Mary was, of course, surprised to find Speedo there, but pleased as well, because it added quite a few more Afterlights to her growing cumulus. She would soon have to come up with a new word for them. Thunderhead, perhaps. “A thunderhead of Afterlights.” She rather liked it!

“Thank you so much,” she told Speedo, “for taking care of these children and finding this wonderful place for me.”

“Right,” said Speedo, “for you.” There wasn’t a trace of his typical over-wide smile on his face.

Around them, Speedo and his squad had begun to separate things into piles. One pile caught Mary’s attention. At first glance it appeared to be a pile of bodies.

“What on earth?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Speedo. “I know what it looks like—but they’re just plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“Yeah, I know. Weird, right? Lots of weird things here.” Then he got a little bit quiet. “But that’s nothing. I’ll show you the weirdest thing of all.”

The plastic personages scattered about the deadspot might have seemed odd if one didn’t know where they came from. The fact is, it was common for many nations to use test dummies to discover the effects of a nuclear blast on the human body. Entire communities were evacuated and test dummies were installed in the homes, and then bombed. The communities were usually old military housing, but sometimes not. There were entire islands in the South Pacific blown to radioactive smithereens, along with the abandoned homes of those who once lived there.

And, of course there were the wartime attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that not only took things, but people as well. In those two deadly blasts, more than 100,000 souls were instantly sent into the light, bringing a tragic end to a painful war.

. . . But the things consumed by nuclear fission in those cities, as well the things incinerated in every nuclear test ever performed, did not leave the universe entirely. They came here: ground zero of the first cataclysmic blast—the one that made all the others possible, and therefore will forever bear the burden of all things lost.

The Trinity vortex was the repository of nuclear memory.

To Mary, whose lifetime had not included such things as nuclear fission, it was all new. She knew the living world had found extraordinary methods of large-scale destruction, yet she had no idea the extent of it. . . .

. . . But as Speedo led her deeper into the deadspot, Mary began to tingle. The gravity that had pulled her here felt stronger than ever before, and she knew, without ever having to ask, that Speedo was leading her to the center of the Vortex.