CHAPTER 5
EVE
The test is at dawn, and I watch it from the courtyard gate, Sasha in the sling and a bottle warming in my pocket, because Mason asked me to watch.
“First flight hardware with the Mort component integrated,” he said at four a.m., dressed for the blockhouse, kissing each twin, kissing me twice. “It either works or we learn something. Watch from the courtyard, you can see the pad from the gate. I want you to see this one.”
I want you to see this one. After everything, he still believes I am his good luck. The terrible thing is that I get up, and I wrap the sling, and I go outside to be his good luck, because five weeks of rage has not yet beaten three years of habit.
The desert at dawn is pink and gold and silent.
Delia comes out with Simon, bundled against the cold, and we stand at the gate with two security guys in a golf cart parked nearby and a pair of binoculars somebody thought to leave on the courtyard table.
The rocket is a white needle on the horizon.
The countdown comes over someone’s radio, thin and far away.
Ignition. Even from miles out, you feel it in your chest before you hear it, this deep cough of power, and then the rocket climbs, straight and clean and beautiful, trailing fire, and for about forty seconds it is the most magnificent thing human beings know how to do.
Then it stops.
There’s a flash, wrong, high up, too bright and too sideways. The radio squawks. The white needle becomes pieces — I can see it happen, see the clean line of the flight break into falling sparks — and the sound reaches us a second later, a long rolling crack that goes on and on.
“Get inside,” one of the security guys says, suddenly very awake, and the radio on his shoulder erupts.
For the next hour, the world is noise.
Inside, the TV is on with the sound low, because the news already has it. A Tailor rocket failing on camera is the biggest story on earth before the pieces have finished falling. UNMANNED TEST FAILURE, the chyron says. NO INJURIES REPORTED.
They keep replaying it, the clean climb, the flash, the break, over and over, and I finally turn it off because I cannot watch my husband’s dream come apart on a loop while my daughter sleeps.
Delia feeds Simon in the armchair, unbothered, or acting unbothered, which with Delia is indistinguishable.
“My second husband worked oil rigs,” she says, to nobody in particular.
“You learn the sound of a normal day versus the other kind.” She listens to the radios crackling outside. “This is the other kind.”
The compound loudspeaker — I did not know there was a compound loudspeaker; there is a compound loudspeaker — asks all non-essential personnel to standby for transport instructions. Non-essential.
I look down at Sasha, asleep against me in the sling, warm and heavy and essential, and I think about how the same building can hold two completely different meanings of that word and never notice the seam.
Mason texts from crisis command. We’re on it.
Then: Nobody was hurt. Hardware’s gone but nobody was hurt.
I text back: I know. I watched. He sends a broken-heart emoji, and I stare at it, this little cartoon of grief, while outside the window the smoke rises over the most expensive failure of his life, and I realize he has asked about the babies.
Not once. I scroll up to be sure. Ignition, fire, debris, evacuation, and the twins exist in none of it.
I don’t think he’s forgotten them. That’s what frightens me. I think he has filed them — safe, handled, in the good column, under security has you — and the part of his brain that does the filing has been winning for a long time.
Debris comes down across the exclusion area, which is what the exclusion area is for, which is what everyone says on every channel.
But the exclusion area is desert scrub and it is June, and by the time the sun is properly up there are columns of smoke on three sides of the horizon, and the wind is doing something the models didn’t plan for, and the word evacuate starts moving through the compound the way smoke moves everywhere at once, from no single source.
Mason calls at six-forty. His voice is a different instrument in a crisis, flat and fast. “You’re okay.
Residence is not in the debris field. But there’s a fire front moving and they may order a precautionary evacuation.
If that happens, security handles you. Vaughn’s team has you and the twins as a designated package.
You go where they put you, you don’t wait for me, do you understand? ”
“Where will you be?”
“Crisis command.” And then, quieter, a crack in the flat voice: “It’s bad, Eve. It’s really bad. I love you. Security has you.”
He hangs up. I look at Delia. Delia is already packing with the speed of a woman who has understood the situation faster than the situation has understood itself.
The order comes at eight. Precautionary evacuation of the residential zone. It means probably fine, and it means leaving anyway, and it means nobody is willing to say out loud what the wind might do to a fire front between now and noon.
I pack the diaper bag with shaking hands and then repack it because I’ve put the formula in without the scoop, and Delia silently takes it away from me and does it properly, the wedge, the bottles, the log book, Sasha’s scale, all of it, in ninety seconds flat.
“The napkin,” I say suddenly. “The framed one, on the dresser.”
She looks at me for half a second and she goes and gets it and wraps it in a burp cloth and puts it in the bag, and she doesn’t ask why, and I could cry, except there is no time for crying, there is only the door and the parking area and the smoke.
And here is what I learn, in the parking area behind the compound, over the next forty minutes, while Sasha screams against my chest and Simon screams in Delia’s arms and the smoke gets thicker and the light goes a strange filtered orange: in an emergency, everyone is calm, everyone is competent, everyone has a plan, and the plan has an order.
The order is not me.
The first transport goes to the fire crews.
Obviously. Then the evac vans are reassigned — I watch it happen, I watch Vaughn, Mason’s security chief, a man who has been unfailingly kind to me, take a call and go pale — reassigned to pull the propulsion team out of a test bunker on the far side of the pad, because the propulsion team cannot be replaced and everyone else, in the honest reckoning of crisis, can wait for the next vehicle.
“Ma’am,” Vaughn says to me, hand over the phone, hating every syllable, “there’s a helicopter coming in for Mr. Tailor and the command staff. I can get you and the babies on it. It’s going to the secondary control center, but it’s out of here—”
The helicopter comes in low and hard over the compound, rotor wash flattening the smoke, kicking the dust into a storm, and I have one baby crushed to my chest and one in Delia’s arms and the noise is enormous, apocalyptic, the loudest thing I have ever stood under, and I watch Mason come out of the blockhouse at a dead run with his headset still on.
And Jessica is with him.
She is right beside him, matching his stride, one hand on his back to steer him through the rotor wash, and they run for the helicopter together, and I understand before anyone explains anything that the seats on that helicopter are assigned.
Command staff. The CEO. The CEO of Mort Dynamics, whose engineers are needed at the secondary control center, whose component just blew the sky apart, whose presence is, by the only math being done today, mission-critical.
Mason sees me. Even through the dust and the noise and the chaos, he sees me — I know he does, because he stops, half-turned, one foot on the helicopter skid, and he looks at me standing there with his daughter on my chest and his son screaming in another woman’s arms and debris ash falling out of the sky.
He points at me. Then he points at Vaughn, and makes a gesture — clear, unmistakable, decisive, the gesture of a man solving a problem — get her on a vehicle — and then he’s in, and Jessica’s in beside him, and the door slides shut.
The helicopter rises. The wash hits us, hot and full of grit, and I turn my body around Sasha to shield her face, and I stand there in the storm of my husband’s departure and watch him disappear into the smoke-orange sky.
Here is what I will think about later, on the bus, and in the weeks after, and at three in the morning for a long time: he was not cruel.
He was not even careless. He looked right at me and genuinely believed I was being handled, because in his world there is always a Vaughn, always a team, always a plan for the people who matter, and the people who matter get handled in priority order.
Mason reached command. Jessica reached command. The engineers reached command. Every piece of the machine he built had a seat and a plan and a person accountable for it.
His wife and his five-week-old twins were designated a package, and packages wait for capacity.
Vaughn gets us out on a bus, eventually, a crowded shuttle full of kitchen staff and junior engineers and a firefighter with a bandaged hand who gives up his seat for Delia and the babies.
It is hot and it smells of smoke and everyone’s ash-dusted and nobody is talking much. Sasha finally cries herself out against my collarbone. Simon, in Delia’s arms, sleeps hard and total, a boy who has used up everything he had.
I sit by the window with my daughter’s heartbeat against mine and watch the compound shrink behind us, the smoke columns leaning in the wind, the pad, the blockhouse, the whole gleaming empire.
Across the aisle, two junior engineers are talking in low, shell-shocked voices.
The younger one has ash in his eyebrows and keeps saying he can’t believe it, and the older one, a woman with a Tailor badge and kind eyes, keeps saying the data will tell them, the data always tells them.
At some point she notices me, and her face rearranges itself as she places me — the boss’s wife, the twins, table eleven — and she gives me the small, careful smile people give to grief they don’t know how to price.
“They’ll figure out what happened,” she offers. “They always do. Mr. Tailor’s the best there is at this.”
“He is,” I say, and I mean it. That was never the question. That was never, in three years of marriage and five weeks of parenthood, the question.
She goes back to her friend. The bus rattles on.
Somewhere behind us, on the road we just came down, a convoy of emergency vehicles is going the other way, lights on, toward the fire with more capacity, more priority, more of the machine getting exactly what it needs exactly when it needs it.
Nobody on this bus begrudges them. That’s the thing about priority order.
Everyone in it can see the logic. You can ride in the last vehicle out and still agree, technically, with every decision that put you there.
Agreement is not the same as being all right. I am technically in agreement, and I have never been less all right in my life.
My phone buzzes.
Mason: Are you out? Tell me you’re out.
Then: Eve please.
Then: I thought you were on the helicopter. Vaughn said transport was handling you. I swear to God I thought you were being handled.
I look at the messages. I look at my daughter, asleep now, exhausted, five pounds eleven ounces of trust, her face still blotchy from screaming through her father’s departure.
Handled.
I type nothing. I put the phone face-down on the seat, and I hold my baby, and the bus carries us out of the desert, and somewhere up ahead of us in the sky is a helicopter with my whole marriage in it, and I can feel, with a strange cold clarity, that it is not coming back down the same.