A girl a few years younger than Desmond sat behind the counter, a mechanical pencil in her hand, a large book open in front of her. Another University of Oklahoma student, if he had to guess.

“Help you?” she asked.

“Nah. Just looking.”

He walked down the fiction aisle, Peyton close behind him. He spotted a few of the paperbacks he’d read as a kid: Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Hyperion. He could even remember where he was when he read them.

The place had barely changed. The only addition was a wooden study carrel in one corner. It held a Gateway computer with a seventeen-inch monitor. A plaque on the top of the carrel read, Pioneer Library System Technology Center Provided in Loving Memory of Agnes T. Andrews.

It was the best thing he’d ever read in that library.

He took Peyton’s hand.

“Let’s go home.”

Chapter 74

Chapter 74

In the plane’s cockpit, Avery stared in disbelief. Spain was dark except for a few glimmering lights in what she thought was Barcelona. They’d launched no fighters to pursue the Red Cross plane. Air traffic control hadn’t even engaged her. She wondered what was going on down there and how many people were left.

On the navigation screen their destination loomed: the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland. She’d never heard of the place. She wondered what they’d find there, at the GPS coordinates Desmond had provided. On the satellite map, there was only a forest. Was it a trap? Avery feared that it was. But she had no choice.

She engaged the autopilot, stood, stretched her legs, and walked back into the passenger compartment. Desmond and Peyton lay in sleeping bags, both facing forward, Peyton tucked into Desmond like a little spoon.

Avery leaned against the door frame and stared. She’d have to make a decision soon. A hard one.

On September the eleventh, 2001, Desmond sat in the light-filled living room in Palo Alto, Peyton at his side, both staring in disbelief. The news channel showed a live view of Manhattan. The people in the buildings were burning alive, just as Desmond’s family had on that day in 1983. This tragedy, however, wasn’t a natural disaster. It was an act of humankind—the worst kind of evil. The sickening, cruel slaughter of innocents.

“Something is very wrong with this world,” Desmond said.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

The US stock market stayed closed until September seventeenth—the longest closing since 1933, during the Great Depression. When it reopened, stocks tanked. The market fell 684 points—the largest single-day decline in history. By the end of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over fourteen percent. The S&P lost almost twelve percent. Nearly 1.4 trillion dollars in market value was lost in that week alone.