“Get the hell out of my sight!” Layton yells.

The skater obliges, slipping away to join a group of other skaters waiting just outside the lot. They leave in unison. Layton might notice that they look remarkably similar, but probably not, because his mind is too clouded by the image of me kissing Paul, playing in an endless loop in his head.

By now all the lights of the lot have come on, but they do nothing to purge the terrifying darkness that has found a home in Layton’s soul.

But I didn’t know that yet.

I was just trying to make sense of the things I was beginning to see around me. Ed said the world would lose coherence as we got closer to the correction. Now, as I drove with Katie away from the jail, I was seeing evidence of that decay. Fender benders on nearly every corner, as if the rules of the road were different for everyone. Fights beginning to break out on streets as people blamed one another for an uneasy feeling they couldn’t explain. And then there were the children. Inconsolable children everywhere, screaming in their mothers’ arms.

Everyone sensed that something was wrong, but no one knew what it was, and the collective tension made my hair stand on end, like electricity buzzing through a power line. Like that feeling you get when you walk out of a scary movie and still feel like you’re in it.

“Freaky,” said Katie.

I glanced over to see her scrolling obsessively on her phone.

“What’s freaky?”

“Just stuff in the news,” she said. “You heard about the tides, right?”

“More flooding?”

“Yeah—but places that were flooding last night now have shorelines that go out for miles. Look at all these beached whales.” She flashed me a picture, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the road long enough to see the details.

“Do they know what’s causing it?” I asked. I knew the answer but wondered if anyone else did.

Katie shrugged uneasily. “Some are saying climate change, but others say it’s something else. Something worse.”

“Are the changes in the tide bigger now than they were yesterday?” I asked.

“How should I know?” Then she took a long look at me. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know—like maybe you changed the rotation of the Earth or something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“If I’m ridiculous then why are your hands shaking?”

I tightened my grip on the wheel to stop the shaking, but now I was all white knuckles.

She looked at me for a moment more, then I think she realized she didn’t want to know. She leaned back, putting her phone away. “It’s probably just one of those things,” she said. “Like the way hurricanes and earthquakes come in bunches.”