The sky was clear, but the earth’s surface was now gray. And when we flew near the impact site of the biggest crater, the drifting ash had formed dunelike waves that were a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet high.

I don’t know how to even explain how massive this meteor was.

It left a crater so wide that we could barely see across it. When we stood at its edge, we were looking into a hole that went down for almost a mile.

It was the literal expression of “awesome”—every one of us was struck speechless with shock, wonder, and reverence at the extreme power of nature.

Finally, Total managed to articulate what all of us were feeling.

“How is it remotely possible that we survived this?” he asked, and we all chuckled, breaking the tension.

“The human spirit,” Angel said with a good-natured shrug. “Turns out it’s actually pretty tough to kill.”

“And the canine spirit,” Total said quickly, and we all agreed.

“Mama, what are we going to do now?” my daughter asked, ever curious.

I squeezed her hand and smiled.

“We’re going to begin again.”

We’re living in the Southern Hemisphere now, somewhere in what used to be Peru. The rain forest shriveled up along with everything else, so I’ll have to wait awhile to build another tree house, but plants are starting to grow back, bit by bit. I come out to this hillside every afternoon and sit cross-legged among the Incan ruins, where the boulders are still standing, even after the end of the world. I take my feather pen—an old memento—and I write with ink made from ash and stone.

I try to record the past.

Right now, I exhale and lean back against a five-hundred-year-old stone wall, relishing the feel of the sun on my face again. I study this page, and the many pages before it, and wonder if someone will read these words in another five hundred years.

I trace the silky black feather pen across my skin, down my cheek, and close my eyes, remembering.

Two

FANG FOLLOWS MY gaze across the rocky slope to watch our girl playing with her flock family, and his face softens. It seems crazy that she’s already almost five now—almost as old as Angel was when she was first kidnapped by Erasers, what seems like several lifetimes ago.

The whole flock is helping to raise her, with Total insisting on French lessons and Nudge making sure she doesn’t look like a cave girl (even though we pretty much live in caves). But it’s only Fang who spends as much time with her as I do, Fang who patiently teaches the fascinating facts his photographic brain remembers from all those fat books I shunned in school. Fang, because he’s her father.