The big intersection at Portugal and Tenth was shut down, stranding a busful of tourists desperate to get back to their cruise ship. Radio transmission had been compromised by the gunk in the atmosphere and communication with vessels at sea was intermittent. A government lab was doing hasty chemical analysis of the fallen ash, but no results had been announced. Some respiratory problems had been reported but nothing to suggest that the ash was immediately harmful to human health. Loose talk suggested a link between the ashfall and the annual meteor shower, but that was impossible to confirm. Best advice from local authorities was to hunker down, keep doors and windows closed, wait it out.

Everything after that was more of the same. Lise didn't need a reporter to tell her the city was shutting down. The usual night noises had gone silent, apart from the periodic wail of emergency-vehicle sirens.

Turk muted the display and said, "My clothes are probably clean by now." He walked to the laundry alcove and took his T-shirt and jeans into the bathroom to dress. He had been more brazen out in the lake country. But then, so had she. Lise made up the sofa as a bed for him. Then she said, "How about a nightcap?"

He nodded.

In the kitchen she drained what was left of her last bottle of white wine into two glasses. When she came back to the living room Turk had opened the blinds and was peering out into the darkness. A deepening wind swept falling ash past the window. She could smell it, faintly. That sulfurous reek.

"Reminds me of diatoms," Turk said, accepting a glass.

"Excuse me?"

"You know. Out in the ocean there's plankton? Microscopic animals? They grow a shell. Then the plankton dies and the shells drift down through the sea and make a kind of silt, and if you dredge it up and look at it under a microscope you see all these plankton skeletons—diatoms, little stars and spikes and so forth."

Lise watched the ash drift and thought about Turk's analogy. The remains of things once living settling through the turbulent atmosphere. The shells of dead Hypotheticals.

It would not have surprised her father, she thought.

She was still contemplating that when her phone buzzed again. This time she picked up: she couldn't exclude the exterior world forever—she'd have to reassure friends that she was all right. She briefly and guiltily hoped that it wouldn't be Brian on the other end; but, of course, it was.

"Lise?" he said. "I was worried sick about you. Where are you?"

She walked to the kitchen as if to put some symbolic space between Brian and Turk. "I'm fine," she said.

"I'm home."

"Well, good. Lot of people aren't."

"How about you?"