She sat up on one elbow, waiting for her eyes to focus. Outside, the sky was alight, which meant time to get up, but when she picked up her phone and looked at it, the time was 4:11 a.m. Even in April, that was way too early. She sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She stared dully at the sky outside her window, awash in a blood-red glow, and looked back down at her phone to double-check the time. She noticed there was no signal.
Her breath quickened. She reached for the bedside lamp and clicked the switch. The bulb failed to light. She clicked it two, three, four more times with the same result. She glanced over at the TV mounted on the far wall, which always had that maddening little red light in its lower left corner, even when it was off.
Except for now. Now, there was nothing.
“Wake up. Scott, wake up.”
He rolled over on the couch and squinted up at her, but she was already leaving the room, headed outside. She’d pulled on a pair of pants, her shirt half-tucked in. The room was bathed in a reddish glow, and when Aubrey threw open the front door, more colors streaked across the floor. It was nighttime, and it wasn’t.
Scott got up and followed her. She walked down the front path, her head back, taking in the huge, weird sky above her. It was majestically streaked with a half dozen vivid colors: reds, blues, and the most otherworldly swirls of electric green he’d ever seen. The aurorae were spread in great, soft arcs across the sky, with patches that had billowing surfaces like clouds. But they were completely different from moonlit clouds, in that the stars beyond were clearly visible through them. There were rays of lighter-and darker-colored stripes that undulated through the sky, radiating upward, increasing rather than fading in intensity the farther they rose from the ground. The sky seethed and billowed.
Scott drew up next to Aubrey and they stood there, at the edge of the sidewalk, staring upward in disbelief. Aubrey heard voices and looked down, seeing Cayuga Lane turned into something not quite daytime and certainly not nighttime. Some of her neighbors had walked into the street to get out from under their trees for a clearer view. Mrs. Chen and her boys lingered in their doorway, afraid to come out any farther, and a few were inside, their slack-jawed faces visible in their windows, lit up by the rainbow-colored reflections on the glass around them.
All of them were staring up at the sky, then at each other for confirmation, and then back up at the heavens. Scott drifted over toward Phil, the amiable pothead in his mid-forties who lived across the street, and they muttered together. There was something Aubrey didn’t like about their rapport, but she had no time to think about it at the moment.
Norman Levy stood in the middle of the street in a pair of torn khaki pants, a flannel shirt, and enormous, unlaced hiking boots, staring up at the sky, hands on his hips, his face lit up with the widest, most childlike grin Aubrey had ever seen.
“You OK, Norman?”
The old man looked at her, opening his mouth and trying to find words, but he couldn’t. He gestured back up at the sky, as if to say, “Have you seen it?” Then he turned away from her again, his eyes back on the heavens.
“Norman? Are you all right?”
He answered softly, without looking at her. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “But goddamn it’s glorious, isn’t it?”
Up and down the block, and as far as Aubrey could see in any other direction, not a single window, door, or streetlamp was lighted.
Aurora, Illinois, had gone dark.
Seven hundred and twenty-nine miles away, Perry St. John stood in the parking lot of NOAA headquarters, shoulder to shoulder with his co-workers from the solar monitoring station and stared up at the same sky. It was just after 5 a.m. on the East Coast, and Perry was approaching his twenty-fourth hour on the job, in what was the longest, most terrifying and exhilarating day of his professional career.
He stood there silently, Murtagh and Fitz on either side of him, and the other dozen researchers, some of whom had been there in the morning when it started, and others who had poured in as the day had worn on. None of them spoke, because none of them could think of a single word that could capture the beauty in the sky above them.
Nor could they find words to express the completeness of their failure over the course of the day. They had rung society’s alarm bells as they had never been rung before; they had called every government official all the way up and down the line, from the lowliest O&M manager at a tiny power plant in Christine, Texas, all the way up to the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, and their increasingly desperate entreaties had been largely greeted with skepticism, hostility, and a strong desire to get off the phone. As the day wore on and the anticipated impact was delayed and delayed, they were met with outright anger, and their successes, such as they were, became fewer and further between. A tiny relay station in Wichita agreed to go offline. They cheered wildly. Ethos Energy said they’d get back to them, actually did, and said they were “seriously looking into” taking all transformers in Central California off the grid. They cheered, less wildly. And a plant manager in Tallahassee saw immediately the peril of the situation and swore he’d call back in five minutes but had been sent home for the day by the time they reached the facility again, three hours later.