Like staring into the future.

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

THE HELICOPTER touched down on the helipad of the Stoneheart Group’s Manhattan headquarters, a building of black steel and glass in the heart of Wall Street. Its top three floors were occupied by Eldritch Palmer’s private New York residence, a regal penthouse constructed with onyx floors, its tables laden with Brancusis, its walls papered with Bacons.

Palmer sat alone in the media room with the shades all drawn, the glowing black eyeball rimmed in fierce crimson and ringed with flaming white staring out at him from a seventy-two-inch viewing screen. This room, like his home in Dark Harbor and the cabin of his medical helicopter, was kept regulated at exactly sixty-two degrees.

He could have gone outside. It was, after all, cold enough for him; he could have been taken up to the roof to witness the occultation. But technology brought him closer to the event itself—not the resulting shadow, but the image of the sun subordinated to the moon—that was the prelude to the devastation. His Manhattan sojourn would be brief. New York City would not be a very pleasant place to visit, not for much longer.

He placed a few phone calls, a few discreet consultations over his secure line. His cargo had indeed arrived as expected.

Smiling, he rose from his chair, walking slowly but straight at the giant viewing screen, as though it were not a screen at all but a portal he was about to step through. He reached out and touched the LCD screen over the image of the angry black disk, liquid pixels squirming bacteria-like beneath the wrinkled pads of his fingers. As though he were reaching through it to touch the eye of death itself.

This occultation was a celestial perversion, a violation of the natural order. A cold, dead stone deposing a burning, living star. For Eldritch Palmer, it was proof that anything—anything, even the grossest betrayal of natural law—was indeed possible.

Of all the human beings watching the occultation that day, in person or via broadcast around the globe, he was perhaps the only one rooting for the moon.

JFK International Control Tower

THOSE IN THE VIEWING CAB of the air-traffic-control tower 321 feet above the ground glimpsed the eerie sunsetlike twilight way off to the west, out beyond the reach of the great moon shadow, past the edge of the umbra. The brighter penumbra, illuminated by the sun’s blazing photosphere, had turned the distant sky yellow and orange, not unlike the healing edge of a wound.

This wall of light was advancing on New York City, which had now been dark for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

“Glasses on!” came the order, and Jim Kent put his on, anxious for sunlight’s return. He glanced around, looking for Eph—everyone from the press conference, including the governor and the mayor, had been invited up into the tower cab for the viewing—and, not seeing him, assumed that Eph had slipped back to the maintenance hangar.