Sol popped up his eyebrows as if he were about to drop an interesting tidbit of trivia, and stated, “I don’t think that could have possibly gone worse.”

He sauntered up to the broken and reassembled glass, licked his fingers, and then touched it, tapping it a couple of times. Then he exhaled loudly, shaking his head and jamming his hands into his pockets. “Welp, I guess you’ll have to do.”

Cora shook her head, the angry shell that had formed around her cracking. “What?”

“Have you ever been to Temecula?”

8

8

Temecula was about forty miles from Riverside, and usually this long stretch of highway wasn’t clogged with that quintessential SoCal traffic. Today was a different story. Unlike with the Obelus Event, where only fringe internet crazies were convinced that aliens had landed, now everyone knew what was going on.

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic, the northbound scrambling to get away from Enola Gay, and the southbound consisting of every other genius in Southern California who had also decided to descend on Temecula. What should have been a forty-minute drive was crossing the two-hour mark. They’d been stopped dead at this spot close to their exit for a couple of minutes, a billboard on the side of the road that read “Prayer Will Save Us” looming over them. Cora wondered if the billboard was pre-or post-ET-gate.

“You seem different lately,” said Sol.

“What do you mean?” From the way he kept glancing at her, she knew Sol could tell she was hiding something, a lot of somethings. There was a part of her that wanted to tell him everything, not because it would do any good but so she could tell someone.

“I don’t know. Seemed like for a little while there you were starting to perk up. But since the Enola Gay light, you’ve been different.”

She sighed and shifted her gaze toward the Taurus in front of them. “It’s been a rough few weeks.”

“Is he lying about anything?”

“How would I know?” she snapped, regretting her tone immediately. It was a reasonable question. Ampersand tended to lie, or at least lie by omission. “I don’t know if he’s lying. But . . . he might have omitted some things since you didn’t ask the right questions.”

“What is the right question?”

She leaned her head against the car window, running her finger over the pulse emitter she had in her jacket pocket, which she had on her at all times. It had been easy to sneak in and out of work every day since it wasn’t made of metal in the traditional sense and therefore didn’t set off the metal detectors. “You didn’t ask if he knew who Enola Gay is, and he does know who Enola Gay is.”

Sol digested this. “Who singular or who plural?”

“He doesn’t know. Ampersand was singular, Obelus was plural. Could be either.”

“How does he know who it is?”