But Nick cut Jix off. “Los Alamos . . . Alamogordo! My God, I know what it means. I know exactly what it means!” They all looked at him, waiting, and Nick tried to keep his voice steady. “There’s this town in New Mexico called Alamogordo. It’s kind of famous if you’re a geek, and I think I was one, when I was alive. The thing is, Alamogordo has its own ‘ground zero.’ I imagine it would be like a giant deadspot—perfectly round.”

“Charlie and I saw that!” said Johnnie-O. “We passed right over it. It was weird—full of static and stuff.”

“That’s only two out of three,” Jix pointed out. “It doesn’t explain ‘the Trinity.’”

“Not THE Trinity—just ‘Trinity,’” Nick explained. “That’s the name of the site!”

“You figured it out!” said Mikey, slapping him on the back. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

Nick swallowed nervously. “Trinity was a military test site.” And as he thought about it, all his remaining chocolate began to harden and crack like fused desert sand. “Mary’s going to the place where they tested the first atomic bomb.”

In her book My Struggle: The Quest for a Perfect World, Mary Hightower writes, “Destiny is the sum of the choices that God knows we’ll make.”

For once, Allie the Outcast doesn’t disagree, but she adds, “Not even Einstein can do that kind of math.”

PART SEVEN
Journada de Muerto

E=MC2

There are about three hundred billion stars to a galaxy, and more than eighty billion galaxies in the known universe. That means that if only one in a million planets can support life, and one in a million of those actually has life, and one in a million of those planets has intelligent life . . . then there are at least one and a half million civilizations out there.

Of course, chances are they’ll never find one another, being so spread out in time and space. Yet all of these civilized worlds have distinct similarities when it comes to the works and wisdom of the living, namely, the “befores” and “afters” that define every intelligent world:

before and after the harnessing of fire

before and after written language

before and after the smelting of iron

But above and beyond all of these is the single most important milestone of all: before and after a world discovers the ability to lower the number of life-sustaining planets by one.