They decided to head out about midnight. They weren't going to get full coverage haz-mat suits, let alone anything that could start coping with radiation, so Hawk chose not to bother. Instead, she picked out comfortable jeans and a black t-shirt. Alex did the same. She reorganized her anting kit to something more useful, and, after a minute of thought, added a garden trowel and a handful of spoons.

Alex spotted this. "Spoons?"

"I need a small shovel. The garden trowel won't cut it and I can't dig with tweezers."

"But spoons." He repeated.

Her smile stiffened. "It works for small things."

"I thought you didn't dig up Queens," he said.

She rolled her eyes. "I don't dig up established Queens, and I suck at spotting fresh founding chambers."

Banter covers fear the way duct tape fixes broken windows.

Her hands were shaking as she got back in the car.

Alex put his hand over hers. "It's alright, babe."

"I don't break rules," she said. "I'm doing this and it's terrifying."

"Then give me the word. We can sit this out," Alex said.

"You won't," she said, and his eyes registered the hit, even if his smile did not. His wife had no expectations of law abiding behavior when he was left alone, and he knew it. "And I...I can't, Alex. Does that makes sense? Like, this morning my whole universe were ants and your clients and my mother."

"And your mother's cake pearls," Alex said.

She let the barb pass. "And now...now those are just the things I have to protect. Because a world that has stuff like what killed Elizabeth Cummings' dog..." she shuddered. "No. I feel like I'm being an idiot...but I don't feel like there is a choice here, either."

"Ditto," Alex said, after a moment, and put the car in gear.

They parked well outside of the evacuation zone. It had grown in the hours since the Wests had left, to cover several more blocks. They parked in the lot of an abandoned convenience store, its windows boarded shut and doors padlocked. Not because of this evacuation, either. Weeds grew amid glints of broken glass, oil stains dark upon pavement. Footsteps echoed like shovels on a grave.

"Urban decay," Alex said, studying a particular bit of graffiti. It was inviting the viewer to perform certain incestuous acts with their mother. "That has 'affulenza' all over it."

"Not exactly prime gang territory," Hawk agreed, and they began to walk down the empty street towards Elizabeth Cummings' place.

"You'd be surprised at what the disaffected youth of America can manage to pull out of their subconscious," Alex said. "But this isn't that. It's little boys and girls trying to play at being gangsters. Problem is, sometimes they actually make it." He checked the GPS on his phone and sighed. "That way, I think."

Mrs. Cummings' house was about three blocks north and west of the abandoned convenience store. The Wests had decided early that it'd be easier to just cut through back yards than try and walk the streets. The streets would be patrolled. Still, they stuck to the pavement until they saw the evidence of other humans: car headlights, flashing towards their street.

Quickly and silently, Alex went for the nearest privacy hedge. Hawk followed, less quiet and a bit less silent, but she still got into the brush before the headlights reached their position. Huddled there, barely ready to breathe, they watched as the gray painted Jeep rode slowly down the street.

"That was close," Hawk said.

"Nah," He gave her hand a quick kiss, because it was nearest and she needed the reassurance. "They're looking for people who are looting. We're here to steal ideas, not televisions."

They waited until the cars left and kept going. If they got caught, they got caught. Alex tried to keep them out of basic line-of-sight cameras and hoped they hadn't set up any thermals.

They reached the dead animal line first. Alex hadn't even considered such a thing, or such a name, existing. But then the dead birds began appearing in the soft, green grass of abandoned back yards. Dead cats, too. Some of them seem to have taken advantage of the dead animals and sat in the grass, eating the half-crystalized flesh with its load of unknown energy exposure, until the cat, too, died where it sat. But most of the bodies Hawk and Alex found appeared to have been in some kind of flight. For the birds, that was literal. They dropped with wings outstretched, snapped off in some cases, feathers splintering as the unknown energy stripped pinions of all flexibility. Cats and dogs mostly died where they fell when their feet broke, as the last gasps of their limbic system screamed, survive. The animal in Alex's own brain was ready to chew its way out of his cranium; he kept himself in place with sheer force of will. He could even have been proud of it.

The dead insect line was closer to Mrs. Cummings' place...and much more obvious. It was a near rain of insect bodies two yards away from the main death-line, the crystallization of grass and tree running through the abandoned lawns like flame. Alex stared as mosquitoes, moths, dragon-flies and other night-insects fell around them, impacts like shattering silk.

"What the hell, Hawk?" he said.

"Insects are lower life-forms," Hawk said, with a muted voice. "They have a lower tolerance for some fluctuations. It's why I kill fire-ants with boiling water. The sudden change in temperature overwhelms them. They have smaller brains. Similar in processing power and data interpretation to a computer, I guess. It's an ongoing debate if we've managed to out-strip insects yet. The birds and mammals have a higher tolerance to the energy, I guess—because obviously they're living longer and getting further away from it—but they can also figure out that something's going on, and they need to run away. Insects won't process that until much later—if at all. The mammals we saw were dead when they started running, but they took longer to die and got farther. This..." she gestured down, at an ant-hill spotted with dead fire-ants. There was one living ant, larger than the rest. Alex was pretty sure that was a major. It twitched twice, and curled sharply, and did not move again. "I'm pretty sure this is the point where the energy gets so strong, it's lethal to insects."

"Or else this is where the living things have been exposed the longest. So...why would plants survive and the bugs not?"

"The grass is probably dead too. Plants don't have a nervous system. They don't need a centralized intellect to function. Even if bits of them break, the rest of them can keep going for a while. I mean...you bring me roses. There's a part of me that goes, 'oh good, more amputated plant genitals,' because that's what a flower is. It's how a plant reproduces. We pay twenty bucks for a dead rose that's going to take a week or so to wither. That's what this grass is. It just won't get enough time to wither." She moved her flashlight across the lawn, and paused at a tree. "It's already withering, Alex. Look."

The tree she'd fixed on had been a sycamore. Alex would have been less sure of the past tense under other circumstances. The leaves were only slightly drooping, as if during a long drought on a hot afternoon. But it was cool tonight, and had rained recently. He paced his own flashlight around this stranger's yard and registered other unhappy looking plants. Gardenia bushes dropping petals and leaves.

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"God. We should not be here," he said.

"We are here, aren't we?" She said. "We chose this. Nothing to do but to do it. Come on."

A block from the insect line, they reached the glass.

Glass, Alex thought. That had been Willheim's word. But he was right. This strange...transformation, for lack of a better word. It was like extremely brittle glass. The tan colored dead grass had a shimmer to it, a glint. It could have been dew, but he knew it wasn't. Once they passed the glass line, the humidity in the air vanished. Each breath felt dry and rasping, and lined with knives, and Alex hoped that was in his imagination because the last thing he needed was to breathe in this shit. His mouth tasted foul. Not, mercifully, like metal—Hawk had given him that particular bit of paranoia over the last few hours. But it wasn't the coppery taste of blood or the ionization of radiation. It was something...else.

It tastes like a fever, he thought. It made no sense, but neither did the dead tan grass.

They had vaulted over four fences to get to this point. Now, inside the glass line, Hawk started to grab the next fence...and stopped. Looked back. The previous fence had been chain-link. This was wood, and it shimmered, just so. She touched it. With gloves on, she couldn't feel if the texture had changed...but maybe? It felt...rougher. She gripped the top hard, as if she were about to vault it, but simply pulled the wood towards her instead of putting her weight on it. It snapped, and the way it felt when she broke it...describing it as wrong was not enough. Theft was wrong. Cutting the tag off a mattress. That was technically wrong. This...you had to think of violations to cover it. She was a woman; the first thing she thought of was rape. Death couldn't cover this, because death had a place with life, a kind of hand-in-hand yin and yang. To die, there must first be life. Life had no place here, in the auditory horror of that snap. This was something that had forced its way in, that had grasped and clutched and sneered and ripped. She wanted to drop the piece of destroyed wood. She wanted to scrub her gloved hands without stripping down to skin, so that she could obliterate the leather with the effort of cleaning and spend this horror before she had a chance to flay her hands down to the bone. And instead of any of that, she set the broken bits of board down on the ground, very carefully.

We should not have come here, she thought.

Too late. Too late. Hawk motioned to Alex. "I don't think we can jump this, but it'll break if we breathe on it too hard."

"Yep," Alex said, then looked around before slamming his khaki colored boot into the boards. They shattered the way safety glass would, in small glinting fragments. There was a strange high ringing to it all, a reverberation that reminded Alex of Thanksgiving. Odd, that it should do that. He grabbed another board and broke it, just to hear that sound. It echoed through the teeth, making him think of turkey, of gravy and stuffing. Plates with gold edges and glasses of water with...he remembered running damp fingertips over the lip of a glass. That sound came from the glass.

"Harmonics. The...remains. Cremains."

"Glass," named Hawk, who winced. He did too. It was named, now. It had power.

"The glass," he agreed. The word tasted like ashes. "When you break it. It harmonizes."

"Great. Let's never touch it again." Hawk said, and began kicking down the fence on the other side.

***

Elizabeth Cumming had been an impressive gardener.

The yard, even destroyed, was flawless. She'd had the usual required Augustine carpet in the front lawn, mowed and tended to domestic perfection as defined by the HOA. But her back yard was carpeted in moss. Deliberate, and laid out like it was sod. Given that this was a back yard in Arizona, that was an impressive defiance of sane water management. Flower beds were zoned out using rocks. There was one great riot of wisteria looping around a white painted gazebo. The crystalized petals of each flower fell, as light as if they were still alive.

There was one small point of light in the center of the garden. It shifted through the air, seeming like mist in a spotlight...only the glow seemed to be coming from the ground, just out of sight.

"Alex. You see that?" Hawk jersey a chin at the light.

"Yup." He said. "What you thinking, Babe? Buried light?"

"No. I was thinking about the ionization witnesses reported at Chernobyl. The air changes when it's exposed to certain kinds of radiation. Let's assume that that is what we're seeing." She paused. “That’s really not good.”

Alex looked at the thin beam of light, with swirls of something flexing through its brilliance. "I'm starting to realize just how stupid we're being, here."

"Well...if it makes you feel any better, we're in the same place we were this morning." She said, and began looking at the dead tomato plants. "Huh. There's a few more traces of color on these than on the grass. Funny. They're nearly gone." There were four small pools of shattered red where tomatoes had hit ground. Most of the leaves and crumbled and blown away. There were only the oldest stalks left, perhaps preserved by their sheer size. The wind couldn't crumble a quarter's thickness away.

"This garden isn't too sheltered. Look at the tree, babe," Alex said, getting her attention. She cast her flashlight across the lawn. Yes, she was fairly sure the lump of crumbling matter had been someone's back yard live oak. It was mostly gone now.

"Yes," she said, hesitantly.

"Wind should have blown those to pieces. And look...the color's still there. It's the only colorful thing in this garden." And he let his flashlight play across the shapes in Elizabeth Cumming's back yard. Most of it was already gone, blown to bits by regular atmosphere. But here and there, sheltered in the nooks, in the corners of the fence, the hollows of this pot or that one, there were still a few remains of plants. Half of a corn stalk, its upper spars obliterated, was sheltered by three large logs, stacked one atop the other. A wind change would destroy the rest. Its leaves, frozen in a terminal arc, were the tan of dry straw.

And yet here, central to it all, four tomato plants. They weren't some exceptional, exotic heirloom variety. They were red tomatoes, beefsteak, the friendly staple of every green house. Their leaves and the one surviving tomato fruit were all translucent, and the fruit was turning to red piles of unknown, inorganic matter. But they were more durable, here, than a tree that had died hours later.

Alex picked up a leaf. It did not snap the way the dog's ear did. It let go as a dying leaf ought to, and sat in Alex's hand. It was not supple like a leaf, but it wasn't fragile to the touch, either.

He looked back at the tomato plants. "Alright. Why would this energy signature affect these plants differently than those over there."

Hawk peered down. Light refracted through the crystalized stems, giving it a glimmer of life. A promise, in its way, that could never be fulfilled. "I don't know. Maybe..." she frowned, and peered closer down. "Maybe this is our epicenter. You heard Willheim. These..." she looked up, where the air continued to dance in aurora-like shifts. No color changes. It was all blue. You could not pay her enough to get any closer. Not with those lights active. "Yeah, they're right under the atmospheric show. Maybe the first exposure is the most potent. Sudden and abrupt, verses..." she panned her flashlight around the yard, where everything was still, and dead, and crumbling to the ground with the soft hush of insect wings. "Slow exposure," she said.

"Like what we're getting, right now," Alex said.

"Yep." She said. Her hands were starting to tingle. She knew it was a psychosomatic whatsis...something in her brain was panicking, screaming for her heart to beat itself to pieces against the bars of her ribcage, for her lungs to breathe faster until over-oxygenation caught them on fire. It screamed that it could feel her skin hardening, despite visual evidence to the contrary. And she knew how what this emotional maelstrom would actually be, should it be collected and cooled and decanted down: life. The drive to survive. Paranoia is nature's friend, because nature wants to kill everything and paranoia recognizes that. A hallucination isn't so bad, biologically, if it means you stay alive. People talk about wanting things to be natural, Hawk thought. Well, this is natural. This is nature. Nature is the glowing balls of gas a million million miles away, burning itself to nothing under the pressure of its own weight. It's evolution throwing a million years behind predation so that you watch, horrified, as seagulls eat baby ducks, and dolphins gleefully beat infant sharks to death, and the manful young lion murders his father's children so he can eat their flesh and replace their genetic line with his own. It might even be the same impulse that has young men raping their classmates behind dumpsters. Humans may not like to think it, but they are animals, same as the deer and the ducks and the gulls. They say nature abhors a vacuum; they don't tell you what it means to let her eat her fill.

Her body wanted to live. Her brain was screaming to her body; this was not a place she wanted to be.

"So what does that mean, Hawk?" he asked. "The slow exposure."

"That we're standing in probably one or the worst places we could be, being constantly irradiated by an unknown energy source, and we're probably going to die. You want more than that, you should have married a—"

The impact blew both of the Wests off their feet. But Hawk had just enough time to watch it blast the surviving tomato plants into powder. And then she was catapulted backwards, into a wall that did not stop inertia at all.