Sliding over, Jack bumped his knees against hers and thought about moving to sit beside her and offering a more physical comfort and . . . His thought process kind of hit a slipstream there and he wondered what more physical comfort could entail. How physical? How comforting? If the world had twenty-two months, how much more stupidly irrelevant could seven years get?

“Jack, the chair.”

“Shit.” He brushed the scorch marks out of the wood and lifted his head to see Charlie staring at him. “What?”

“Sorcery.”

“Okay.”

“You can use sorcery on the asteroid! You could . . . turn it into butterflies!”

The family was never going to let that go. “You turn your cousins into butterflies once and suddenly it’s always butterflies?”

“Pay attention!” Charlie’s freezing cold fingers closed on his jaw and she shook his head back and forth. “You can turn the asteroid into butterflies. Or, if not butterflies, then something else. Something harmless.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.” One final shake and she released him. He rubbed his jaw, stopped when he saw her eyes following the movement of his hand, and said, “I can’t.”

“You can’t? Of course you can’t,” she continued before he could explain. “It’s too far away. Okay, we get you into the Orion capsule . . . no, that’s too dangerous. If it was me, I could nudge. I’d have to bludgeon to make them believe you belong, and then what happens if I’ve overwritten crucial information? Not a problem. You can take the asteroid out when it appears in the atmosphere. It’s there! It’s not!” She raised both arms, then grabbed for the quilt as it fell. “It’s a miracle! And, okay, we’ll still have the panic in the streets, but that’s better than the worst case scenario. We’ll call the family home and hunker down. I’m not saying enforced close proximity won’t take out a few of us, but that, that we can live with.”

She looked so pleased—and manic—Jack wished he could let her have the moment. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, I can’t—no matter how close it is. I don’t . . .” Admitting a weakness went against everything he’d been taught for the first thirteen years of his life. Admitting a weakness was like exposing the softer scales on his belly to his uncles’ claws. But this was Charlie and exposing the softer scales on his belly was right up near the top of his list of things he wanted to do. Metaphorically. Sort of. “My sorcery is instinctive. The butterfly thing—I just reacted before they hit the ground. I didn’t do it on purpose. I can’t do it on purpose.”

“Fixing the scorch marks . . .”

He shrugged. “I don’t like it when Allie’s mad at me.”

“Allie’s going to be pretty pissed about being part of a mass extinction.”