The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut, #1)(3)



Wanted to, though.



“I’ll be sore tomorrow, but I don’t think there’s any damage.



To me, I mean.”



He nodded and craned his neck around, looking at the little cavity we were buried inside.



Sunlight was visible through a gap where one of the plywood ceiling panels had fallen against the remnants of the doorframe.



It took some doing, but we were able to push and pry the wreckage to crawl out of that space and clamber across the remains of the cabin.



If I had been alone … Well, if I had been alone, I wouldn’t have gotten into the doorway in time.



I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered despite my sweater.



Nathaniel saw me shiver and squinted at the wreckage.



“Might be able to get a blanket out.”



“Let’s just go to the car.”



I turned, praying that nothing had fallen on it.



Partly because it was the only way to the airfield where our plane was, but also because the car was borrowed.



Thank heavens, it was sitting undamaged in the

small parking area.



“There’s no way we’ll find my purse in that mess.



I can hot-wire it.”



“Four minutes?”



He stumbled in the snow.



“Between the flash and the quake.”



“Something like that.”



I was running numbers and distances in my head, and I’m certain he was, too.



My pulse was beating against all of my joints and I grabbed for the smooth certainty of mathematics.



“So the explosion center is still in the three-hundred-mile range.”



“The airblast will be what … half an hour later?



Give or take.”



For all the calm in his words, Nathaniel’s hands shook as he opened the passenger door for me.



“Which means we have another … fifteen minutes before it hits?”



The air burned cold in my lungs.



Fifteen minutes.



All of those years doing computations for rocket tests came into terrifying clarity.



I could calculate the blast radius of a V2 or the potential of rocket propellant.



But this … this was not numbers on a page.



And I didn’t have enough information to make a solid calculation.



All I knew for certain was that, as long as the radio was playing, it wasn’t an A-bomb.



But whatever had exploded was huge.



“Let’s try to get as far down the mountain as we can before the airblast hits.”



The light had come from the southeast.



Thank God, we were on the western side of the mountain, but southeast of us was D.C. and Philly and Baltimore and hundreds of thousands of people.



Including my family.



I slid onto the cold vinyl seat and leaned across it to pull out wires from under the steering column.



It was easier to focus on something concrete like hot-wiring a car than on whatever was happening.



Outside the car, the air hissed and crackled.



Nathaniel leaned out the window.



“Shit.”



“What?”



I pulled my head out from under the dashboard

and looked up, through the window, past the trees and the snow, and into the sky.



Flame and smoke left contrails in the air.



A meteor would have done some damage, exploding over the Earth’s surface.



A meteorite, though?



It had actually

hit the Earth and ejected material through the hole it had torn in the atmosphere.



Ejecta.



We were seeing pieces of the planet raining back down on us as fire.



My voice quavered, but I tried for a jaunty tone anyway.



“Well … at least you were wrong about it being a

meteor.”



I got the car running, and Nathaniel pulled out and headed down the mountain.



There was no way we would make it to our plane before the airblast hit, but I had to hope that it would be protected enough in the barn.



As for us … the more of the mountain we had between us and the airblast, the better.



An explosion that bright, from three hundred miles away … the blast was not going to be gentle when it hit.



I turned on the radio, half-expecting it to be nothing but silence, but music came on immediately.



I scrolled through the dial looking for something, anything that would tell us what was happening.



There was just relentless music.



As we drove, the car warmed up, but I couldn’t stop shaking.

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