***
We made no haste in our journey from then on. James sped down back roads, his eyes constantly darting to the shadows in the land surrounding us for hidden policemen or otherworldly creatures. The last thing we needed was to be pulled over. The time it would take to be given our ticket was time that was wasted.
“Did I ever tell you how I found out that the Reapers could change form?” James asked me quietly at one point in our journey. I had been turned around, looking at Maura, Violet, and Penny as they slept. My own tired eyes stopped moving to focus in on the luminescent green digital clock on the dashboard: 1:17 AM. Two days with no sleep.
“Are you going to try to scare me into staying awake right now?” I asked, turning sideways and laying my head against the headrest so I could look at him while he spoke.
“No. It just popped into my mind. Or I guess I should say, 'They just popped into my mind.'”
“Who?”
“Two of the kids I met. I had only ever encountered one Reaper, and besides knowing that it was a female, I was too afraid to really study it. It followed me while I was out in the fields one night.”
“What fields?”
“My ex and I lived on a farm.”
“Oh.”
“I just turned around, and there she was. No tricks. No ruses. Just some deformed, demonic thing following me home.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I just kept walking, telling myself that I was imagining it. But every time I looked back, she was there. So anyway, I told you about the 'summit' that we all had.”
“Yes.”
“Well, more of us showed up than I ever could have imagined. We consumed the entire top level of that Mexican restaurant on 78th. There was a group there from Iran. Only one of them spoke English and was constantly translating. There was a family of three from Norway. A man from Japan, a couple from Wales, another family from Czechoslovakia, one from Syria... But the two that interested me the most were from right here.”
“Which state?”
“Maryland. They were this young couple. They were obviously off for Christmas break.”
“How could you tell that? Were they wearing shirts that read, ‘Christmas Break Forever, Female Dogs?’”
He gave me a jocular glare of scorn, but its effectiveness was diminished greatly by the smile he was trying to fight. I chuckled softly to myself.
“No, smart-ass, they just looked so young. They said they had traveled for two days to get to us. I asked where their parents were. I asked if their parents would be worried. And the girl kind of shut off, looked away from me, didn't really say anything else. And the boy took a long time to respond. When he finally did, he said, 'It's just us now.' I prodded him a little further, trying to get him to tell me what had happened. You can guess the rest.”
“The same thing you saw?”
“A few differences. Theirs was mutated even more than mine; besides arms, legs, a torso, and a head, there was no way that it had ever been human. Mine still had some qualities about it that made me believe that it might have been a human, do you understand?”
“I do. Well, what exactly convinced you that it wasn't a human? What made you start questioning that?”
“Besides the huge slash in its face where the mouth was supposed to be and the pointed teeth, I knew by the way it felt. It's hard to explain it. It was just... evil, you know?”
I nodded, studying him.
“Strange similarity of paranormal circumstances... You and those kids.” I said, and he murmured his agreement.
“Alright. Your turn.” He told me after a minute of quiet ensued.
“What are you talking about?” I had just closed my eyes but opened them again at the sound of his voice.
“You have to tell me something.”
“Something strange?”
“With you, I'm sure it's going to be strange whether I ask for it or not.”
“Indeed.” I grinned, “Well, since we are on the subject of the impending apocalypse...”
“Is there really any other subject to discuss?”
“No,” I replied, “Not when it is this close. I haven't told you this because I have been too afraid to tell anyone.”
“Well, that's an intriguing start to the story. So it turns out Brynna Olivier does fear things.”
“Only sometimes.” I rolled my eyes.
“You feel something other than disdain.”
“Do you want to hear this story or not?” I asked him, losing my patience with his constant psychoanalysis of me. As I acknowledged the annoyance in my mind, I immediately realized how hypocritical I was for thinking it. At the same time he was trying to analyze me in order to be able to communicate, I was doing the same to him in order to reach whatever small level of trust could be achieved between us.
“I do.” He told me, “Genuinely, I do.”
“Alright, then. Well, obviously you know who my parents are. You know my mom is a senator. You know my dad works for the news.”
“Your dad runs the news.”
“One more interruption, and I lapse back into my thoughtful silence, James Maxwell.” I snapped at him, and he held his hands up in surrender. “Well, I'm sure you remember the rather sudden deaths of Michael West and Rachel Lilien.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Those two were from that news website, weren't they?”
“Indeed. I don't agree with my mother on a lot of political issues strictly because she is who she is. I feel that any opinion she holds surely can't be the moral option amongst her choices. These people felt the same way about her and the people like her. They also hated my dad and said he was running the news so that it would work in the favor of the current administration. Manipulation of stories and facts is nothing new, as I am sure you are aware.”
“I was not aware.”
“Well, now you are. I have always been fascinated by how fear governs our lives without us ever realizing it. What does fear do, James? It gets people in a stir, makes them docile, makes them accept things that go against our most basic freedoms. It is all very subtle. It is unnoticeable, actually, if you are not paying attention. Picture it this way: a younger man goes on a killing rampage. It has happened before, so the idea of a new, fearful trend is perpetuated by my father and his band of white-collar thugs in the media. We get bans on violent video games, censorship on television and even in films, to a certain degree.”
“But is that really so bad?” He asked me.
“I am not looking to have a debate with you on the necessity of censorship. I am only telling you this to set up the rest of the story. This same kid checked out Mein Kampf from the library. Even though his teachers said it was for a history project, we still get new legislation that allows agents to access our library records, regardless of criminal history or lack thereof. Then, the news tells us that this kid was accessing websites about guns and how to use them. Legislation goes through to keep an eye on what we are looking at online. In a world where everyone has gone electronic, we have not one speck of privacy.” I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window.
“Obviously, if the killing rampage occurred, it would be a horrendous tragedy. But to use that terrible and very rare occurrence to keep an illegal eye on things, that is horrendous in its own right. So I presented that imaginary scenario to you in order to tell you this story.”
“Can I have one of those?” He asked me suddenly, and I pulled a cigarette from the pack to give him.
“Those two journalists died three days apart, both of 'natural causes.' One had no history of heart problems, and the other was only forty years old. The latter had no preexisting medical conditions, either.” I stopped, my heart jolting. “As I gathered from the death certificate I found online. They just dropped dead. Now that means one of two things: either God is cruel and takes healthy people from the earth long before sense would tell us they're ready, or there was foul play at work.”
“Weren't they both sitting
on something?”
“Yes. It was something exponentially damning, too. It was some sort of bombshell about several of my mother's colleagues. Maybe they even had something on her, too. They were going to post it on April 7. They died on April 6. On April 7, my father's channel reported on the so-called bombshell. But it was fake. My father was on the phone the night before the story aired, and as I was walking by the door, I heard him say, '...just enough to make it plausible.'”
“So, you assumed he was getting ready to fake a story? With those words alone?”
“With those words and the knowledge of how my parents are ruthless in going after what they want, yes. Just in case you were not sure, I will tell you that I had two friends once. They were a couple of years older than me, and they were two of the only people with whom I have ever been able to reach a level of connection. They shared my eagerness for learning things and for keeping an eye on what was going on around us. So, of course, they were the first and only people I went to with what I suspected.”
“And what did you suspect?”
“I suspected that my parents and their shady colleagues had killed two people. It had not been by their own hand, of course. But they had arranged it. We were going to shake things up until we figured out the truth.”
“And then what? What would you do with the truth?”
I looked out the window for a moment, contemplating; we had never decided, in all honesty, exactly what we would do with the truth. I could not tell James that because then I would have to tell him my real reasoning behind my persistence in finding it. It was not to destroy my parents, though truthfully, that was an added perk. It was not for the greater good, even. The sudden increase in emotion I felt as I pondered the question was enough to cease my story. He never could have known how I felt at that moment, but as a young woman who had never been touched by grief and loss before, I did feel something.
“Was that an interruption?” He asked me after a moment, snapping me out of my thoughtful contemplation, “I’m sorry. I'll stop.”
“No.” I replied, shaking my head slightly, “I allow questions. I just don't allow snide remarks. Anyway, we started running searches at the library, thinking that if we checked in under guest accounts, no one could track us. We found the death certificates that said nothing was amiss. We contacted their coworkers at the blog who told us that even they had no idea what the story had been. I call them my friends in lieu of using their real names because even now, I need to preserve their anonymity, out of fear that they are still being watched.”
“The world is getting ready to end, Brynna. I don't think it matters at this point.”
“Force of habit, then, I suppose. We even went poking around their home offices after my guy friend picked the locks on their doors. My guy friend was a genius when it came to computers. His mom and dad were responsible for network security at a law firm and a university, respectively. So he knew his stuff, as they say. Because their deaths were 'natural', their laptops weren't confiscated. We knew that if it leaked that the laptops were taken, it would cement what we already suspected. They couldn't afford that story getting out. So, it was easy enough for us to get in, for him to override the passwords on both, and for us to find nothing.”
“Well, that was anticlimactic!”
“No. It's not. We found nothing because someone had performed a dump on the hard drive. My friend suggested that perhaps they had done it themselves. But if they hadn't been expecting to die, then what was the point? No. It was too big of a coincidence to justify and too strange to write off as nothing. Now, we were like the Scooby Doo gang for two weeks, solving this great mystery that others wrote off as just a glorified conspiracy theory. I think we were so thrilled to be engaged in such important sleuthing that we started getting sloppy. My guy friend didn't wear gloves when he worked at the computer. I accidentally left a cigarette on the fire-escape of R… of Lilien's apartment.”
He was so ready to reply sardonically that he missed my very slight slip of the tongue.
“You made a stupid mistake? I am shocked beyond anything I ever thought was possible.”
I looked at him, raising one eyebrow, pursing my lips and crossing my arms in my typical show of intense discontent.
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry!” He told me quickly, “I'm done.”
“I hope so, because this is your last warning.” I replied with a particularly emphatic roll of my eyes, “Yes, they were stupid mistakes. But the last time I checked, I had not completed even an entry-exam for the CIA or FBI, so please, forgive my indiscretion. I am well aware that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, were they real people, would be rolling in their graves. The point I am trying to make is that I think they knew about this. I think they knew what my parents and their repulsive friends were up to.”
“You think they somehow realized that the end was coming?”
“I do.” I nodded, looking at him again, “My parents were acting strangely. They were always distant but after they started to suspect that I knew something, they cut me off completely. My father kicked me out of the house, and my mother bought me my apartment. I don’t know what happened to my friends.”
“Why would they throw you out, though?”
“Because they didn’t want me to involve Elijah and Violet. If a person is carrying an infection, you put them in quarantine, don’t you?”
“And suspicion was your infection?”
“It was, and it was highly contagious. They were smart enough to know that. They just weren't ruthless enough to do something about it. They did not permanently erase me from the world, though they certainly did erase me from theirs. Do you want to know something? And please, when I say this, do not try to comfort me by denying that it is the truth.”
“You have my word.”
“They would have left me behind.”
He opened his mouth to counter my statement with a denial that I knew was heartfelt and for my own benefit. But after remembering his promise not to dissuade me from believing what I had said, he closed his mouth and stared straight ahead as he drove.
“If that’s true,” He said after another lapse in conversation, “then they deserve to die. I feel no sympathy for them.”
I looked straight ahead also when I responded.
“Do you want to know the end of the story?”
“The story about the journalists?”
“The very same.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Two people died because they posed a threat. When my parents and whomever else was involved committed that crime, they crossed a line that, as far as we know, had never been crossed before. If the world were to go on as it is right now, it would continue to happen. Anyone who attempted to cross them would meet the same end. It sounds overly dramatic, like a hyperbole and a half. But you and I both know that it is the truth.”
“I agree with you.” James nodded solemnly, “But what is their endgame? Yes, your mother can hold office for years upon years, if she wants to…”
“And she does…” I interjected.
“She does. But why? What do they need to accomplish so badly that they won’t let go of their power?”
“I don’t know, James. They could have something up their sleeves, some sort of vision that they want to turn into reality that will take years to accomplish. Or maybe they are just obsessed with power. It corrupts the best of us, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” He shook his head before looking over at me. “I will tell you something, Brynna: You are the oddest twenty-two year old I’ve ever met.”
“Am I non-human?” I asked, grinning.
“I’m starting to believe that is the truth.”
“It’s not. I just say it because I’ve always felt like a freak. I have always been able to remember vast amounts of information, and as a result, my intelligence was so far above average that it bounded right off the charts. What aided my intelligence was my strange wisdom that has always been beyond my years. Maura,” I l
ooked back at her, observing her as she slept, “always tells me that I have an old soul. I believe her.”
“She’s right. You’re maturity is proof of that. I can see why you felt different from everyone else. That had to have been so difficult for you when you were growing up. What caused it, do you think?”
“What caused my maturity to rapidly accelerate to the bewilderment of every mental health professional I was ever forced to see?”
“And what caused your intelligence to reach such an elevated level that you could more than likely win a debate against a forty-year old Ivy League college graduate in possession of three or four PhDs?”
I giggled softly for a moment; I will admit that when adults complimented my intelligence and maturity, I did feel a strong sense of pride that was so refreshingly different from my usual arrogance.
“I told you that I have been reading voraciously since I was small. I have always had a need to learn things. For a long time, it was my only escape from the ridiculous drama around me. I could disappear into college textbooks, internet databases, and academic journals. I would memorize things, but it wasn’t just a verbatim recitation that I could give when asked about certain topics. I had insight into them. It took some time to gain it, but I just read and read until I could understand everything clearly. When I decided that I needed an even deeper escape, I would read fiction. That was escapism at its finest.”
“What were your favorite books?”
“Well, I read Dickens as a child a lot. I loved how he took a culture that today, we see as being so full of grace and dignity and turned it into a third world slum. Historically, it was one, but his writing challenged my preconceived notion of England by teaching me that history. Not that I believe England is a third world slum now, Maura…” I muttered, looking back at her even though she was still fast asleep. James chuckled. “I love England. It was just an interesting perspective to experience nowadays. Of course, I can understand it completely now, because I have seen this world as what it truly is. I have seen what it was intended to be. As a result, I can see a third world slum that reaches every corner of it in reality.”
“Well, then, you’ve just answered your own question about where your insight came from.”
“Did I?”
“You gained your knowledge from the factual information you read. You gained your insight from fiction.”
“That’s an interesting theory.” I told him with my head on the side as I contemplated what he had said.
“Isn’t it? It’s factual as well as interesting.”
“Normally, I would glare at you with venomous disdain for declaring the unshakeable truth of an unproven statement you made yourself, but I believe you, James.”
“Well, thank God for that. I don’t know if I could survive another venomous glare of disdain from Brynna Olivier.”
“You are right about that.”
“So, would you change any of it? Your intelligence? Your personality? Your strangeness?”
“Hell no.” I said emphatically, “I am blessed to be this way. I never let myself forget that. I might not have been popular. I might not have had more friends than fingers. But my teacher said to me once, ‘You have a great mind. Use it,’ and I have never forgotten that.”
“Well, he was right, and you shouldn’t forget it. We’re going to need you on Pangaea more than you know, Brynna. We’re going to need someone who can think like you. We’re starting life over. We are starting from nothing. We’re going to need you to help us find our way.”
“Well,” I replied as I turned my head to gaze out of the window, “I don’t know about that, James.”
Quinn
We found Alice’s father while we were on our way to the launch site. We had just met many of the other people who had suffered through the same terrible dream that I had. It had taken very little convincing for Alice to finally grasp the severity of the situation after that.
“You really did see it, Quinn.” She told me incredulously as we drove around, searching for a new motel. “You really did see the end of the world.” She reached over and entwined her fingers with mine, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
I looked at her, with a hint of a smile on my face.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, either. If you had come to me with that, I would have said you were nuts.”
“I did think you were nuts.” She laughed despite the situation, “You’ve always been crazy, but I really thought that you had finally lost it completely.”
“I’m crazy?” I asked, “This coming from the girl who did six shots of tequila in a row at Rachel’s party?”
“Hey, just because you’re a lightweight and you wouldn’t have been able to handle it doesn’t mean you have to bring me down, baby.”
We both laughed, sounding more like ourselves than we had in days.
I turned the headlights on as night descended on us. Originally, we were going to sleep in the car, but after trying the first time (and sitting up for the duration of the night picturing the monstrous face of another one of those things) we buckled and checked into a motel perched right behind an adult store and a tattoo parlor. It was a classy place, believe me...
I pulled off of the interstate as Alice fell into one of her dazes. I had seen her laugh for the first time that day and I knew that she would recover from the horror she felt at killing her mom. I hadn’t been sure of that before. It would definitely take time, but the grief and the guilt would pass eventually.
I was able to force my own sadness away for her sake. I knew that while I had found my parents senselessly murdered, my own feelings were nothing compared to Alice’s. She had killed her mother and still had no idea if her father was alive, dead, or if something worse than the latter had happened to him. I couldn’t imagine how terrifying that was.
The man who was sitting with his feet up on the check-in desk eyed us curiously as we checked in. We were too young to be traveling on our own, and people everywhere reminded us of that by staring at us like we were attractions in a freak show. It had to have looked really weird to see two teenagers who clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating well traveling the country alone. The back stories those people must have fabricated for us would have been truly entertaining to hear. In one of her better moods, Alice and I created some of those fantastical scenarios ourselves to explain away the stares we got wherever we went. Alice imagined that they thought we were runaways, escaping the wrath of our parents who disapproved of our relationship and the love child we had conceived. I went further than that, telling her that they thought we were escaping conviction after committing an unreported Bonnie and Clyde-like shootout with the police. I witnessed another one of her laughs that had become so rare, and my spirits were lifted.
We went to our room, which was better than the last, at least. Alice went to take a shower as I carried our bags inside. Though we never stayed more than a night in one place, I still liked to have our bags inside with us. It was a waste of energy to haul them to and from the room, but for the sake of consistency, we wanted the things we had brought from home with us at all times.
“I hope there’s a washing machine on this spacecraft.” Alice told me as she came out, wrapped in a towel. “We’ve already worn almost all the clothes we bought.”
“Do you want to go shopping one last time?”
She flashed me a smile of recognition; she knew I was attempting to make her feel better, as I knew that she loved shopping as much as the next girl.
“Maybe.” She replied as she grabbed some clothes from her bag and went back into the bathroom to change.
“Well, we might as well, right?” I told her. “We won’t need money where we’re going. So we should just spend what we have.”
“That would be fun. It’s our last chance to shop at all our favorite stores in the mall. It’s my last chance to buy new jeggings. Or those really cute slipper shoes. Or headbands. None of that stuff will exist in a day or so. Nothing will exis
t in a day or so.”
She started talking about the dismal end of everything we knew only when she was feeling the sadness for her mother and the fear for her father. I had learned not to try to reassure her. It wasn’t that she cut me off, demanding that I face reality and stop feeding her lies that everything was going to be alright. I just knew that I couldn’t convince her. Every time I tried, I felt a lump in my throat that blocked the blurry words of reassurance I could barely see in my mind from coming out of my mouth. I knew as well as she did that we were leaving a dying planet. Those people who stared at us so quizzically would all be dead within the space of twenty-four hours.
“Do you feel guilty for leaving? Do you feel like we’re kind of...” She sat down on the bed and started to brush out her long, blonde hair, “I don't know... betraying the human race a little bit?”
“I don’t know if it’s betraying the human race. If we were communicating with aliens, passing along top-secret military intel on the human race, then yeah. We’d be betraying them.”
“You know what I mean, Quinn.”
“I do. If we lived here, shouldn’t we die here? That’s what you’re getting at. What makes us so special that we’re the ones who know that we have to leave? Why are we going to be the ones that get saved?”
“That is exactly what I was asking.”
“Do you remember what that guy, James said? He said, 'It doesn’t matter why at this point. Nothing matters except the fact that we had the dream, and they didn’t. We know, and they don’t. That has to mean something.’ I believe him.”
“That guy seemed a little off to me. He seemed a little haunted. That doesn’t really make any sense when I say it out loud. But he seemed like he had seen too many horrible things.”
“Don’t you think that’s how we seem?”
“Well, we’ve been through hell.”
“He's probably been through hell, too.”
“We all have. I just wonder what the whole purpose of it is, that’s all. Why aren’t we just going to die with the rest of them?”
“And we’re back to square one.”
“Yeah. And we’re probably always going to stay there. We all either had this dream or know someone that did. Whether we had the dream or not, we all know what’s coming. What are the chances of us also having been able to get in contact with the people responsible for that spaceship and the people who know all about Pangaea? I know that they all had the dream, which is strange. But don’t you think that’s just so...” She searched for the right word.
“Lucky?” I filled in for her.
“Exactly! It just seems like a huge coincidence, and generally, when something seems like a huge coincidence, it isn’t a coincidence at all.”
“So what is this, Allie?”
“I think it’s fate. I know you don’t believe in stuff like that. But I think we’re meant to go there. We’re meant to start life over. That’s what we’re going to have to do, isn’t it? We’re going to have to rebuild civilization on another planet.”
“I guess so. You know what’s weird? I haven’t thought about what we’re going to do once we actually get to Pangaea. I’ve only thought about getting there.”
“Well, we’re in a situation that is time-sensitive, right? I haven’t thought about it until right now, either. We’ve been too focused on surviving that we haven’t looked at what is going to happen once we’re there. What if there isn’t enough food for however many people are on the flight? What if it turns out people aren’t capable of living there? Maybe there won’t be oxygen. Maybe there will be people already there that try to kill us. Maybe the climate will be too intense for us.”
“Or maybe it will be everything that they’re saying it’s going to be. Maybe it will be the place where we start over, where we have the life that we’ve always wanted.”
“We would have had that here, if it weren’t for the end of the world coming.”
“Who says we would have had it here, Allie? Our parents would have probably torn us apart in the end. They didn’t want us to be together.”
“We shouldn’t talk about them. We shouldn’t say anything mean about them now, Quinn. They’re dead and they were our parents and…”
“I’m not saying anything mean; I’m being truthful. I want to be optimistic about this. You know that I’m normally the pessimist out of the two of us. I’m not being optimistic for your benefit or for mine. I’m seeing things in a positive way because I really think that once we’re there, everything is going to be okay for us. We’ll make a life there. Everything will be good.”
“Or maybe we’ll create some sort of cosmic catastrophe by outrunning our fate.”
“You think our fate is to stay here and die?”
“I don’t know what our fate is. I’m not God, so how would I know? Our fate might be to stay here and die. Then, if we leave, we’re messing with something that’s bigger than us, and I don’t know what the consequences of that would be. Maybe our fate is to go to Pangaea, start over there, and live out the rest of our lives. I don’t see much bad coming from that, and that’s exactly what scares me. There’s no way that we’re going to get there and just live out the rest of our lives in peace. There’s no way that’s possible.’
“Why not?” I asked with a chuckle of disbelief. “Would that be so weird after we survived the apocalypse?”
“There are always things that we have to overcome. What is the point of us living if we’re just going to be skating along with nothing to challenge us? No one ever lives a chaos-free life. There are different kinds of chaos, yeah. But everyone experiences it in one way or another. I think that if we leave here and go to Pangaea, we’ll be facing things that we have absolutely no idea how to handle. We’ll probably end up dying there, too.”
“Don’t say that, Allie. Look,” I reached out and held both of her hands, “we know that we'll die if we stay here. That is for sure. But we have a chance there.”
“A chance to die painfully instead of in a quick burst that we won’t even feel.”
“Who says that we’re going to die there?”
“I just don’t think that we’re going to go there and everything is going to okay for everyone. There will be things there that we have to deal with. It won’t be paradise.”
“I don’t think it will be paradise. We’ll be rebuilding civilization on a new planet. That’s going to be hard, to say the least. But it’s a chance to live, Allie. That’s something that we don’t have here. I’ll tell you how I see it, from my logical, secular view: All living creatures have the instinct to stay alive, no matter what it takes. We will all fight for our lives because that’s our nature. This is our fight. I think that fight will end once we’re there. But if it doesn’t, then we’ll keep fighting. That’s our nature, Allie.”
“That project you did on evolutionary psychology really stuck, didn’t it?” She narrowed her eyes at me and tried to suppress her smile.
“It did.”
“Do you want to know how I see it, from a faith-based point of view? The world is going to end, and that is something that was guaranteed from the beginning. We’re running away from it. We’re escaping the end that was always intended for us. We’re messing with fate.”
“But you said you didn’t know if our fate was to stay and die, or to go there and start over.”
“I don’t. So, either we’re messing with something that was promised for us from day one and we’ll suffer the consequences for it, or God has changed the game.”
She got up to pull her lotion from the bag. I looked away from her, seriously contemplating everything she had just said, but especially the last part. We had always held completely differing views on the meaning of things. I was always the logical one. She was always the faithful one. We were, in that respect, at least, fire and water. But I sat and thought about her words seriously, wondering if she was right. My brain told me that no, she was deluding herself. She was looking for something Divine in an event
that was being caused by people who were in power all over the world.
“Maybe there’s a different God on Pangaea.” I told her after a while. I was trying to make light of the situation, but a part of me meant it as well.
When she turned to reply, I saw only complete seriousness in her eyes.
“There’s only one God, Quinn. It doesn’t matter where we go. There’s only one God.”