Page 38

The Ice Tube, Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i

Mac and Jenny squinted into the weird blue light coming from the canisters as if trying not to see what Sergeant Matthew Iona was showing them:

Two canisters with clear, well-defined cracks like quake fissures, cracks that hadn’t been there when Mac came into the cave with Colonel Briggs.

“So there it is,” Iona said.

Mac’s breathing sounded louder than ever behind his mask; he was surprised the faceplate wasn’t fogging up. His suit seemed much heavier than it had when he’d put it on back at the base. He felt like he was suddenly carrying the weight of the world.

He saw Iona sag as if he were feeling the same weight Mac was, and Mac knew Jenny Kimura surely felt it too.

“It’s like they’re time bombs,” Jenny said, her voice sounding tinny from behind her mask. She stared wide-eyed at the canisters. “They’ve just been waiting half a century to explode.”

Iona said, “We have to hope that the lava doesn’t come anywhere near here and that we can find a safe way to remove these things and do it faster than Colonel Briggs says is humanly possible. We probably need a Hail Mary.”

“Full of grace,” Mac said quietly.

Mac and Jenny had spent all of last night listening to Rick and Kenny spell out their new projections in painfully precise detail. Mac had challenged them the way he always did, wanting to poke holes in their data, wanting them to be wrong. But gradually—and painfully—he’d come to the conclusion that they weren’t.

“These cracks are pretty much a nightmare for us,” Iona said.

“For all of us,” Mac said.

The ground underneath them began to shake in a way it wasn’t supposed to within these walls. The canisters right there in front of them shook too, and so did the walls.

As if they might come tumbling down.