How many birthdays had he missed while on deployment? How many soccer practices? He knew there’d been at least one soccer championship, and he felt shame that he didn’t know for sure if there’d been more. Toni had extraordinary skills on the field. Even at sixteen, she’d had college coaches sniffing around her.

Sixteen. He cast a glance at the boy he’d assigned to be his shadow. Jesus, he was the same age as Toni. And Tina was thirteen—the same age as Luke. Was that why he found Vicky’s boys so annoying?

It was hard not to be pissed that her two adolescent sons got to live, while his two adolescent girls were immolated in the nuclear fireball that the boys’ mother had had a hand in launching. If those adolescent boys had been born to a mere mortal, as Tina and Toni had—as opposed to a member of the vaunted political class—they would have been immolated, too.

Stop.

The inner command arrived so forcefully that McCrea worried that he might have said it aloud. If he had, the others showed no reaction.

The past—all of it—no longer had any relevance to the present. Vicky’s sons were alive, and his daughters were . . . status unknown. The world had imploded, each of its inhabitants betrayed in the worst imaginable way by their political leadership. The hows, whys, wherefores and WTFs were the purview of future historians.

For the present, life was all about acquiring the next five minutes. It was fine to plan for the next five hours, but the next five days were iffy at best. Only a fool would presume to plan out to the next five years. At thirty-eight, McCrea couldn’t imagine a circumstance where he would live to see forty. The world’s shortest war—could it have lasted more than eight hours?—had shaved away ten thousand years of human evolution.

McCrea felt sorry for the men and women who had dedicated their adult lives to the analysis of stock markets or the lending of money. He couldn’t conceive of a more irrelevant pursuit. Million-degree fireballs had, at the speed of light and sound, rendered valueless the green strips of paper that were decorated with portraits of dead presidents.

Everything that could possibly be broken was destroyed now. Every thread of the fabric that held society together had been either snipped or shrunk or stretched. Society worked because we agreed to make it work. People in civilized countries had evolved to be polite and cooperative because it made sense to do so. They gave up little bits of freedom in the form of torts and criminal statutes in return for a governmental structure that would protect the interests of the commonwealth. All of that was gone.

Christ, even the air was broken. God only knew how contaminated the air was, or what it was contaminated with. Only God knew a lot of things.