“Not what I meant.” Sighing, Kiren squirmed until she was lying more-or-less the right way around, her head on the pillow. “If you can’t stop the Armageddon Asteroid and I can’t stop the Armageddon Asteroid, then in sixty years we—where we is the whole human race including your quirkily unique subset—we will be scraping out a subsistence living in isolated pockets where incidental geography or possibly geology . . . I’m a little tired . . . provided protection. From the Armageddon Asteroid. God, I hate that name.”

“None of that means we won’t be talking about my sisters.”

She smiled, a tired, sad smile that took a good shot at breaking Charlie’s heart. “Fair enough. You know, there’s speculation that after the Chicxulub asteroid the entire surface of the earth baked for over a decade.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Baked. We’ll be cookies.”

“Pie.”

“What?”

“My family leans toward pie.”

Kiren nodded. “I like pie. I like you. You give me hope. If there’s people like you and yours in the world, anything can happen. Anything.”

Charlie pulled the comforter up and made a mental note to turn the air conditioning down. “Get some sleep, Kiren.”

“You can sleep on the couch, it’s comfortable. I’ve slept on it lots of times.” Yawning, she rolled over onto her side. “Wipe my memory in the . . . you know, after sleeping.”

The couch was comfortable. Between the asteroid and Jack, Charlie hadn’t been sleeping much either, and it wouldn’t be long until morning.

“I don’t want to be pie,” she sighed as she turned off the light.

Instead of heading north to Calgary, Jack detoured west into the foothills and snatched a big white-tailed buck off the side of the highway. This close to the end of October, he had a full rack of antlers and the severed head dropped like a rock. After all the flying and the flaming, a second deer would’ve hit the spot, but—with even a partially full belly—sleep called.

With Charlie off sorting out the Courts’ crap in the wider world, he had no reason to go home. Sure, there’d be pie, but there was always pie. Sometimes, pie wasn’t enough.