Unity and Destiny Pt. 04

"Come back, Esther," he said, brushing her hair. She began to retch, coughing up liquid and half choking. Someone bumped his arm, handing napkins, and he tried to steady his heart. She would come out of this, eventually. But what was it? Had someone attacked her?

She'd warned them beforehand. Then they'd lost power. It was dark, true dark outside and in, except for the waning embers of the fire. The others were talking loudly and nervously.

"Someone! Go outside and see if it's a blackout everywhere."

Then Raj's voice, carefully controlled. "It's a big blackout. We would see the light pollution, even out the window. I'm going to my car to listen to the radio."

Javier stroked Esther's hair. She was still coughing and shaking, but she seemed unconscious.

"Mijo, is there a light? A candle?"

His mother had found him, holding his shoulder as he held Esther.

"There's a flashlight in the kitchen," said Javier. "Drawer to the right of the sink."

A big blackout. Big enough to stretch to San Francisco? A fresh wave of horror washed over Javier, and he started shaking. It was the vision. Had Esther felt it just beforehand? Had the Chosen done this themselves, fulfilling their own prophecy?

Someone eventually found the flashlight, and an instant later Raj burst in, moaning.

"India," he gasped. "Pakistan dropped a nuclear bomb on India. Shiva protect us."

* * *

Raj had collapsed on the floor, Yelena gripping his shoulder. Everyone was trying to talk.

"Quiet," Professor Kuznetsov said, the professor's voice cutting through. "Javier, do you have a battery radio? And is there a basement we can shelter in?"

Javier couldn't wrap his mind around it. A nuclear bomb. He hadn't processed what the professor said, but his mother repeated the questions.

"Radio," he said. "Yes, in the kitchen again. Top of the refrigerator. Basement, ah, end of the hall. It's unfinished, a mess."

He finally understood that the professor was worried about more bombs. It was unreal. Could that explain the blackout? A closer blast? But no, Raj would have heard that on the radio too.

Everyone was moving, and Javier realized he needed to take Esther. Carefully he picked her up in his arms.

"That's good, mijo," said his mother, and he had a horrible memory of trying to perform CPR on Esther's father. Esther wasn't dead. This couldn't be worse than what she'd faced in the canyon. But a nuclear bomb. It was unthinkable.

He followed Mamá down the hall to where the professor held the flashlight, at the top of the stairs.

"Nothing much on the radio," called Grace. "Extensive blackout, most of the Bay area. Maybe further. Phones down, communications failures everywhere. Some fires reported. This broadcast didn't mention nuclear weapons. They say to shelter in place, underground if possible."

"Javier," called Professor Kuznetsov, his voice strained. "Let the others care for Esther. We need to gather supplies immediately."

He reluctantly left Esther in the care of Mamá and Grace, and bounded back up the stairs. Kat and the professor were digging through the cabinets.

"All the ready-to eat stuff is in that cupboard," Javier said. "There's a five-gallon bucket outside. Should be clean."

"Good," said Anatoly. "Grab that and I'll fill it in the tub. Any other light sources?"

"Candles," he said, pointing at the cabinet, then digging out the match box.

Outside he heard the distant wail of outdoor emergency sirens, a noise he'd never heard except for occasional tests. He shivered and grabbed the bucket. While the professor filled it he racked his brain, but there was precious little useful stuff here for an emergency. Nothing like the Sierra camp. Nicola and Mark would be fine, as long as there weren't any more blasts. And Selena, she would be here soon. Should have been here already.

He carried down the pail of water, and then the professor was closing the door behind him.

There was a single candle that someone had put atop a rusted filing cabinet. The place really was a mess, full of broken things from the previous owners and a few boxes Javier hadn't unpacked. Hardly anywhere even to sit except the broken concrete floor.

Grace was trying to tune the radio better, but of course reception was terrible down here. "They're just repeating the same message," she said. "A recording now. Shelter in place, or find the nearest building."

"All right," said the professor. "We can remain here a while. Raj. Please, Raj. Did they say anything else about the nuclear strike?"

Raj was curled up, head in hands.

"Northern India," he finally said. "Based on seismic data, I imagine. I assumed it was Pakistan. Who else would have done it? My parents are outside Mumbai. Far enough south, maybe. How big are their biggest weapons? A hundred kilotons? Oh, what does it matter? They each have dozens. More, I don't know."

"Would we feel one? An earthquake?" Kat asked nervously.

Anatoly nodded. "Maybe not the earthquake unless it was already too nearby. But we might hear or feel it other ways. Tremendous pressure wave in the air. Even from San Francisco."

There was a map Javier recalled, a horrible thing he'd seen years ago. Potential nuclear bomb targets across the country. He was pretty sure the Bay area had been covered with overlapping black and red circles.

"There's no reason we would be involved," said Grace slowly. "Unless it escalates, right? Surely everyone is worried about India and Pakistan already. They have contingencies, safeguards?"

Anatoly let out a sigh. "Safeguards are never as safe as they should be. And then the blackout, at the same time, or almost. An electromagnetic pulse weapon? No, I'm being fanciful. But it is too large a coincidence. And now, let's talk about Esther. How is she?"

"Unconscious," said Javier warily. "I think fine, otherwise."

Anatoly shook his head. "The chronology. Esther warned us. Then she screamed. Both, *before* the blackout. She knew something horrible had happened, and something horrible had in fact happened. Most of you seem less shocked than I am by this coincidence. Javier, Raj, you immediately believed her warning. So, tell me, what in God's name am I missing?"

"Anatoly," his wife hissed. "Esther's sick. We're all terrified. Stop badgering them."

Everyone else looked at Javier. What did it matter? The world might be ending. And Esther surely trusted Anatoly.

"Esther might have been able to sense something like that, even from across the world," he said. "Professor, you know how unusual she is. Can you accept for the moment that she might be unusual in more ways than you knew? Of course it doesn't mean she knew about the attack beforehand. But she's the one person here who could tell us more of what is happening, if only she were able."

Anatoly cocked his head, considering.

"I suppose I will try accepting that," he said. "And I'm sorry. I am as worried about Esther as everyone else."

There was a long silence. Javier knelt holding Esther, Mamá stroking his hair.

"Twenty-five minutes, at least," said Raj after a while, voice strangely calm. "ICBMs would reach in what, a half hour?"

Anatoly nodded. "Give it an hour, just to be safe."

They held their breath as the minutes ticked past. Kat and Grace were holding each other tightly, and Grace started to cry at something Kat said. Esther's breath was shallow, and she twitched a bit. This couldn't be how it ended. He gripped her hand and put his arm around Mamá.

The half hour mark passed, and they breathed more easily. Grace started to fiddle with the radio again, but all she got was the same emergency message, repeated on several stations.

As they neared the hour mark, something banged upstairs and they all jumped. But then they heard it again, and other noises.

"Javier? Esther?"

"Selena," he yelled. "Down here! Basement."

She came down the stairs slowly, finally collapsing to sit near the bottom. Javier had never seen her like this, not even after a day out with Mark. Dripping sweat, shaking, breathing hard.

"What's happened?" she asked hoarsely. "Is this it? Esther, where is she ..."

She took in Esther's unconscious form and lowered her head in her hands.

"There was a nuclear strike on India," said Anatoly. "Apart from that and the blackout, we don't know. Are you all right? My name is Anatoly Kuznetsov."

"Selena," she said. "Oh, God, do none of you feel this? Only Esther, I guess."

"What, Selena?" Javier asked. "What do you feel? Do you know anything else?"

Selena raised her head and looked at Anatoly and Yelena. Wondering what to say in front of them.

"Go ahead and say what it is," said Javier. "You can trust them."

She took a ragged breath. "I'm experiencing a nuclear explosion. I'm burning alive, and it's excruciating. It plays over and over, in my brain. Not in India, though. Buildings, vehicles are all wrong. It looks—I assumed it was Japan. Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It's horrendous, but I think it must be a memory. Right before, someone yelled "STOP". I think it was connected to the vision."

Yelena gasped, but everyone else stayed quiet.

"It's a response," said Raj after a pause. "A response to the nuclear strike. The chronology makes sense now, aside from the blackout. Esther sensed the strike, and others did as well. Then someone tried to make it all stop."

Selena stood up suddenly, shaking. "Have to move," she muttered.

"Selena," said Javier quickly. "Did you run here? What did you see?"

"Dark," she rasped. "The memory hit before the blackout. Lost consciousness for some time. But traffic was stopped anyway. When I woke, I had to move. The only way. Sorry."

Then she was gone, back up the stairs. Javier didn't think he could catch her, not even after however far she'd run. But there was space to run around the house.

"I'm going to run with her if I can," he said.

"No," Mamá said. "Stay with me, mijo."

"Just around the house," said Javier. "We need what she knows and we can't make her stay down here. It's torturing her."

"It's been over an hour anyway," said Grace. "But we need to know more about this blackout."

Javier patted Esther and squeezed Mamá's hand. Then he climbed the stairs and made his way to the door.

It was truly dark outside. Maybe there was a brightening of the sky towards the Bay, maybe not. The trees blocked too much. Overhead it was as dark as the Sierras, though the stars seemed to twinkle more.

His eyes were adjusted, though, and he saw Selena come around the side of the house. She slowed her pace slightly and he matched her. She seemed less out of breath now than in the basement.

"Javier, I know a disaster has happened, but I can barely think. I hope Esther can overcome this. The bomb scene has replaced all the noise in my mind, and her meditations help a bit against it. The pain—running eases it, but not enough."

"So sorry," Javier wheezed. "Tell me what—saw on the way from your car."

"Abandoned it on the Dumbarton bridge. Faster to run, anyway. Power out everywhere I could see. Both sides of the Bay, up to San Francisco. Everywhere dark, like the vision. But no big refinery on fire, just a few small fires. Car headlights, some emergency lights. Not absolutely dark. Other people leaving their cars, a few slow runners."

Everyone was slow to Selena, of course. Javier couldn't keep this up much longer.

"We have food and water," he said. "Punch bowl near the fireplace. And if you see a flash—"

"I know," she said. "I understand. And I'll stop when I can tolerate it, or when I have to. Javier, I think the memory might be fading. Esther will be all right. But I have no senses, none. All blocked out. She may be the same."

He let her go, bending over to catch his breath. Once inside, he filled a few cups of punch and headed back down the stairs to share the news.

Esther said there was a limit to the detail she could discern from the prophetic scenes in Unity. Maybe that was all it was. But maybe this wasn't playing out exactly as the Chosen had expected.

* * *

Esther floated in an ocean of pain. It had a rhythm to it, a slow rise and then a quick fall as it repeated. Here in otherspace, if that's where she was, the pain was an abstract thing, just a feature of the space around her. But there was no geometry, no connection. A universal scalar field without structure. Strangely peaceful.

But that wasn't quite true. There was something behind her, something she had to look for if she ever wanted to leave this place. Everything in her resisted the idea, but she'd done something like this before. The pain was an external thing to her. There must be a way to separate it from herself.

It hurt to remember her body. Her mind had run to this distant place on instinct, but she couldn't truly protect herself here. And there was no chance to protect anyone else. Bit by bit, she turned her perspective backwards, realizing there was a backwards. The pain grew, and it no longer felt so abstract. The images began to clear again, the sense of time in the vision. The smash against a wall, the first blast of light and heat in the instant before the pain.

But there were other sensations as well, at odds with the pain. A soft hand brushing her, the distant sounds of people she loved. She was looking towards herself down a long tunnel, a glowing storm of pain and images pouring into her body. Like a river. You didn't escape a river by swimming against it, or by being swept along.

With a tremendous effort, she stepped to the side. Once, twice. And suddenly she was in otherspace, all its familiar complexity and subtle geometry extending faintly. It was almost overwhelmed by the torrent next to her, which she now recognized as a bundle of connections so bright that she'd been unable to see anything else. But they had a source, and when she looked back she saw countless similar branches, seeking other Changed. A person must be doing this, though she couldn't imagine the power necessary. Indeed, it seemed to be slowly weakening. But she couldn't enter her body without separating herself further.

Slowly Esther pulled at the strands, but there were too many. Her body seemed barely connected to anything else, except for a single glowing bundle at her side. Javier. She couldn't stop the river, but she might be able to rip her body away from the flow. It would unmoor her from her own senses. But she would have Javier. That would be enough, until the river weakened on its own.

* * *

"Javier?"

Esther's eyes opened and Javier pushed up on an elbow. He'd almost fallen asleep with her, back in their comfortable bed. Still dark out. Still no power.

"Esther," he said. "Are you all right? Can you stand the pain?"

"No pain anymore," she said faintly. "No senses. I had to cut myself away from it all."

He kissed her and got up to get some water. He heard Kat's voice out in the living room, but he selfishly wanted these few minutes alone with Esther.

"Selena's here," he said. "She ran for hours, trying to keep ahead of the pain. Sleeping now. She said it was just a memory, something from an atomic bomb strike in Japan at the end of World War II. Seemed to be getting weaker slowly."

"It was," said Esther. "But I can't feel it anymore. I could get back my senses, but until it's weaker I wouldn't be able to function. I'm useless, Javier. Can't sense a thing except for you."

"It doesn't matter," said Javier, kissing her. He hesitated, but there was no point protecting her. Slowly he laid out what little they knew.

"I thought maybe it wasn't what the Chosen saw," he said, trying to keep his voice calm. "But Raj has been out with his radio, tuning it to ham frequencies, and shortwave. We heard distant explosions, so big we were terrified it was another nuclear bomb. It wasn't that, but there's an immense fire in the North Bay now. You can see the light even from here. They think it was the Richmond refinery, but now there are huge fires up in Martinez as well. It's just like the vision, Esther."

"But we're still here," she said.

* * *

It didn't take too much cajoling to get Javier tucked in for the remainder of the night. Esther still felt queasy, her nerves tingling in memory of the illusory pain. She felt swaddled in cotton, like a ghost wandering her own house.

She nearly ran into Kat coming out of the bathroom.

"Sorry! Oh, Esther, are you all right? We were so worried."

She nodded. "Didn't see you. Had to shut all my senses down, but I'm OK otherwise. Javier told me what happened. Everyone still here?"

"Yeah. Well, except Professor Kuznetsov and his wife. They have a daughter in Oakland, and there's no phones or anything, so they're going to try to get to her somehow. Christ, I hope she's OK. Those explosions—" She shook her head. "Aside from the fires, the immediate danger seems over but still we don't know much. Raj is still out in his car. I don't know what to do for him. I'm going to take a nap myself."

Javier's Mamá was asleep on the living room couch, snoring loudly. Esther slipped outside and squinted at the sky. Getting near dawn, and partly cloudy—no, it was smoke. She could see the reddish glow to the north and east.

She found Raj's car and got in the passenger side. Raj looked exhausted, but he gave her a relieved look, pausing in his fiddling with the knobs on his radio.

"Glad to see you, Esther. Please, do you know anything? Are your senses functioning?"

He looked so wretched, but she had to disappoint him. "I don't have any of my senses, Raj. I only know what Javier told me."

Raj nodded, turning back to the radio. "Blackouts extend well outside the Bay, but it's not the whole country. There are problems everywhere, though, phone and internet breakdowns. There have been helicopters, and the emergency broadcasts are calling for a curfew, but not implying we're at threat for a nuclear strike. Little direct news from India still, but there doesn't seem to have been a full exchange. Maybe even just the one bomb. It wasn't Delhi. Somewhere in the mountains, they think. But something happened in Pakistan as well. Hardly any real news from there. Or anywhere, really. Regular radio is mostly off the air, which is scary. I didn't know the government could even do that. I wish I could reach all the shortwave bands with this setup. And I need a better antenna. I wanted to go home to try but Kat said I should stay here."

"You should," said Esther. "And you should get some sleep. I can listen to the radio."

Raj shook his head. "I couldn't sleep if I wanted. I need information. It's all I have, Esther."

Esther sighed and sat with him. There was little else she could do. And she didn't think Raj should be left alone.

After a few minutes she heard a crackly voice mention something new about Pakistan. They'd been hit by an electromagnetic pulse weapon, apparently. Raj sighed and nodded.

"Anatoly was right," he said. "He just had the wrong blackout. India must have exploded a nuclear bomb high above Pakistan. The electromagnetic pulse overloads sufficiently long strands of unshielded wiring. It would have badly damaged their electric infrastructure, and anything attached to wiring that could serve as antennae, but otherwise shouldn't have the usual effects you think of with nuclear weapons. Esther, I think we might have escaped catastrophe. This is about as mild a response as we could have hoped for from India. It means that maybe India suspected Pakistan made a mistake, at least for long enough to stop further escalation."

There was no further word about what caused blackouts in the United States. But there had been similar problems worldwide. It seemed to be a coordinated attack on infrastructure, especially power and communications.

Some while later, Esther started at a knock on her window: Selena. She got out to stretch her legs.