Jonathan had spread the survey photographs across the breakfast table by the time Daniel came downstairs.
He had arranged them in the order he thought they would encounter the landmarks. A split boulder appeared in three, photographed from different angles; beyond it, the ground fell towards the ravine they had looked down on the previous night.
Daniel stood beside him, holding a cup.
“Did you sleep?”
“Some.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“It means I’d prefer to discuss the photographs.”
Daniel sat down.
Beyond the window, morning light had given shape to the hillside. What had been a dark fold beneath the stars was now a broken slope scattered with rocks and pale scrub. Somewhere below it, he could still feel the quiet insistence that had brought him outside before bed.
Mara joined them, fastening her hair behind her head.
She paused beside Daniel and touched his shoulder.
“Still there?”
He nodded.
Her amulet rested against her chest. Its central stone shone softly, with the small lights marking the others nearby. As Kane entered with Elena and Sal, two more brightened.
Sal noticed before anyone spoke.
He looked from his necklace to Mara’s, then towards the empty place at the table.
“Vale’s coming.”
A moment later, the older man appeared in the doorway.
Jonathan looked up.
“That could become useful.”
“For breakfast?” Kane asked.
“For knowing when to stop talking about someone.”
Vale drew out a chair.
“You usually stop too late.”
Jonathan returned to the photographs.
For a few minutes, they ate. Elena cut Sal’s toast while he asked whether the ravine was deeper than the caves in South Africa. Gabriel came in to say the vehicle was ready and set a radio beside Jonathan’s bag.
Isobel arrived before anyone began clearing the plates.
Jonathan stood when he saw her.
She carried several folded sheets and had apparently forgotten the jacket she had worn the previous evening. Ernesto followed her, closing the door behind them.
“Have you eaten?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes.”
Ernesto looked at her.
“Some,” she amended.
Daniel smiled at Jonathan, but the expression faded when Isobel placed the papers on the table.
“I need to speak to all of you before you leave.”
Gabriel remained beside the door.
Isobel pulled out the chair opposite Jonathan and sat down. She unfolded the top sheet, smoothed it with her hand, then looked around the table to make sure everyone was listening.
“We’ve had another night’s observations, together with measurements from other sites. Professor Valdés has been speaking to the people checking our calculations.”
Jonathan drew his notebook towards him.
“Do they agree?”
“Closely enough that we can no longer put the differences down to our equipment.”
Her gaze rested briefly on the amulets.
“The object is real. So is the danger.”
Kane set down his cup.
“How much danger?”
Isobel turned the page towards them. It contained a curve, a cluster of marks and more figures than Daniel could readily follow.
“The best orbit we can calculate brings it into collision with Earth.”
Elena’s knife stopped against the edge of Sal’s plate.
No one reached for the paper.
Jonathan had expected bad news. He had spent much of the flight reading reports that offered very little else. Yet expectation had allowed him to keep a small distance from what the figures meant.
That distance disappeared when Isobel said collision.
“How certain?” he asked.
“The remaining uncertainty still matters. We’re continuing to observe it, and other teams are working independently. But impact is now the best fit, rather than one possibility among many.”
“Could another observation change that?”
“Yes.”
He waited.
“It could also confirm it.”
Outside, a vehicle passed the window. Someone called to its driver, and an ordinary conversation continued beneath the silence in the room.
Daniel looked towards Mara.
She had moved her hand from his shoulder to the back of his chair.
“When?” Kane asked.
“Eleven days. The current calculation gives fourteen twenty UTC, with an uncertainty of several hours.”
“From today?”
“Yes.”
Elena looked down at her son.
He was watching Isobel.
“Will it hit here?” he asked.
“We don’t know the location yet.”
“Then we could go somewhere else.”
Isobel’s eyes moved towards Elena before she answered.
“With a smaller object, that might help.”
Sal considered her.
“But this one’s big.”
“Yes.”
Elena put down the knife and drew his chair closer to hers.
Jonathan looked at the figures.
“How big?”
“Our best estimate is roughly a hundred and twenty kilometres across.”
He looked up from the paper.
Isobel waited while he checked that he had heard her correctly.
“A hundred and twenty?”
“Yes.”
For a moment, he thought of the regional maps spread across the library table in England. He could picture that distance on a map more easily than he could imagine it as a single object moving through space.
“What happened to the smaller estimate?”
“The first figures depended on assumptions about its distance and how much light the surface reflected. Both needed correcting. The longer sequence of observations has given us a much firmer distance. The surface is darker than our early estimates allowed.”
She separated another sheet from the others.
“There’s something else. A model appeared in the system during the night.”
Ernesto moved closer to the table.
“Appeared?” Jonathan asked.
“It wasn’t part of the calculations we were running,” Ernesto said. “And neither of us entered it.”
Isobel turned the sheet towards them.
A cross-section occupied the centre of the page. Within the irregular outer shape was a broad, dense core.
“The model gives a solid iron-nickel core between sixty and eighty kilometres across, beneath a rocky outer layer.”
Kane studied the image.
“How could you tell that from here?”
“We couldn’t establish the interior from these observations alone.”
She left her hand beside the page.
“Some of what it supplies can be checked against our measurements. The position, the movement, the brightness. Those agree. The density and internal structure go beyond the information our equipment has given us.”
“The ghost,” Mara said.
Isobel nodded.
“Does Valdés believe it?” Jonathan asked.
“He’s treating it as an unverified model. So am I. But a source that has repeatedly directed us towards useful observations has now supplied a detailed estimate of what’s inside this object.”
She looked around the table.
“I can’t call the core independently confirmed. I can’t responsibly leave it out of what I tell you either.”
Daniel leaned forward.
“What happens if something that size hits?”
Isobel rested both hands on the table.
“It would be a catastrophe across the planet. There would be no part of the world untouched by it.”
Mara’s fingers tightened against the chair.
“Even on the other side?”
“Yes. The immediate destruction would only be the beginning. Material thrown into the atmosphere, extreme heating and then prolonged disruption to sunlight and climate. The location changes the details. It doesn’t give us somewhere safe to move everyone.”
She glanced at the cross-section.
“If the core model is right, the mass involved is greater still.”
Elena looked towards the telephone near the door.
Her other child was in Chicago.
Kane noticed. He moved his chair nearer without speaking.
For a while, Isobel let them absorb what she had said. Ernesto stood beside her, watching the untouched plates.
Vale broke the silence.
“You revised the speed.”
“Yes.”
She brought another sheet forward.
“We now understand why the earlier orbit was giving us trouble. Tracing the path backwards takes us through a close encounter with Jupiter.”
Jonathan looked up.
“A gravity assist?”
“Yes. It changed the object’s direction and increased its speed relative to the Sun.”
Daniel studied the curve.
“Recently?”
“Earlier in its approach. The encounter has already happened. We haven’t watched it suddenly speed up overnight; we’ve corrected our understanding of the path it’s been travelling.”
“So the eleven days is based on that correction,” Kane said.
“And the new measurements. The projected impact speed is about thirty-one kilometres a second.”
Jonathan stopped writing.
He had put down the number, but there was nothing useful to add beneath it.
“Who’s being told?” Gabriel asked.
“Professor Valdés is making sure the results reach people who can act on them. The independent teams have their own reporting routes. This won’t remain a discussion between a few astronomers.”
“What can they do?”
Isobel looked at him.
“That’s a question other people will have to answer.”
Her composure had held throughout the explanation. Now Jonathan could see the effort behind it.
He moved the papers slightly so she no longer had to keep them flattened with her hand.
She noticed and released them.
“Thank you.”
He nodded.
Across the table, Daniel touched the place beneath his shirt where an amulet would eventually rest.
They had travelled here because a message had named six people and something they carried. He had allowed himself to think of that as a destination: reach the observatory, find the missing pair, discover what the others knew.
Now the people here were waiting for answers from him.
“Do you think we can stop it?” he asked.
Isobel looked directly at him.
“I don’t know.”
The answer was quiet, and he trusted it.
“I know something in our system helped us find it,” she continued. “Then it left a message asking for six people to come here with their own objects. You arrived with four that match the drawing.”
“We haven’t done anything like this,” Mara said.
“I understand.”
“No,” Daniel said, more sharply than he intended. “I don’t think you do.”
Mara turned towards him.
He looked down at his cup.
“Sorry. We can make a room look different. We can see things that happened somewhere else. Last night I made something above a workbench, and I’m still not entirely sure what it was.”
Isobel listened.
“None of that tells me what to do with an object a hundred and twenty kilometres wide.”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
For a moment, he had expected reassurance. Her agreement left him with the uncomfortable relief of not having to pretend.
Vale leaned forward.
“It tells us we don’t understand enough yet.”
Daniel looked at him.
“The two below us may give us more,” Vale said.
“May,” Kane repeated.
“Yes.”
Kane studied him, then glanced towards Sal.
The boy had left his toast untouched.
“All right,” Kane said. “Then we find them.”
The discussion became practical slowly.
Gabriel opened the map and pointed out where Ernesto had marked the nearest approach by road. Jonathan showed them the split boulder in the photographs. Beyond it, Daniel and Vale would follow what they could feel.
“We don’t need everyone on the slope,” Gabriel said.
“I’m coming,” Sal said.
Elena answered before anyone else could.
“You’re staying with me.”
He looked towards Kane.
Kane drew his chair around to face him.
“I’m going to help them bring the cases back. You can stay here with Mara and Lindiwe.”
“I helped before.”
“I know you did.”
“Then why?”
Kane took a moment.
“Because we don’t know what the ground’s like. Because we may have to climb. And because your mother has just said you’re staying.”
Sal looked down at his amulet.
Elena rested her hand beside his.
“I need you with me.”
That reached him in a way the other answers had not. He leaned against her, still unhappy, but stopped arguing. Mara looked towards Daniel.
“I’ll stay too. Isobel can show us where the message appeared.”
Lindiwe nodded.
“And what happened before it.”
Lucía would remain with Elena and Sal. Ernesto could keep radio contact with Gabriel while helping Isobel. That left five for the search: Daniel, Vale, Jonathan, Kane and Gabriel.
Jonathan began gathering the photographs.
Isobel put a hand on the folder before he could close it.
“Take these copies. I’ve marked the features Ernesto recognised.”
Their fingers briefly met over the paper.
He looked up.
“We’ll be careful.”
“Please do.”
There was enough feeling in the words to make him pause.
Then she withdrew her hand and helped him put the pages in order.
Elena went to the telephone with Lucía.
Kane waited near the door until she had made the call. He watched her speak to her sister, then close her eyes when the receiver was passed to her other child.
She asked about breakfast.
She listened to an answer none of them could hear.
When she came back, Kane did not ask what she had told them.
“Ready?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Then go.”
Sal came with her to the vehicle. He allowed Kane to check the cord beneath his collar, then caught his hand before he could straighten.
“You’ll come back?”
Kane looked at him.
“Yes.”
The boy held on for another moment before letting him go.
Daniel stood beside Mara while Gabriel loaded the last bag.
“You don’t have to know what to do yet,” she said quietly.
He looked towards the hillside.
“I’d like to know soon.”
“So would I.”
She took his hand.
The connection between them was steady, familiar now in a way that still surprised him. Beyond it, below the road, the other pull remained.
Daniel kissed her, then climbed into the vehicle. Isobel stood beside Jonathan’s door. He had the map open on his knees.
“When you get back,” she said, “I’ll show you the latest images.”
He nodded.
“Perhaps we could begin with coffee.”
For the first time that morning, she smiled.
“Perhaps.”
Gabriel started the engine.
As they drew away, Daniel looked back at the small group outside the building. Mara stood beside Lindiwe. Elena had one arm around Sal, and Isobel remained near the place where Jonathan’s door had been.
Then the road turned, and the buildings disappeared behind them.
Jonathan lowered the map.
For a while, no one spoke.