The four of them (and don’t think for a moment Hawk was comfortable with Kaiser standing in for Alex; her husband should have been a part of this milieu) were walked to the rooftop command center. Glass energy seemed to cling to the ground, completely bypassing skyscrapers and other, tall edifices. This information was being passed around through the news crews: if you’re in a Glass Event and you can’t outrun it, climb. They were already rescuing people from radio antennas and rooftops…and finding the remains of people who had not climbed high enough. Hawk had spent most of last night sleepless, watching the carnage as it spread across Massachusetts. Three days, and thousands dead, and many, many more displaced, and there was no sign of stopping.


    Why is it spreading so fast this time? She’d wondered then, and she wondered the same now, as they approached the command tent. It was surrounded by people in incomprehensible uniforms, and by overwhelmed civilian authorities. Three firemen stood to one side in a circle with two cops, and tears were streaming down all their faces. Another firefighter stood inside the command tent, with Commissioner Thomkirk across the base of his uniform. They were talking about ways to stem the tide of Glass flooding across the surrounding counties…and from what Hawk overheard, they had no good ideas.


    The soldier who had brought them here stepped forward in a salute. The soldiers, fire chief and chief of police did not seem to notice. They were saying something about dropping buildings, which wouldn’t work—


    “Excuse me?”


    She blinked, and realized the entire command tent was staring at her.


    “Who the hell are you?” said a man in military fatigues. He had stars on his shoulder, two of them. Maybe he was a General. She was struck by a wave of fatigue and embarrassment, and she realized she was so exhausted that she had said “It wouldn’t work” out loud.


    “Who the blue hell are you, lady, and what are you doing at my command post?”


    She shuffled forward. “I’m Hawk West. I’m going down that hole in a few minutes.” And she waited for the respect to filter into their eyes. Most of them didn’t get it at all. The general’s eyes softened just a bit. “And dropping a building to contain the Glass won’t work. It goes right through most substances. Ironically enough, the only thing we’ve found that works is glass.”


    “You’re the scientist who’s raising hell because your husband’s in the hole, aren’t you?” he sighed. “You look soft. Softer than I’d like.”


    And then an unexpected gesture of support oozed her way. “I can assure you, General, the Wests are a lot of things.” Kaiser Willheim said, to the General. “Soft is not one of them. And it’ll be a lot easier letting Dr. West in from the beginning, than trying to peel her off your ass when she decides to become your new barnacle.”


    It was, she thought, the first time he’d called her Doctor. Which was her title, and it should have made her feel better. It didn’t. Manipulative kindness is still manipulative, and Kaiser had seemingly spent a great deal of time belittling her. Which she was playing along with. A Kaiser that assumed she wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him would be a Kaiser unprepared when she finally did. But his disrespect rankled.


    The General turned his attention to the elderly man beside Hawk. “Which makes you Kaiser Willheim. I’m assuming candy-hair there is Yung, and the little guy is Dyson. There’s a protocol to giving answers, but I’ll cut you some slack.” He paused. “When the hell was the last time you people got sleep?”


    She ignored it, mostly because he wouldn’t like her answer. She hadn’t really slept since Alex vanished…or even before that, if she were being honest. “How soon can we get to the Rift? We need to get started ASAP.”


    “Well, there’s a problem with that. Twenty minutes ago we were told that the entirety of the hole became blocked, a couple hundred feet down the hole. It happened suddenly, we got nothing on the seismographs or any of the other monitors, but the whole thing is blocked off.”


    She didn’t like the sound of that.


    “What do you mean ‘blocked off’?” Kaiser asked.


    “See for yourselves.” The general stepped back, gesturing towards a telescope. Hawk glanced from the military men, who stood stoic, guns at side, then to Kaiser, who looked bored. Oh, god, she wanted to hit him. To fling herself, feral, at his head until she’d ripped his smug, stinking eyes from his skull. Bring him back, she wanted to yell. He’s ten times the man you are, bring my Alex home! And instead, she turned to the General.


    “Is that an invitation?” She said, drily.


    “Yes, Dr. West. It is.” He said.


    She moved, knowing as she did that she was on a kind of stage. She was here on Kaiser’s suffrage, and because she knew how to keep Honeypots alive and, thus, could keep the soldiers alive. She would be viewed as an extension of him, and unless she wanted to lose her shot at saving her husband, she had to make sure that extension was unblemished.


    At least until she chose to fucking blemish the fuck out of it. She was going to burn the fucker. Oh, yes, she was. She was going to make sure that Kaiser Willheim couldn’t buy a fucking hotdog when this was all over and done with, not even from prison commissary. But that wasn’t going to get Alex out of the hole.


    Those were her two questions, her guidance, her compass and sextant: What would Alex do? And will this get Alex home any faster? And right now she needed to be inside that hole. So she was quiet and pleasant, the most cooperative little bug scientist this big, important man had ever seen. She didn’t have teeth, oh no. She reached the telescope and looked down.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    The hole that devoured the Bittermoss School should have been pitch black, like a staring crater, rimmed round with aural spikes of Glass energy threatening to rip all organics from anything nearby. They were on top of the tallest nearby building, a twenty-story bank, and only the top three floors were safe. And even that was questionable. Aural spikes had lit the whole area up, they arched across every surface with a strange, neon hissing sound, and left a devastation of Glass in their wake. But the hellmouth Hawk had every intention of walking into seemed to have developed a crystal plug where the gaping unknown ought to be.


    It was huge, the size of the building that wasn’t there anymore, and the small showers of dirt trailing down from the violated school lawn now pooled in the crevasses between crystal spires. It was rather like the inside of a geode, if that geode were the size of an entire school campus.


    “Fuck,” she whispered. “Is there any way through?”


    “Not that we can see. We’re bringing in a drill and the Army Corps of Engineers, so we’ll get through. It’s just going to take time, and now we have no way of knowing what’s happening to the kids down there.”


    Hawk’s stomach plummeted. “The kids?”


    “The students of Bittermoss School. They’re down there, same as your husband. I got families with the kind of fuck-you money that buys Ferraris breathing down my neck, and while I don’t give a solitary shit about some jumped up PI who was in the wrong place, I got six-hundred and thirty seven children, plus their teachers, plus the support staff, down there in the dark, and by god I am getting every single one of them out.”


    He didn’t know, she thought. He didn’t know that time was moving faster inside of the Event Horizon. She hoped and prayed that it was just a few days faster, that each minute up here was something like three minutes, or thirty, or even a day a minute. That might have left something to survive. But she suspected that time was moving in the order of years in a minute, maybe—oh horror!—centuries an hour.


    Kaiser had told her, at last, why Bittermoss School even existed. They’d been the intended breeding stock for Ararat Project, the seed for a new humanity that Kaiser had intended to build in outer space (or, more probably, out of the wreckage of some collapsed country when climate change got too severe) and finally, when they discovered the Prisms and the Rift-worlds they created, Naomi Studdard had insisted that her school was to be the start of a human empire, grown entirely within the closed pocket universe inside a Rift.


    They would have survived if they were fed Honeypots first. And then they would have grown up, lived, reproduced, and died, all down in the dark in the hole, probably within the first few hours of real time.


    But there was hope for Alex. The things that survived in the hole, in the darkness of the Rifts, were things that had a representative in the Prism, something like a Jungian Archetype. She’d seen it with monkeys, ants and honeysuckle, and she suspected it was happening on a larger scale here; the Prism had been functioning as Bittermoss School’s greenhouse. It reportedly also held the children’s smaller 4H projects. Lots of plants. Lots of animals. Lots of breeding stock for the madwoman who wanted to create her own universe.


    She stepped away. “Do you think they know we’re coming?” She said, to Kaiser.


    “They?” the General said.


    “Naomi Studdard may be behind this blockage. She would expect a response.” Kaiser said. The rage in his voice was tectonic. The rumbles were things the Studdards would pay for, alright. “How long will the drill take to get here?”


    “Got here five minutes before you lot did. We’ll be carting it into place, and we’ll have it up and running in the next few hours.”


    Hawk was looking at the hole with its geode plug. “It’ll happen a lot faster than that. You’ll see.”


    There was a pregnant pause after her words, and the General leaned forward. “You care to explain that sentence, little girl?”


    “No,” She said. “Sorry, General, but it’ll be easier for you to understand when it happens. But do not let your people stay down there very long, at all. Tell them no more than an hour at a time.”


    “It’ll be thirty minute shifts.” The General said. “You want to tell me what you think I’ll be sending my boys into.”


    “Nothing that will kill them. I’m going down in there too, General. As soon as you give me permission. But I want to warn you. I have a lot of hope for my husband. I don’t have that same hope for those children. And when you start letting people in the hole, you’ll see why.”


    “I don’t like sending my people in blind.” He said.


    She measured the man, trying to hold him to Alex’s rules about people. But she couldn’t see through this man the way Alex could. She just saw a competent, steady man who was trying to save children, who deserved the answer he was begging for…and who would never believe it. She said, “And I don’t like sending you in blind. But I’ve spent—wasted—three days trying to convince you people that you haven’t even started to understand this thing.” She paused. “Are you actually going to listen to me?”


    The General watched her for a few moments. Then he said, “As long as I’m sure that man over there doesn’t have his hand up your ass, sure. I’ll listen. Believe? That’ll be another thing entirely.”


    She sighed. “We think that there’s a time dilation effect in the hole. Emile Yung calls it ‘Narnia.’” And she cringed inwardly at the General’s reaction. “It’s not a great comparison, but it fits the behavior we saw in the Bronx Event. Time will be working faster inside the hole than outside of it. The good news is that means, to us, it won’t take long to get through this barrier.”


    “And the bad news?” The General said.


    “We may not be able to rescue any of these children in their lifetime. I believe that we are seeing time the length of the average human lifespan go by in minutes.”


    He stared at her. “So, lady, let me get this straight. You think that all those kids and your husband have aged and died in the time it took for us to realize we even had a problem? And you’re still going in there?” he said.


    “Yes,” She said.


    “In my defense, I’ve tried to talk her out of it,” Willheim said. His tone said even more. It said poor little woman, and aren’t we great for babying her, and even I’m Kaiser Willheim, King of the World.


    The General glared down at her. She smiled up at him.


    “You’re either nuts, or you’ve got guts and are nuts, and I’m not entirely convinced I need to allow a civilian group into the Event Horizon, as you people are calling it. But you seem to understand this more than I do, so I’ll tell you what. If we manage to break through the Crystal before this time tomorrow, you’ll get to run point. First ones in, first ones down. Sound like a deal?”


    The venom hidden in this promise could have melted steel. “You gonna keep those promises, General?” She said.


    “You calling my word into question?” This was said very, very quietly. The air changed. Every military person in this tent stiffened.


    “You questioned mine,” She said. “And then you made a joke out of it. It’s only fair.” She paused. Far, far down below a crane was starting to move the first of several large crates. They were indeed about to send someone into the deep, white hole from hell. “Tell you what, general. You make it through there before dinner time, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”


    And she walked away before any of them could respond.