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by bigger bangs from
further away. Stone stretched and shrank, as if he had become
a rubber band.
    Sarah broke out of her stupor long enough to say oh, a tiny
exclamation echoing on and on until Kaya thought she'd go
mad with the girl's everlasting despair.
    She swam against the tide, striving against a mighty swell
of the moon as it stretched and snapped every tide that had
ever rolled in and out.
    Shrinking and stretching, snapping and shaking.
    The world shook into a billion pieces, but Kaya refused to
be shaken because she had splinted a precious baby to herself,
and even if the world insisted on falling apart around her, she
would not. Grace held her steady in the vortex, giving her time to remember a love that was before all things, and so she found
the will to pray-

    -please, God, watch over Ben, wherever he may be.

    Ben watched as the first blast blew jasmine backward, her eyes
wide with confusion until-
    -another blast came, and still another until the earth rose
up in protest and Ben saw jasmine come apart in such painstaking slowness that he was intimate with every bone and
muscle and cell in her body-
    -and he cried for mercy for her because God must be
squeezing this world until it bled, for all he could see was
red-
    -but that was his blood, not hers, and he watched in fascination as his own DNA wound and unwound, over and over
until-
    -the sins of the father came to Ben, who vowed in this
unending moment that he would never visit his sins on his
sons, or his sons on his sins-
    -but how could he escape his own blood-
    -yet he did because even as the world bent into itself, he
knew one thing with certainty-
    -that somewhere in this breaking apart, his mother had
named him to the heart of God-

    For some reason, though the train had gone by Jon and Chloe,
it kept on coming-and did so with a huge bang.
    The world folded in two, and Chloe bent with it, her mouth
open as if to protest the warping of the air and the stretching of
the tunnel and the persistent train that just kept coming, even
though it had gone by.

    Jon saw the particle. One particle that became a hundred,
a million, an infinite array of particles as the big bang from
above split the world into its endless possibilities. Too many to
count, to calculate, to do anything but wonder.
    Suddenly Jon was one person, a hundred, a million, an infinite array of flesh and mind and spirit. Disarrayed as was never
meant to be, yet refusing to realign because the stars had lost
their alignment. Give me a minute, Jon told the universe.
    Being of a generous nature, the universe gave him far more.

    A flash of fire and the boom-boom-boom of one blast after
another. Logan spent a lifetime in the air, a lifetime in
which-
    -a fist of fire swept down from the sun and up from the
heart of the earth, roaring a song that couldn't be heard anyway
because who was left to listen?
    Pappas perhaps, but where was the man in black now?
    Where was Logan now? Where was now, now?
    Why didn't the air stop screaming?
    Why didn't the sky stop shredding?
    Why did the fire rise up only to cool and rise up again until
each finger flame wiggled its own self into existence?
    As the blast ripped Logan out of the air and slammed him
against the pavement, he uttered the only words he could
think of.
    Jesus, my Jesus, what is happening?

     

the first hour

     

chapter ten
    HEN THE WORLD CEASED ITS STRETCHING, LOGAN
sat up and tried to figure out what to do next.
    "The trains," he said, taking a strange pride in
figuring out the obvious. "They've blown up the trains."
    A knot swelled on the back of his head. A thousand bits of
dust had pinpricked his skin. He looked down, not surprised to
see he had been blown right out of his sneakers.
    Pappas's feet were bright white in crisp sport socks, though
debris and smoke were everywhere. His face was frozen with
shock, but his mouth streamed steady curses aimed at the
explosion, the panic, and Osama