《A Storm of Glass and Ashes》


 Chapter One: A Domestic Advent

    The end of the world came with nineteen boxes of iridescent cake pearls.


    "Nineteen," Haven Center West said, with emphasis.


    For obvious reasons, she went by Hawk. It was her favorite bird and easier than explaining what happens when fundamentalists-turned-hippies do too much mescaline. The worst part, she thought at times, was that her father had been on a Christianity kick.Heaven Centered,to remind her to alwayslooktoJesus. Her name was just about the only thing her father had contributed to her upbringing. Good riddance.


    It wasn''t the religion''s fault that her parents were flakes. She didn''t really blame the mescaline, either. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortunately for Hawk, her parents'' religious fever--not to mention relationship--lasted about as long as her mother''s other serial hobbies. This year alone, Hawk''s mom, April Rayne, had gone through archery (Hawk got the very expensive compound bow, but no arrows) fish (Big, empty fish-tank Hawk promptly turned into a terrarium for her various collections of insects; she did not like fish) and, now, cake decorating. Which was how Hawk became the proud owner of fivelargecases of cake-mix, two five galleon buckets of white buttercream, four Russian piping tips she couldn''t make heads or tails of, a case of food coloring, and nineteen boxes of edible pearls coated in a rather disturbing red/gold shimmer.


    Her spouse, Alisdair "Alex" West, looked on in consternation. He was a rather attractive white man, brown hair, sharp blue eyes like somebody had filed color down to a razor point, in his usual work uniform of professionally nice dress pants and a button down shirt with no tie. He kept a clip-on Windsor knot in his glove compartment in case he had to meet a client. He came with the aura of a golden retriever. Hawk thought this wasn¡¯t fair. If the universe had a sense of justice¡ªwhich it did not¡ªAlex would have struck people like a Mastiff. Brazilian Mastiff at that. Formidable, and with the jaw muscles to make your car a bit concerned. The kind of dog that would eat your problems before you knew about them. But Alex was good at presentation, and about as honest in that department as P.T. Barnham. People just saw the typical under-educated white guy and assumed he was coasting on his Black wife''s laurels.


    She often let him coast; it made it more fun when she could finally feed the racists to him. She was a Black woman--mixed race, sure, but the white hadn''texpresseditself so much as peeked out of Hawk''s biology and decided to go back to bed--who was too tall and too interested in odd things to ever fit in. April Rayne, ever the Mommie Dearest, had raised Hawk with a nineteen seventies approach to race relations. Hawk hadn''t even learned how to take proper care of her hair until she was nineteen and one of her Black college professors gave her their mamma''s phone number. She''d accepted this, the way she accepted the boxes of cake pearls, and reminded herself to call April more often. You must choose your battles in this world, after all. Fighting to make her mother less of a flake? That was a no-hoper. But making a place where her mom could be her mom, no damage done to any party? That, Hawk could do. Sometimes people were worth the extra work of salvage.


    "Those are edible?" Alex put down his tablet and grabbed a box of cake pearls. Shaken, some of the shimmer fell from the box''s seams and landed on the rich wood of their antique table. It looked old, which it was, and expensive, which was a testament to Hawk and Alex''s skill with a belt sander and patience with polyurethane lacquer. They hadn''tquitegotten a finish so smooth your breath might mar it, but the wood''s natural chatoyance put anything of the edible glitter variety to shame. They''d fished this thing out of a dumpster somewhere. It was worth everything they hadn''t paid for it.


    "Technically. I''m willing to bet they''ve never come out of the box." Hawk pulled another four boxes out of the shipment from her mother. April Rayne''s candy-coated shipment came with a kind of dustless patina that spoke of many hours of care from some harassed minimum-wage employee, and many months of display without interest. These had moldered beneath their permanent use-by date until April Rayne, deep in the throes of obsession, decided that her world would not be complete without nineteen boxes of red/gold shimmer edible pearls. Hawk glared at the last box, then turned her gaze in horror at Alex as he reached in and ate one.


    "Are you out of yourmind?" She said.


    He grinned. The dust on his lips shimmered. "They taste like chalk. How much...thirty-nine dollars a box?"Silence. The sort that attends a wake. "I know I''ve asked this before, love, but Is your mom okay?"


    "Yes. No. I have no clue. You know Mom," Hawk said, and rolled her eyes. She pulled out an unexpected ball of yarn. "Oh, god." Buried her face in her hand for a minute.


    Alex ate another expensive ball of sugared chalk. "Problem?"


    "Right. You weren''t here for the Yarn Episode." The title came with capital letters. Itshouldhave come with sirens. She continued pulling balls of yarn out of the large cardboard box. There were five of them so far. Six. Seven. All of them wool.Notsoft. Peach colored, but a bad peach. Ten. Eleven. Maybe burlap would be a better comparison, except it had an uncomfortablyredtone. Rusty. Like it was maybe bleeding. Twelve. Thirteen, fourteen...and fifteen skeins, all the same dingy, dirty, rusted, ick of peach.


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    "The yarn episode?" Alex said.


    "It was before your time," she said, thought for a second, and added, "It''s the reason why I triple check the weather-proofing in the attic, and why Mom isn''t allowed to donate anything to Goodwillorthe Salvation Army anymore."


    "Is that your rule?" Alex said.


    She shook her head. Both organizations¡¯ regional directors had beenveryclear about things.


    The yarn sat in the middle of the table, a hirsute Martian edifice with too many ends. Hawk liked cool blues, the color of a good head wind. She didn''t fly. Heights were tricky. But she liked the color, and she liked the dream of flight. She wanted to feel free when she had free time. The yarn on the table with its awkward color and reaching, dangling ends, were the opposite. Strangling things, reaching fingers and warmth gone sticky. No wonder April bought it.


    "Does Aprilpickthese colors, you think?" her husband said. He brushed the tangled curls of his upper mop away from his eyes. "Like, does she wander through a craft store and think really gross color wheel thoughts?"


    "Demented Tinkerbell?" Hawk shrugged. That was actually areallygood description of her mother. "I think it''s a kind of sixth sense thing. Either that, or she''s trying to color match myM. Depilis."


    "I know jack shit about those ants, Hawk, and I could tell you she missed."


    Hawk was an entomologist working out of Sedona, with an emphasis on micro-ecology and various species ofMyrmecocystus,which some people recognized as the honeypot ant, but most people wouldn''t recognize if they sat on it. Hawk didn''t mind having her own obscure obsession. It gave her an excuse to go out into the few wild places the world still had, to stand under a wide blue sky in a field of desert flowers, the air still tense with petrichor, ground damp with rain''s sweet memory. Some people need an excuse for beauty; Hawk''s was anting season.Anting Season,Alex would say, and he''d roll his eyes, dig out his good hiking boots and help assemble the ant kit. And he''d get her back later, when they''d go on a walking tour someplace famous for buildings. Alex was a Private Investigator, but his big hobby was architecture. His doodles when talking on the telephone all involved brutalism and lines. She assumed it was like her ant things, and bought books on houses she thought were neat, that would sit beside the six stuffed ant-eaters he''d brought home from varying zoos. She didn''t get buildings. He didn''t get ants. They got each other, though, andYou love mesometimes looks like an earnest miss, a sigh, and a whispered,wow, youreallytried this time.She could find the joy, even when it came in the wrong shape, because marriage isn''t about highs or lows or passion. It''s about effort.


    Anyway, her newest colony of ants, a pair ofmyrmecocystus depilisqueens that showed an enticing amount of promise, were a rich garnet color fading to dark brown. Red heads. Bellies, when swollen, would be colored by the liquids they held. Nothing at all like this burlap-rust-peach mess, unless you found an ant just recently eclosed. Callows, newly hatched from pupa, still fragile and pale, were somehow more terrifying than any adult soldier because the fate of its colony sat in its unhardened mandibles...or maybe dead callows.She''d lost more than one pet ant colony to various causes, but all were ultimately heralded by small, pale bodies curled and discarded in a corner, the ultimate sign that this group had no future. Yes. That was the perfect way to describe this awful color: This was the color the future turned when it died.


    "Do you want to make socks out of it?" Alex said. Hawkdidknow how to knit her own socks. Largely because of the Yarn Incident. Forget boxes of pearls, lets go with boxes of yarn, the large Uhaul boxes you''re supposed to put dishes or blankets in,filledwith yarn. Hawk hadn''t even asked. Or unpacked it.Thatset of boxes had gone straight to the thrift store.


    Which was when they found the raccoons.


    Plural.


    "I want to set it on fire, but wool stinks when it burns," Hawk said.


    "Wool is supposed to be fire-proof," Alex was grinning.


    "It''s fireresistant.But when your mother decides that she''s the reincarnation of Mother Pleasant and wants to do voodoo and figures that she can substitute her daughter''s pashmina wool scarf for the required cotton hanky..." Hawk trailed off, and Alex patted her hand, as one would offer comfort after a cancer diagnosis.


    Being April Rayne¡¯s daughter should have come with an award. April was the kind of person who, upon entering a store, twigged the "sucker" detector for every salesman on the floor. Visits to the mall always became a parade of eager kiosk salesmen offering perfumes, skin creams and remote-control toy sharks. A great deal of her obsessive purchases¡ªlike, Hawk suspected, the pile of cake pearls her husband was steadily munching chalkily through¡ªcame about when April doubled down after a hard-sale left her holding the bag. April never admitted that she was more gullible than a drunk carny, which meant the seventy-seventh salesman offering her a remote control helium balloon would have exactly the same effect on her as the previous seventy-six. If she was buying a car, the salesmen would know he''d finally found a home for that lemon on the back lot.


    But the bonus was that Hawk gotreallygood at spotting a con. She had to be. She''d been her mother''s only defense since she turned twelve, and a minor protecting an adult? She''d had to be good. The wordparentificationmight blink on and off like neon, but she didn''t mind the after-effects. It was how she''d met Alex.


    He was a con-man, after all.

 Two: The Con of the Artist

    Alex West viewed the human smile as a mask.


    The original smile was a monkey expression of anger, hatred, and fear. It was the monkey''s way to show their teeth, how sharp they were, how big. A last warning before things go south and the claret begins to flow. Think twice about fucking with me, said the original smile. Think twice. I have TEETH.


    At some point the malice drained away, and human teeth¡ªsmall pearls of nothing, of bone. The scariest thing about them would be the possibility of MRSA hiding in a cavity¡ªbecame a beacon of friendship. Simultaneously, they became a lie, and the con-man''s best friend. Alex learned this early on, from his Daddy, sitting on an egg crate near various boardwalks and beaches where the tourists piled in six high and you found yourself paying through the nose for a simple vanilla cone. It didn''t matter what beach, or where. The Wests would cycle from California''s blazing glory to the homey clich¨¦ of Coney Island. What mattered was the size of law enforcement''s memory; you hoped for goldfish-sized recall. Rejoice in people battered complacent by a stream of Karen-y tourists, in a vice squad that was only so-so. Tourists who would think, oh well. We''re leaving tomorrow, and it wasn''t that much money. Heaven for a con-man has short-term residents and solid access to public transportation.


    Daddy had been a big man named Baylor. He''d viewed a kid as dead weight, and then as a possible prop, and then a partner worth training, just for a little while. They''d been a decent team, Alex thought, raking in the suckers, the money flying into Baylor¡¯s wallet like birds to a princess¡¯s hand. That was the only part of his childhood where he didn''t remember being hungry, and the only time he remembered Baylor looking at him with pride. Being a con-artist had been his ticket to joy.


    Of course, cons age in dog years. He was fifteen when he and his dad decided they''d seen enough of each other. Daddy found his way to Club Fed, where Alex lost track of him and good riddance. In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, who the fuck was that guy? Alex managed to scrape by on two-bit jobs and didn''t have to share the take with anybody, and that got him through to eighteen without too much trouble.


    And then he met April Rayne.


    It could have been terrible, he acknowledged now. It would have been like the first time Hemmingway tasted whiskey, or the first time Jack the Ripper drew blood. There''s marks, God loves ''em, they''re born every second, and then there''s marks, and when you meet the kind that will flay themselves alive if you smile right, it''s like stepping off a cliff into freefall. There are reasons people have limits and boundaries. They''re what keep folks safe and sane, and give them a sense of self inviolate. April Rayne, having none of those things, was a disaster looking for a place to happen. Here was a woman who would fall for anything, literally anything. She was nursing Flat Earth ideology and wearing wire and crystal bracelets that were supposed to improve her IQ, paying a surcharge for her water because somebody dropped a cheap chunk of quartz in it, and was risking chemical burns for essential oils. That old saying "you say jump, I say how high" didn''t work, because April was already in mid-air and she didn''t care where she fell. She was perfect. And perfect was the worst thing Alex West could have found at eighteen. It was like Clyde Barrow meeting that pretty blond Bonnie for the first time. Water and a level surface. Gasoline on a fire. He''d have been comprehensively screwed from day one.


    But right behind April Rayne was her daughter Haven Center, who had somehow managed to crawl her way into a masters degree at eighteen, with her mother firmly strapped to her back and who wasn''t about to let some two bit con-artist blow all her hard work. Baby Hawk hadn''t been as formidable as her future self; she''d yet to learn how to hide her fangs. He''d known almost immediately that going after April as long as Hawk was around was a mistake...but she was there. The mark from Heaven was sitting right there, all fat and flustered and waiting to be plucked (though actually April Rayne was very fit; the result of buying and using every exercise fad that ever bounced, mixed, or danced its way across an infomercial meant that April¡ªand, as a side effect, Hawk and Alex¡ªcould run a flat marathon with two seconds warning.) He''d get everything he ever wanted. All he had to do was get around April''s very pretty, aggressively skeptical, mixed-race daughter. Should be easy. Right?


    Alex would have felt rather sorry for his younger self, but the little shithead had deserved it.


    It''d been Hawk that had dragged his unwilling carcass up to law-abiding absolution. At first, out of a sense of mutual interest: Alex disliked April''s then-boyfriend because the guy was taking half of April''s paychecks. Hawk had disliked April''s then-boyfriend because the son of a bitch had given April two black eyes and a cracked rib. They had both been trying, independent of each other, to get rid of him. Alex had asked they try working together because the fuckhead was about to propose and neither of them had stopped him so far. He disliked Hawk because she saw straight through him, and Hawk disliked Alex because he was a criminal waiting for a conviction, but they both hated that guy.


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    He''d been gone within a week.


    Alex and Hawk were dating within two.


    Hawk broke him. He could acknowledge that now. Before he met her, he hadn''t imagined people like that could exist. People who could look at the world and see it for what it was¡ªa washed up, fucked up, messed up place where no one really has a plan¡ªand still choose, daily, to do the right thing. To turn around and face the world with a Pollyanna smile. He''d felt it at times when they were enemies, and he''d chalked it up to it being her play. Her angle of attack. Which was true, in its way; that was Hawk''s angle. It just wasn''t aimed as expected. If you''re trying to be a criminal, the absolute worst thing anyone can do is have solid expectations of you. It shows a guy what the alternative is, gives you a taste for the straight life. That shit''s worse than crack, going straight. Hard work, yeah, but that was just the bitterant they laced it with, keep everyone from catching on that they had a good thing with that whole Law Abiding Citizen spiel.


    He''d looked into Hawk''s eyes, and for an instant he''d seen himself reflected as a good man. There was no coming back from that.


    It helped a lot that life with Hawk was never boring. First, there was her mother. Whenever Alex felt especially bored, he''d just call April Rayne and ask about her day. He''d find a problem that would take several weeks to solve. Doing this, in an odd way, lead him to his current job. Technically, he was a PI. When asked, he''d just say that and leave it alone. But what Alex West was, really, was a fixer. Missing people? He''d find them, figure out if they needed help or not, and connect them to that help. He''d only do a divorce if one spouse was documented as abusive, and he would verify the evidence before he accepted the case. He picked his clients carefully, and addressed their issues with even more care. He didn''t always make an enormous amount of money, but it was enough for him to feel satisfied. And if he didn''t have a job, and April had somehow managed to avoid hooking up with Satan for the ten thousandth time, then there was always Hawk and her bugs. Hell, maybe they''d get lucky again this year and she''d score a large enough grant to study ants in Australia again. That''d been a blast.


    Hawk had gone all the way through her mother''s care package when Alex decided he''d circled around the pile of ugly yarn long enough. He''d walked into the house with an agenda, and the cake pearls were way too nasty to be an effective distraction. "So, when you''re done with your Mom''s..." he trailed off and gestured at the pile of junk. "I could use a little help on the current job."


    "Somehow I knew you weren''t here for the cake pearls." She smiled patiently and waited. "What''s the case?"


    "A dying garden. Old lady up on Hilltop called me like, three days in a row--"


    "Ah, you got a pray-er," Hawk said. This was a Rayne-thing, relating to the Bible story of the old woman who annoys a judge into helping her. Hawk was not a believer, but one couldn''t exist in modern society without absorbing at least a little bit of Bible by osmosis.


    "Well, I told her my rule about vetting clients, so she gave me her daughter''s number. The girl confirmed it, but added that she''s worried her mother might have dementia. Both women are sure her garden is being poisoned, but the daughter thinks her mom might have mixed up Miracle Gro and bleach. Mom wants me to find who is poisoning her garden, daughter wants me to talk mom into getting an assessment and maybe a live-in carer for a bit. I''m going to drive up there and take a look."


    Here was his assessment, reading between the lines: the daughter was right. Mom had dementia, early onset, and was either forgetting parts of her gardening routine, or really had put cleaning chemicals on her roses. Daughter sounded clearly overwhelmed. His goal in this was to figure out what happened and get the old woman assessed. And if someone really was poisoning her garden, he''d find out who, and how, and make them regret every choice that lead to them abusing an old woman. But there was one problem with this, and Hawk caught it before he had a chance to bring it up.


    "Alex, you kill plants. How are you going to know what''s going on with this woman''s garden?"


    "That is why I''m asking you. I don''t expect you to know anything about plants," he said this hastily, as one chants a rapid prayer at the precipice, and continued. "But anything affecting the plants would also affect the bugs, right? And I don''t know bugs well enough to...well, say anything about them."


    She winced about halfway through this little speech. "I''m not sure that''s a given. Bugs are vulnerable to stuff you wouldn''t think of, and they can shake off shit that would kill a tree."


    "Like mites?" Alex hid a grin. Hawk kept trying to keep honeypot ants, and her attempts kept failing. She''d smile, and shake her head, and order another one from what had to be a sketchy website. Who on earth sold bugs online? Not as food, but as pets? He could understand pet tarantulas, and he totally got pet lizards, but ants? He''d been married two years so far, and he still did not entirely get the ants. But she got them, and she let him rant about cosmetic dampers on McMansion roofs, so he listened about the ants. Her last attempt got past what she called "the founding stage", which he interpreted as some kind of numbers thing, but died to an onslaught of mites. She''d been a bit upset by that one, but not nearly so much as the one who got eaten by feral ants.


    She made a face. "Actually I was thinking more about temperature differentials and stress. But yeah, mites would be on my short list of things to look at. Alright. When are you leaving for this old woman''s house?"


    "Half an hour." Alex said, then added, "Where are you going?" because his wife had gotten up and begun walking towards the rear of their house.


    "We''re leaving in half an hour, so I need to do my chores. It''s time for Ant food," she said, and on that cryptic note, left the room.

 Three: The Old Woman

    ¡°Ant Food¡± meant pre-killed, chopped mealworms. Hawk kept hers in the ant-room, which was set aside specifically for her harmless little hobby. The mealworms grew in large, shoe-box shaped bins of bran meal and were, as usual, a bit unpleasant to look at. All the worm-writhing, she supposed. Dubia roaches were another favorite feeder insect, but Hawk sincerely did not like roaches, even the non-pest kind. The worms? She could live with the worms.


    The ants got their own room, because when you actually wanted the ants to survive indoors, they tended to die. Mary Mary Quite Contrary was probably some form of ant. The room was kept warmer than the rest of the house, with heat cords and other toys that made adults (sane adults, Hawk¡¯s mother would joke) roll their eyes. But if other people could cook their dogs¡¯ raw food from scratch daily, Hawk could baby an ant with a heating cord.


    Hawk''s successful colonies were housed in elaborate, planted terrariums. They even had their own feeding dishes. She topped off their nectar and water dispensers, though they weren''t quite "due" yet. Her colony of Campos (Camponautus Pensylvannus, the presumed largest carpenter ant in North America) were especially ravenous. Some of their scouts were already hanging out at the feeding spot. She did her best to put eyes on the Queens in her visible nests¡ªshe kept most of her colonies in either test tubes or artificial formicariums, so she had visuals on nearly all of nesting chambers¡ªand then locked up the ant room. Other ant keepers weren''t quite as insistent on eyes-on-Queen as Hawk was, but she''d lost more than one promising colony because she wasn''t paying close enough attention to them. Her last colony of honeypots was a case in point. Mites. Why did it have to be mites?


    Having cared for her pets, Hawk joined Alex for the drive to his new client''s house. They lived in Sedona, as did the client; it was the setting for every western that ever imagined it was in Texas. The drive to the client¡¯s home was short. Elizabeth Cummings owned a small ranch style with a very dead lawn. It made an interesting picture. Here was the house, built of brick and painted blue. With latex paint. Multiple layers, even. She wasn''t even sure why this horrified her more than the dead lawn. The house now looked like some sort of lozenge. But no one was responsible for the grass. It had at some point been a beautifully tended lawn, because the dead plants had a dense look to them, the product of tending, fertilizer and effort. But it was dead, along with every single plant around this house, and...


    "Did they mention anything about her neighbor''s garden being poisoned?" Hawk said. Because the line of dying plants terminated about six feet into one neighbor''s yard, and a little bit more into the other''s. It wholly occupied the fenced in yard around the house.


    "No. They didn''t mention anything about the lawn, either. Just the back garden." He frowned. Looked at one neighbor, with their half-dead lawn patch, and then the other with the same. He harrumphed, which meant he was admitting his initial idea was wrong. That was one of the things about Alex that Hawk liked the most: he was so easy to read once you got used to the man. She''d never had a problem reading his face once she''d worked out his tells. She didn''t know what his initial assessment had been. She was willing to bet it was now "get the old woman out of this house,¡± because god only knew what the risks were, here.


    They got out of the car together, Hawk carrying her Anting bag, though she would never have admitted that it was, indeed, her kit for queen ant hunting. People tended to look at her oddly when she said that out in public. But it held all the things she''d vaguely supposed she needed: test tubes, a stack of deli cups and lids, cotton balls, bottled water, feather-touch forceps and a set of very soft paintbrushes. Looking at the lawn, she was very glad she brought it. The things used to collect ants as pets would be just as useful collecting evidence for testing.


    ...just...testing evidence of what?


    "This is pretty impressive," she said, and bent down to poke at the grass. It was very fragile and nearly translucent, but it crumbled to the touch in an odd way that put Hawk¡¯s teeth on edge.


    Alex went up to the house and knocked on the door. He was better at this whole "people" thing. There was a kind of subterfuge to some kind of social interactions¡ªusually the first interactions, where people are still being polite¡ªthat Hawk understood but did not enjoy or willingly participate in. It was the kind of thing that inflates one''s popular accomplishments over cocktails, while the less-popular jewels in people''s lives are kicked off to the side and ignored. Or maybe she was biased because most people didn''t care about ants and got a little cross-eyed when she talked about her job. (Reasonable; most people would just call an exterminator if they had ants in their dresser. She put hers there, in test tubes, on purpose) At any rate, she''d rather deal with the lawn than the oddly weepy woman who just answered the door. She was already responding to Alex like a heliotrope to the sun. Everything would be fine.


    The grass¡¯s strange death disturbed her. It reminded her a bit of the fried herbs they''d serve at upscale restaurants. Except those leaves would be a strange neon green, their chlorophyll flash-fried into eternity. These were almost like tan-tinted glass. Opaque, but she could see a definition of her fingers through each blade that was more than just shadow and light. But it wasn''t glass. It reminded her of burned books, the ghost of pages still there, lingering until the wind began to blow.


    Poking through to the soil beneath was easy; the whole mess crisped into fragments at the slightest touch. She already didn''t like this. Her first thought on seeing this lawn was some kind of pathogen, either a germ or, more likely, given how it was spreading, a pest like mites (why was it always mites?). But it wasn''t mites, because nothing organic would do this to grass. She didn''t even think chemicals could do this to grass. This was like...flash fried from heat. Was it all like this?


    She walked to the leading edge of death in the neighbor''s yard, keeping her eyes down on the ground as she walked. The blunt edges of crispy grass turned to powder beneath her feet, with a sound that was disturbingly like eating. Even calling it a crunch didn''t describe it properly. It was, she thought, the auditory equivalent of trying to chew aluminum. Or maybe licking batteries. There was something strangely...acidic about all this, the smell, sound, and feel of it. She found herself thinking about Chernobyl, not the disaster but the more recent show about it, and the line echoed most often during the first episode, do you taste metal? She didn''t, but her imagination provided it anyway, echoing it through her entire cranium like the worst kind of hallucination. Do you taste metal? And nothing else lept or flew or crawled away from her footsteps. Just the broken bits of something that, once, had been a blade of grass.


    She made it to the line. The terminus. The place where life had ended, and the place where it still existed. She reached it with a sense of glee, the way she imagined a drowning woman would greet the air. Almost there. Almost made it. Almost out.


    But the line did not make her feel better. She did not see the signs of this...whatever-it-was. She wasn''t sure what she had expected. Some line of bugs, rust colored like April''s awful yarn, sucking juice from the flesh of each plant like radioactive vampires? Oh, god, she''d thought the word. Radioactive. Why couldn''t that just be the title of an Imagine Dragons song? But no, it was death with silent fingers and the open mouth screams of burn victims, and it would show no signs as it left its tan-shaded traces on the grass.


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    It''s not fucking radiation, Hawk. It''s a suburban yard in Sedona. But she still began to lean low, close to the earth...and then stopped herself. What if this was a gas? Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide gas sometimes burped out of the ground right before a volcanic eruption. Your first warning would be a field of dead cattle, and the only sign would be the tracery of smoke skirting over top of heavy gasses.


    If it was gas, it would have filled that house. Alex''s client is still alive, or somebody is, because somebody answered the door.


    She knelt across the line, one knee in, one knee out, and began poking at the difference between the living and dead grass. And she didn''t have to probe at dirt and roots for very long. She found a blade of grass, sitting just beyond the boundary between life and death. There were no crawling things, no strange smells, tastes of metal. No colors out of space, so to speak. But the blade of grass began to crisp. First it gained the hot green translucence she remembered from a leaf of fried sage atop a stupid expensive plate of calamari. But even that bright color bled away. It dissipated like a last breath and left nothing but the tan husk of something that used to be a plant.


    She touched it. For one second she appreciated that it was cool to the touch. Then it crumbled into nothing beneath her fingers.


    Her heart was in her throat now, and her gut was rancid. She''d named the boogeyman already. She wasn''t going to give it more power by admitting that she was afraid. But that was the thing about imaginary monsters. They always have a trick to them, a way to placate them back to sleep. There''s a riddle to solve or a ring of gold to find, or a missing scale to fire a black arrow through. Reality does not provide these escapes. The front of its advance is armored without flaw.


    She kept walking deeper into the neighbor''s living yard, looking down at her feet. As she left the death-line behind her, she noted other signs of vegetable distress only as they diminished. A large number of leaves in various stages of yellowing, browning, that became a smaller and less frightening number of dead leaves, that became only what one would expect from a healthy and living tree. But it wasn''t until she was nearly a hundred feet away that she found what she was looking for: the first grasshopper, a yellow-green nymph, probably third or fourth instar, that lept away from her steps.


    A hundred feet, she thought. A hundred feet with no life. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. Maybe she''d missed something. Springtails were tiny to the point of invisibility. Maybe she missed one or two or two hundred of the tiny things walking over. A hundred feet with absolutely nothing living in it...that was a horrible idea.


    "Hawk!" Alex shouted to her. She turned. He stood in front of the blue brick house, holding the storm door open as a pair of women, one elderly, one Hawk''s age, carried something rather heavy in a sling made of blankets. And she thought, Don''t be the client, and don''t be dead, and waved to her husband.


    "Alex. I want you to walk to me." She said.


    "What?!" He looked at her like she''d gone mad.


    "Come to me. And I want you to tell me when you start seeing bugs."


    "What?" he said.


    "Bugs. Stop when you see any bugs."


    He looked at the women, and motioned to his car. And he walked towards her, looking down at his feet. She knew when he started to see what she''d seen, when the dots started to connect like a reaction gone critical. His shoulders went from his confused hunch to something more focused, and he began intently scanning layers of grass for the cloud of insects that should be escaping his lumbering footfall. Gnats and mosquitoes and no-see-ums gusting away like directed dust motes. Grasshoppers and katydids in various stages of growth winging and hopping away with a buzz. Crickets that silenced their song when you were near. By the time he crossed the death-line¡ªwas she fooling herself, insisting that it was in the same place? Or had it really advanced almost an inch since she started looking?¡ªhe was looking, not at the ground but up in the air. And he was right there, too. The air was as quiet as the ground.


    She didn''t have to tell him anything. He''d already seen it. Everything around his client''s house was dead. Everything.


    "I''m going to take some samples of the dirt and the grass and send them to..." she trailed off at his steady, urgent glare. "What?"


    "The daughter has been frantic for a week because her mother is in serious decline. She''s gotten a lot worse since we spoke on the phone, this is barely the same woman I spoke to. Her dog is almost dead. It''s a fifteen year old basset hound, they thought he was just old, but he''s crashing. We''re taking him to an emergency vet."


    "You need to take both those women to an emergency room. For people. Do you think the dog will make it?"


    "I think it was the only way to get the old woman in the car. Grab your samples. I''m going to tell the neighbors that it might be smart for them to get their pets and get out." Alex said.


    Hawk dropped to her knees and opened her kit with shaking hands. Her whole body shivered with a cellular scream. Get out. Run. Flee the numinous. Flee the Black Death. She kept the tremors down as she crunched dead blades of grass into a vial. Scooped up dirt. She wished she had time to overturn rocks in this still-unseen woman''s garden, to dig through loam for earthworm and springtail and round isopods in defensive curl. She settled for a few test tubes of dirt, a deli container of grass, and...and...


    The thump came nearby. A low ball of sweet grass still rustled with the passage...or rather, with the impact, because there came another. Even closer to where Hawk was sitting. She stood and went towards the object that lay quivering on the earth.


    It was a squirrel, and at first Hawk thought it was gray. Then she realized that was its fur, bleaching to the same fragile, translucent state as the grass. As Hawk watched, the poor, dying thing turned its face up to her and looked up with weeping and clouded eyes. It sniffed, and split the stiffening skin of its nose. Blood poured for a few brief seconds, before death made any questions academic.


    There''s your sample, sunshine. She gagged, briefly...and then steeled herself. She thought, again, about Chernobyl. This time it was about the men who looked into the reactor. It was cracked open and belching smoke and they still had to look down into its glowing bowels. They died, of course. They all died. But their deaths gave their words power. A dying man with cracked and bleeding lips whispered, we did everything right, and a powerful world that wanted to bury the truth found that it could not. In part because of dying men who were seen by too many people. There were too many voices willing to say, I saw this. There were too many witnesses to make the story die. And a horrible part of this was the dying men themselves. The first ones would not have known what they were about to see. Some of them did. Their actions would be their ending. And they did it anyway.


    Hawk moved knowing that she was being an insanely hysterical human. She moved, knowing that she would be laughing at her own paranoia later. That it would be a story to tell over cocktails at some educational institution at a party that would be impossible, if her suspicions were true. Look at how silly the human mind is, the height of conclusions it can jump to. Look at the academic fool, jumping to the tune of paper strings. How silly she wanted to be, a week from now. Embarrassment was now a balm.


    And she moved knowing that there was a small chance she was right, and that if she was, acting now might be the difference between having a bad day tomorrow, or not having a tomorrow at all.


    And that was her prayer to the insensate universe, as she reached down, bare-handed, and picked up the body of the dead squirrel. It was brittle and light, like picking up the ashes of leaves. It still had a soft, meaty core, but she still had to move as gently as possible to avoid breaking the skin. She placed it carefully inside her bag of cotton balls so that it would be protected, somewhat, and lifted the bag the way one would carry a child.


    Please, let this be insanity...or let this be worth it.


    And then she had to move.


    Please.


    Let this be worth it.