Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Nine: A Habitat in a House of Sand

She didn't lose consciousness. That was one of Hollywood's great myths. In the movies, John Travolta takes a direct kick to the head and wakes up hours later, capable of yelling about his headache and planning his escape. Hawk hated to break it to Hollywood, but John Travolta's characters would be lucky to remember most of their vocabulary, let alone how to use two words at once, if they'd really been knocked out for hours.

Instead, she vomited as her ears rang and her gut sang Hey There, Deliliah, only it was Hey there, Hawk, and more about the number of creative ways a stomach could reject its contents. Retching, she wiped her mouth off and chose not to look too closely at the reeking puddle—she was pretty sure part of what she'd just puked on had once been Mrs. Cummings' end table. It was now mostly dust and a memory of carved molding, and a shell of expensive lacquer.

It blew me into the house, she thought, as the organic fragments of a photograph dissolved inside its frame. Pinched between metal and glass, the paper and the cardboard backing supporting it only had the final, molecular descent left to go. It was something still un-defined, her mind not yet caught up to explosive outbursts of physics. She did not know what force or being or explosive nonsense threw her in here. She was having enough issues with the house, understanding it, comprehending what it meant.

She looked up, and a large chunk of ceiling fell on her. It was far less frightening than it sounded. The drywall was light and little more than powder, its surrender to gravity just the sigh before slumber. That was a troubling detail, something that Hawk would have to save for later. Even the dry-wall was affected. She crawled through the bits of ceiling and siding, wincing as she found the more permanent remains of Mrs. Cummings' life: The nails, the staples, the tacks jammed into wood by furniture makers. She crawled over them, and they clawed into her. Metal. That was immune to the energy, or radiation, or magical life-ending whatsis. Did it matter what this stuff was, right now? Because...because was this happening to Mrs. Cummings, right now? Had she died already?

She'd been old, she'd been worn thin by life and cellular degradation...This stuff would burn through her old skin and muscles like flame through charcoal. It would make short work of osteoporosis-riddled bones. Only the efforts to keep her alive and mobile would remain, medical memorials buried in less than ash. Here's the fillings, and that's all that's left of a thousand meals, eighty-odd birthday cakes, a million words, whispered, spoken, and screamed. Every romance and hatred. The only witness is here, in the third-right molar. Here's the heart collapsing like an abandoned cathedral, antechamber of ventricle falling brick by brick, veins that once were pathways now blocked, and the blood that gave the body its oxygenated mass now turned to heretic, working against its oath, and here is the pacemaker still continuing its mindless work, shock, and the cathedral is battered to nothing, shock, the blasphemy of death erased, shock, manifest truth turned to something less than primordial ooze. Shock, and silence, and shock, and silence, until someone remembered the idiot machine, shock, and silenced its unthinking loyalty.

What happened here? Dust, screws, nails, and a few bits of plastic wainscoting. That was all this explosion left of Mrs. Cumming's house. It was coming down, now, and the only blessing was that it came too broken to hurt Hawk. Life. That's what happened here. That's what she was finding only in absentia.

The aurora was gone. As was the garden, and the fence, and most of the surrounding houses. But there was no doubt as to where this substance had come from: rays of destruction and dust were smeared across the ground, radiating perfectly from where the tomato plants had been.