Chapter 9 - Gage #2
"Ash like powdered glass." She lets that sit for a breath.
"It's pulverized rock, sharp as anything, and it's going to come down for weeks.
Months or years, more likely. It'll bury fields, choke rivers, and blot the sun out enough to drop the temperature and kill growing seasons, and that's just it lying there being ash.
The real trouble starts when it gets wet.
There'll be acid rain coming down with it and through it, and ash plus rain doesn't make mud, my darlings, it makes something closer to wet concrete.
It sets up heavy and hard, and every flat roof holding a load of it will come down.
If you breathe enough of it dry it will mix with the fluid in your lungs and turn into a type of mud. It will be like drowning on dry land."
Stunned quiet rolls around the table. Kara has gone pale under her smudged makeup. Reid reaches over without looking and takes her hand, and Luna's arms wrap around her own middle.
"Are you saying that once it starts falling, we can't go outside at all?" I ask her in disbelief.
"Not without masks and some form of glasses to protect your eyes, and probably not for long even then.
When Luna and I did our shopping spree, I grabbed as many heavy-duty masks as I could.
" Gigi ticks her answers off with the ease of a woman who has been living with this fear longer than the rest of us have known it existed.
"It'll murder vehicle engines too. The filters clog and the grit chews everything inside them.
Any driving we do after it starts falling means rigging extra filtration, and even that buys hours, not days before it all needs to be swapped out. "
"What about the house?" I already know the answer from the way her eyes soften before I finish, and I hate it. "Are you telling us we can't stay here?"
She looks at Luna when she answers, and I've never heard her voice come out so gently.
"No, baby, we can't. I'm so sorry, but no regular structure is going to survive this.
We need somewhere big enough for all of us plus at least twenty more, because we're not the only people worth saving.
Somewhere with room to grow food when the sun can't do it for us.
And it needs to be strong enough to carry the weight of that ash as it builds, month after month, without so much as groaning. "
"So preferably underground," Torrin says. His voice is still wrecked, but his eyes are sharp again.
Gigi nods, and Mars leans forward with his forearms on the table. "What about heading into the mountains? There are cave systems out that way we could try to make work."
"Um, the mountains are a bad idea!" Reid flinches so hard his chair scrapes, and his head starts shaking before the words even get out, curls flying. "Like, a genuinely terrible idea. I know for a fact there's at least one very angry dragon flying around out there right now."
The whole table stops and stares at him in absolute silence. Reid looks around at all of us, lifts his shoulders, and gives us an expression that says, I know, right?
I scrub both hands down my face and leave them there for a second.
We've had a cracked moon, magic, soldiers, a super volcano, and now dragons on top of the whole pile.
The weariness rolls over me all at once, heavy enough that my bones feel it.
How much more is going to get thrown at this family before somebody cracks straight down the middle?
I pull a breath in through my nose, slow, the way Gramps taught me when the tractor wouldn't start and swearing at it stopped helping. Work the problem in front of you.
"What about a mine?" I put it out there as the thought forms. "The one I work at up north has drifts running deep into rock that are dry and stable. Ash could pile up there for years and never touch us."
"A mine is exactly the right idea, and that one is exactly the wrong mine." Gigi's nod turns into a frustrated headshake halfway through. "It's too far. I’m sure you know from your travels the roads aren't good, and we don't have the time to get stuck in a traffic jam."
"How long do we have?" Kara asks quietly.
"That depends entirely on the wind." Gigi's fingers find the cigarette again and roll it, back and forth.
"The high cloud from an eruption that size spreads no matter what, but the ash fall follows the weather.
If the westerlies hold, the worst of it blows east across the plains first, and we get two days, maybe three, before it circles back to us and the sky here starts coming down.
Should the wind swing out of the south instead, we could be seeing it in hours.
I'd plan for two days and pray for three, but I wouldn’t plan for more. "