Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

And with that, Marco spun away from the black gate and swished through the gardens, leaving Cole alone with all the quiet tombs.

But Cole didn’t mind.

He sat down on the cobblestones and started to read. Black holes sounded more interesting than stars, anyway.

The next morning, at the first breaking of bread, Cole was sitting with his fellow initiates when Marco arrived with a tray of food. One look, and the bench of boys opposite Cole parted like the Red Sea. Marco’s tray landed with a clatter. He sat down, picked up his roll, and dunked it in Cole’s soup.

“You learn anything about the barrio yesterday?” Marco chewed while soup trickled down his chin. The other young boys, all in identical white and blue uniforms, sat motionless in some form of awe mixed with fear.

“I read all about black holes,” Cole said. He pulled his soup closer and stirred it protectively with his spoon.

“And what did you learn about escaping them?” Marco’s voice was muffled, his mouth full of a second large bite of roll.

“That it’s possible,” Cole said nonchalantly. He sipped soup from his spoon but kept his eyes on the older boy.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s called quantum tunneling. It can happen when a single atom is near the event horizon and has something real random happen to it—”

Marco reached over and dipped his half-eaten roll back in Cole’s bowl. When he pulled it back to his plate, he left a trail of soup between their two trays, a constellation of sticky dollops. Cole watched it happen and fell silent.

“What else did you learn?” Marco smiled and took another bite.

Cole grabbed his own roll and kept it in both hands while he thought about what to say.

“Is there any chance of a black hole coming to the barrio and whisking you away?” Marco stuffed the remainder of his roll in his mouth and chewed around a smile. The other boys still hadn’t moved. Some stared into empty spoons and some clutched their trays in both hands.

“Maybe,” Cole said, still trying to act calm. “There wasn’t much in that book on black holes to be honest, but I found a ton on the web.” He took a bite of his roll and smiled at Marco. “Did you know a black hole might’ve passed through the Earth hundreds of years ago? One could zip through us right now, maybe suck us and our breakfast right up, and then zoom off straight through the roof.”

Cole lifted his roll over his head, and the other boys around him looked up after it.

“We’d be dead, of course, but it would happen so fast, we’d never know it. And we’d all be the same,” he added. “Us, our trays, our spoons, all pressed together into a tiny space the size of an atom. We’d travel like that forever, zipping through space and sucking down more and more and more, leaving craters and burning rings of fire behind.”

Cole smiled and took a large bite out of his roll.

Marco laughed. “What kooky site did you read that load of crap on?”

Cole shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“You’re making that up,” one of the other kids whispered, his tone one of more wistful hope than accusation.

“It was called the Tunguska Event.” Cole turned his attention to the other boys his age. “It was the largest explosion of its kind. It took place in Old Russia, back at the turn of the twentieth. For a long time, scientists thought it was a meteor impact, even though there was no crater. The blast rocked people and houses for miles and miles, and all the trees were pushed over, just snapped off and leaning away from the center of this massive fireball.”

“And it could happen here? ” one of the boys asked. “At any time?”

Cole nodded. He looked to Marco, only to find the boy smiling in a different way; he seemed genuinely pleased.

“How do they know it was a black hole?” another boy asked.

Cole turned to address the kid, suddenly feeling quite older than the other boys his age.

“They finally found the spot where it entered the Earth,” he said. “At first, they had looked directly opposite the blast, down in the Indian ocean, but what were the chances that the black hole passed directly through the center of the Earth? It was silly to look there.” He stirred his soup. “But then, in the middle of the twenty-third century, some guys were digging for bones in Africa when they found charred rock that only looked two hundred years old. They thought it was meteor rock, so they called these astronomers in, who took one look and realized a black hole had passed through.”

“How would you stop it?” the boy beside Cole asked. “There has to be some way to protect ourselves.”

Cole took a sip of his soup, ignoring the fact that it had grown cold and that there were soggy crumbs from Marco’s roll in it. “You can’t stop them,” he said. “They can come anytime and from anywhere. There are probably billions or trillions of the things roaming the universe since the time of Creation. They’re like cosmic cattle, grazing on everything.”

A new fear settled over the boys, quite stronger than the one Marco’s presence had brought. Cole looked to Marco to see the older boy beaming. He winked at Cole and stood up.

“You aced your assignment,” Marco said. He wiped his chin with his napkin, then threw it into his untouched bowl of soup. “Be sure to take up my tray as well, slumrat.”

And with that, Marco spun and hurried out of the dining hall as suddenly and swiftly as he’d arrived. Cole watched him go, the folds of the boy’s cloak swaying wide with his turn, then settling down all around him, the blackness swallowing him whole.

“Do you really expect this court to believe that?”

The lawyer in the black suit waved his arm out over the pews.

“Are you going to tell these families that their loved ones died because of an innocuous conversation that took place over some soup? Is that also what you’re going to tell those families in New Zealand? That this wasn’t the work of God, or some coincidence too extreme to trust, but the scheming of some homeless kids taking advantage of the hospitality and kindness of the Church?”

“I’m telling you what happened.” Cole looked up at the judge. “That’s what I swore to do.”

The judge squinted at Cole, as if looking for something difficult to discern.

“I move to have this case against my client dropped,” the lawyer said. He walked away from Cole and back toward his wide table, staffed plenty with suits. “If this is the extent of the evidence, the hearsay of one boy when the other isn’t here to provide his side of the story—”

“Denied,” the judge said. He held out a hand to calm down Cole’s lawyer, who had risen from her seat and seemed fit to explode. “And I’ll caution you, Counselor, not to employ theatrics for my jury’s benefit. Now, if you have no further questions—”

The lawyer spun away from his desk. “Oh, if we’re going to persist in this, I certainly have other questions.” He stalked toward Cole, his finger jabbing the air. “I’d like to probe into the charges that were dropped, the charges that prompted you to turn on the man who so kindly took you in. I think if there’s any real conspiracy here, that’s where we’ll find it.”

“My client doesn’t have to answer those questions,” Cole’s lawyer protested. She flipped through the papers spread across her desk. “It’s clear in the agreement he signed—”

“A boy is dead ,” the other lawyer said, whirling on her. “Another boy is dead, and now his name is being besmirched without him here to clear it.”