Findley turned to her, his face a mask of rage and confusion.

Sandra ignored him. She was watching the boy now. The kid. Turk. The kid yanked the hood of his poncho up over his head and turned away from his father in a gesture that was eloquent with contempt. He was bound away from here, Sandra realized. She could read that in his body, the way he hunched his shoulders and straightened his spine. It wasn’t the way it had happened in Orrin’s story but it was the same, somehow. The boy was heading for his own unspeakable land … though perhaps not the one Orrin Mather had imagined for him.

Findley saw his son begin that long walk away from him. “Wait,” he called out, weakly.

But Turk ignored him. He walked past the window of the coffee shop, casting a reflection on the rain-slick, fire-bright asphalt. He turned a corner into darkness. Findley stared into the falling rain until there was nothing to see.

*   *   *

Sandra slid into the backseat of Bose’s car, looking for something she could use to bandage Orrin’s wound. Bose gave her a roll of cotton from the first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. Orrin had bled a lot—blood and rain had soaked the loose weave of his shirt—but a few sutures would close the wound. Sandra could do it herself, she supposed, if Bose decided they couldn’t risk an emergency ward. “Hold this here,” she told Orrin, putting his free hand on the cotton wad. “Can you do that?”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm.

Bose drove past the burning van, a few barren blocks to the highway. The highway was almost empty of traffic and the storm was as dense as fog, a rain-slashed darkness. He drove at a steady pace toward the city he couldn’t see.

Chapter Thirty-One. Sandra

CHAPTER THIRTY

TURK’S STORY

We flew to Vox under a crazed sky. External temperature readings rose so high that the ship’s sensors began to sound intermittent alarms. Dawn was viciously bright, and the sun when it rose looked bloated and threatening. But it wasn’t the sun that had changed; it was the protective barrier surrounding the Earth.

During the first uneasy years after the end of the Spin, people had speculated about what would happen if the Hypotheticals withdrew their protection. The answer was so appalling as to be unthinkable. And whatever their purposes, however obscure their motives, the Hypotheticals had seemed intent on preserving human life; so we had accepted the illusion of normalcy and even begun to believe in it, which was presumably what they wanted us to do.