Thomas Cook: Taken

Lisa smiled at Allie gently. “I know that would have happened.”

“I don’t want to go,” Allie said. “I want to stay with you.”

“Then stay,” Lisa said. “We’ve got a plan. We can get out of here, right now.” She saw that this was not possible, that even as Allie had voiced her hope, she had renounced it.

“It’ll be okay,” Lisa assured her.

Allie suddenly turned from her, quickly and abruptly, her eyes fixed on the crowd, the military force beyond them. A wave of stones arced out of the crowd and fell upon the soldiers and their vehicles. From beyond the crowd, small explosions sent tear gas canisters hurtling into the night air.

Lisa drew Allie into her arms. “We better get back inside,” she said.

Allie stepped out of her embrace. “No,” she said.

Suddenly a streak of light shot through the darkness, bold and radiant, as if carried on a comet, and in whose blinding wake the texture of the sky began to change.

The crowd stared upward in silent wonder at the celestial spectacle that raged above them, light flying into light, a play of unearthly radiance against the black field of the night.

Allie’s gaze was infinitely still as she turned toward the sea of faces-the stunned and silent soldiers, Mary and General Beers, hushed and awestruck as the light intensified all around them, growing brighter and brighter, as fierce and unknowable as the dawning of a brand-new world.

Thomas H. Cook is the author of fifteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair , winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents , both Edgar Award nominees; and two early works about true crimes, Early Graves and Blood Echoes , which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He lives in New York City and Cape Cod, where he is at work on his next novel, Peril .