the sky had grown very dark, and it was cold now, and dust scored the windshield and cut visibility to a few feet.

I had no idea where this road might lead. This wasn’t the direction we had come. I asked Hitch but he said he didn’t know; the map was stashed in back somewhere, and anyway it didn’t matter; our options had come down to one.

The duststorm glazed the windshield into opacity and was, by the sound of it, also fouling the engine. I closed the windows and cranked up the vehicle’s heater until we were all sweating. Our dirt track dead-ended at a wooden bridge over a shallow, dry creek bed. The bridge was splintered, rocking in the intensifying wind, and would clearly not support the weight of the van. Hitch said, “Drive down that embankment, Scotty. At least put a little dirt between us and Portillo.”

“Pretty steep grade.”

“You have a better idea?”

So I turned off the road, drove over brittle scrub grasses and down the berm. The van braked itself sporadically and the dash lit up with function alarms, and I believe we would have overbalanced if not for my iron grip on the steering wheel — which was a matter of instinct, not skill. Hitch and Ashlee were silent, but Kaitlin let out a little sound, about the same pitch as the wind. We had just reached the flat and stony basin when an uprooted acacia flew overhead like a stiff black bird. Even Hitch gasped when he saw that.

“Cold,” Kaitlin moaned.

Ashlee unfolded the last of the blankets, gave two of them to Kait and tossed one up to us. The air inside reeked of hot heater coils, but the temperature had risen only marginally. I had seen the thermal shock in Jerusalem, from a distance, but I hadn’t guessed just how painful it would be, a sudden numbing cold that radiated inward from the extremities to the heart.

Stolen energy, drained from the immediate environment by whatever force it was that could unwind a massive object through time. A fresh wind howled above the arroyo and the sky turned the color of fish scales. We had packed thermally-adaptive body gear, and we broke this out; Ashlee helped Kait into a jacket a size too big for her.