She looked at him. She wondered when she might ever be able to watch him undress again. She wondered, if that day ever came, if the sight of his overworked abdominal muscles would arouse the same revulsion in her that she felt right now. She wondered if she could ever see him naked and aroused again, and she wondered how long, exactly, would persist the image of his stupid fucking abs, tensed and sweaty, while he stood in the middle of their home gym, his head down, one hand caressing the dark hair atop his trainer’s head as she took him in her—
Never. That’s when she’d watch him undress. Never ever. It was the sheer corniness of his behavior that enraged her the most, the wild, over-the-top clichéness of it all. Your trainer? Are you joking? The rest was just going to be the sorting-out. The kids would love Stockholm. She was sure of that, as sure as she was that he wouldn’t even try to fight her.
“What do you want?” he asked. She didn’t answer. “Darling. What do you want?”
Still no answer. He turned and walked out of the room.
Ann-Sophie, who loathed conflict and had spent most of her adult life managing to avoid it, walked in the opposite direction. She stopped at the window and looked out, not at the spectacular view but at Marques, Beth, and Kearie, who were now playing with Anya and Lukas. The little ones were racing up the grassy hill, then flopping onto the ground to roll right back down it, giggling delightedly, leaping to their feet and drunk-walking back to the top, bragging about who was dizzier.
Marques and Beth tried a roll too, ended up going mostly sideways, and crashed into each other halfway down, laughing.
Ann-Sophie watched them. Now that’s what a family looks like, she thought.
Beyond, the sun slipped beneath the mountains.
10.
Aurora
10:37 p.m.
The power still hadn’t gone out. Scott kept watching the TV reports, but Aubrey grew tired of the expanding deadline, the horizon that never seemed to be met, the confusing explanations about solar weather, and why this death blow’s travel time was impossible to estimate. Four hours became seven hours because nine hours became maybe-we-were-wrong-about-this-whole-thing, which led to more shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing on the TV. Sometime after midnight, Aubrey went upstairs, took a long hot shower, got in bed, and turned out the light.
Every three or four minutes until she finally fell asleep, at 2 a.m., she’d open her sleepless eyes, feel for the switch on the bedside light, and flick it on, just to see. Every time, the bulb would blaze to light. She wondered if everybody was just . . . wrong.
They were not.
When the CME erupted from the sun’s surface and entered interplanetary space, it created an enormous magnetic cloud containing counter-streaming beams of electrons, flowing in opposite directions. The massive, billowing cloud made first contact with the earth’s magnetopause, the outer limit of the magnetosphere, at thirty-seven minutes past 3 a.m., Central Daylight Time.
Normally, plasma in the solar wind is deflected around the earth into the long magnetotail, which then caroms harmlessly into space or is disbursed, without significant impact, into the atmosphere. In this case, the sheer volume of the coronal mass was overwhelming. Ten thousand billion metric tons of charged electronic particles surged into the earth’s magnetic field like a Mongol horde and cascaded toward the polar regions. Once there, they ricocheted back and forth between the polar mirror points, creating a current flow of unprecedented ferocity that roared above the earth at an altitude of 100,000 meters. Once inside our atmosphere, the resulting voltage potential on the surface of the earth shot off the charts, and the overpowering pulse of direct current invaded power lines through their ground connections.
The Aurora Generating Station—an 878-milliwatt, simple-cycle, natural-gas-fired facility on the outskirts of town and part of the Upper Midwest power grid—picked up the charge within ninety seconds of first polar contact. From the Aurora station, the super-intense power surge spread through the lines, both above and below ground, in DuPage, Kane, and Kendall counties, tripping breakers, blowing transformers, and melting power lines everywhere within a sixty-mile radius.
In the living room of Aubrey’s house, the seventy-seven-inch Sony TV winked, unceremoniously, and went dark. Scott, who had fallen asleep on the couch, failed to notice.
The light woke Aubrey. Not its intensity but its weirdness. Even asleep, her brain knew something wasn’t right. She blinked, looking at a sideways, blurry image of her bedroom curtains. She’d never liked blinds, preferring to have natural light wake her in the morning, and it was doing that now, but the reddish hue coming through her bedroom window was anything but natural.