Dustin Thomason - 12.21

I was tempted to strike her for speaking this way. But when I saw the look of sadness in her eyes, I could not hit this woman I had known since Auxila and I were boys together.

I spoke:

—You must find yourself a length of vine and wrap it around your neck by the turn of the next sun. You must hang yourself proudly, Haniba, to fulfill your duties as wife of a noble sacrificed to the gods—

—But he was not sacrificed to the gods, Paktul! He was murdered by a king! Jaguar Imix ordained his death because Auxila had the courage to speak out against him, and the king sacrificed him in the name of a god that does not exist! This god, Akabalam, surely cannot have called for Auxila’s sacrifice, having never revealed his power to us or to any other noble in a dream!—

I said nothing of my own doubts about the new god. For just as a scribe should not question a divination, it is not for a widow to question a king.

I spoke:

—What can you know of the conversation between a king and a counselor he sacrifices? How can you know the king never revealed Akabalam?—

Haniba buried her head in her hands.

As a nobleman, seeing such a woman make such a transgression against the gods, my duty was to kill her.

But I was powerless in the face of her sadness.

THE CDC HAD ARRANGED SPECIAL DISPENSATION FOR CHEL TO BE on the roads, and the Getty security team provided an escort who followed her toward Mount Hollywood. From the top of Mulholland Drive, even against the night sky she could see smoke rising from distant corners of the city. Yet as she raced east, Chel felt the first glimmers of hope she had had in days. Patrick had agreed to meet her at the planetarium immediately.

East Mulholland was eerily empty but for the occasional police car and National Guard jeep. Yet there was an acrid smell in the air—maybe the burning was closer than she thought. She started to roll up her window. Just then a woman in exercise clothes ran into the middle of the street, right in front of her car. Chel wouldn’t have seen her except for the flash of the woman’s reflective running shoes.

Chel swerved, her Volvo’s tires skidding across the road, and finally she veered onto the shoulder, heart racing. In her rearview mirror, she saw the jogger keep on going, as if nothing had happened. The woman was on autopilot. Chel had heard stories of VFI victims raiding pharmacies for sleeping pills, drinking to the point of alcohol poisoning, and paying huge prices to drug dealers for illegal sedatives. But the woman now receding behind her was trying to do it naturally, attempting to exhaust herself into oblivion. It looked as if she might collapse in the street at any moment. Yet on and on she went.

The security car following her pulled up alongside the Volvo. Once Chel had insisted she was okay, they wound their way up to the top of the mountain without further incident.

Fifteen minutes later, their caravan reached Griffith Observatory. The massive stone structure had always reminded Chel of a mosque. Patrick had told her that, years ago, before the city lights made most stars too hard to see, this had been the best place in the country to study the night sky. Now it was better suited for city vistas; the entire Southland shined below. From here, the fires burning against the night looked almost beautiful. From here, Chel could almost forget that L.A. was at risk of its own collapse.

The security detail peeled off, and Chel checked her phone before getting out of the car. No new messages. Nothing from her mom. Or Stanton. She wondered when she could expect another anything. The possibility that she’d have something to tell Stanton next time kept her going.

She got out of her car, and a minute later Patrick was greeting her at the observatory entrance. “Hi there,” he said.

“Hi yourself.”

They held each other for a moment, fitting together perfectly at his very manageable five-foot-six. How strange it was that, after talking to this man every day, living with him, sleeping so many nights next to him, Chel was huddled against him and had no good idea what had been happening in his life for months.

Patrick pulled back from their embrace. “Glad you got up here okay.” His blue eyes gleamed beneath his eye shield, and blond hair framed his face. He wore the striped button-down Chel had given him last Christmas, and she wondered if he’d put it on for a reason. He rarely wore it when they were together; it was she who’d used it more, as a nightshirt. He’d liked taking it off her.

“I still can’t believe you were in there with patient zero,” he said. “Jesus.” He stepped back to look at her. “Pulling all-nighters again?”

“Something like that.”

“Hardly a first for you.”

Chel could hear the note of longing in his voice, his desire to remind her of what they once shared. “I really appreciate you coming up here,” she said. “I do.”

“All you had to do was ask,” he said. “A codex from the classic. Unbelievable.”

Chel looked back over the L.A. basin behind them. A gray haze of ash filled the sky. “Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s eerie out here—and the clock is ticking.”

Patrick lingered behind her for a moment, squinting into the darkness. “Love the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night,” he said, paraphrasing his favorite epitaph.

The three-hundred-seat Oschin Planetarium dome rose seventy-five feet from ground to apex and gave visitors the feeling of standing inside a great unfinished work of art, a basilica ceiling yet to be painted. They stood in the dark, lit only by the glow of the two red exit signs and a laptop. While Patrick focused on the images of the codex on the computer, Chel studied the strange contours of the star projector in the middle of the room. It looked like a futuristic monster, a mechanical hydra that projected thousands of stars onto the aluminum ceiling through cratered hemispheres.

“Whoa, I’ve never seen this before in a codex, a reference to a star war timed to the evening star,” Patrick said. “It’s unbelievable.”

The images of the book had swiftly worked their magic on him too. He dimmed the lights, flipped a switch on the projector, and now the dome filled with stars jetting across the night sky, rotating through hundreds of positions, magically transforming. Chel had been here a dozen times in the year and a half they were together, but every time it felt new.

“There are dozens of astronomical references in what you’ve already translated,” Patrick said, pointing at the ceiling with a laser. “Not just the zodiac but positional references and other things we can use to anchor us.”

Chel had never paid enough attention to the details of his work, and now she was embarrassed by how little she knew.

“Come on,” he said. “You know this stuff. It’s a historical–astronomical GPS.”

He was teasing her.

“You’ll recall—Dr. Manu—that the earth rotates around the sun. And on its own axis. But it’s also oscillating back and forth with respect to inertial space, due to the moon’s tidal forces. It’s like a toy top that wobbles. So the sun’s path as we see it across the sky changes a little every year. Which is what 2012ers are all obsessed with, of course.”

“Galactic alignment?”

Patrick nodded. “The crazies think that because the moon, earth, and sun are lined up on the winter solstice, and we’re nearing the time when the sun will intersect with some imagined equator of the dark rift of the Milky Way, we’ll all be destroyed because of the tidal waves or the sun exploding. Depends who you ask. Never mind that the ‘equator’ they’re talking about is totally imagined.”