Theirs is a late flight out of New York, and after a couple of hours, Nina is fading. She hugs 21-21, and with the permission of Michelle, she gives Pigs and Princes to her new friend before returning to sit with her mother and sister, where she falls asleep.
Transported by delight, 21-21 returns to her seat beside Rose, hugging the small electronic game to her breast as though it is a treasure beyond value. Now she won’t even play with it because she is afraid that she might break it, and she wants it to remain always exactly as Nina gave it to her.
West of the town of Running Lake, still many miles from Big Bear Lake, following ridgelines past the canyons where the wind was born, bombarded by thrashing conifers hurling cones at the pavement, Joe refused to consider the implications of Pigs and Princes. Listening to Rose tell the story, he had barely found sufficient self-control to repress his rage. He knew that he had no reason to be furious with this woman or with the child who had a concentration-camp name, but he was livid nonetheless—perhaps because he knew how to function well in anger, as he had done throughout his youth, and not well at all in grief.
Turning the subject away from little girls at play, he said, “How does Horton Nellor fit into this—aside from owning a big chunk of Teknologik, which is deep in Project Ninety-nine?”
“Just that well-connected bastards like him… are the wave of the future.” She was holding the can of Pepsi between her knees, clawing at the pull tab with her right hand. She had barely enough strength and coordination to get it open. “The wave of the future unless Nina… unless she changes everything.”
“Big business, big government, and big media—all one beast now, united to exploit the rest of us. Is that it? Radical talk.”
The aluminum can rattled against her teeth, and a trickle of Pepsi dribbled down her chin. “Nothing but power matters to them. They don’t believe… in good and evil.”
“There are only events.”
Though she had just taken a long swallow of Pepsi, her throat sounded dry. Her voice cracked. “And what those events mean…”
“… depends only on what spin you put on them.”
He remained blindly angry with her because of what she insisted that he believe about Nina, but he could not bear to glance at her again and see her growing weaker. He blinked at the road ahead, where showers of pine needles stitched together billowing sheets of dust, and he eased down on the accelerator, driving as fast as he dared.
The soda can slipped out of her hand, dropped on the floor, and rolled under her seat, spilling the remainder of the Pepsi. “Losin’ it, Joe.”
“Not long now.”
“Got to tell you how it was… when the plane went in.”
Four miles down, gathering speed all the way, engines shrieking, wings creaking, fuselage thrumming. Screaming passengers are pressed so hard into their seats by the accumulating gravities that many are unable to lift their heads some praying, some vomiting, weeping, cursing, calling out the many names of God, calling out to loved ones present and far away. An eternity of plunging, four miles but as if from the moon—
—and then Rose is in a blueness, a silent bright blueness, as if she is a bird in flight, except that no dark earth lies below, only blueness all around. No sense of motion. Neither hot nor cool. A flawless hyacinth-blue sphere with her at the centre. Suspended. Waiting. A deep breath held in her lungs. She tries to expel her stale breath but cannot, cannot, until—
—with an exhalation as loud as a shout, she finds herself in the meadow, still in her seat, stunned into immobility, 21-21 beside her. The nearby woods are on fire. On all sides, flames lick mounds of twisted debris. The meadow is an unspeakable charnel house. And the 747 is gone.
At the penultimate moment, the girl had transported them out of the doomed aircraft by a monumental exertion of her psychic gift, to another place, to a dimension outside of space and time, and had held them in that mysterious sheltering limbo through one terrible minute of cataclysmic destruction. The effort has left 21-21 cold, shaking, and unable to speak. Her eyes, bright with reflections of the many surrounding fires, have a faraway look like those of an autistic child. Initially she cannot walk or even stand, so Rose must lift her from the seat and carry her.