Chapter 74: Jack

My eyes traced the familiar lines of constellations I’d known since I was a kid. Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper hang over the mountains to the north. All there. All accounted for. Maybe the Oracle had glitched. Maybe the power surge had given her a nightmare. A man can hope, can't he?

And then I saw it.

It was subtle. So subtle, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. A patch of sky, right near the edge of the Milky Way's faint, cloudy band. It wasn't black, like the rest of the space between the stars. It was a deeper color. A color that didn't exist. It was the color of a hole. It was the color of nothing.

I stared, my breath catching in my throat. As I watched, a tiny pinprick of light at the edge of the patch—a star that had been there a second ago—vanished. It didn't explode. It didn't fade. It was just… gone. Edited out of existence. The nothingness had eaten it.

"Maddie," I croaked, my voice a dry rasp. "Look up. To the left of Orion's belt."

She followed my gaze. I felt the tremor that went through her as she saw it too. Her hand found my arm, her fingers digging into my bicep like a vise.

"What is that?" she whispered, and her voice was filled with a dawning, cosmic dread that dwarfed any fear of gangsters or cartels.

I didn't have an answer. All I knew was that Lynn wasn't crazy. I knew that my gun felt like a child’s toy. And I knew that our war for Calico, our fight against the scum of the Earth, had just become terrifyingly, laughably small.

We weren't fighting for a town anymore.

We were standing on the edge of a plate, looking up at the mouth that was about to eat it.

"We need to get back," I said, pulling a stunned Maddie back toward the warehouse. "We need more guns."

It was the stupidest, most human thing I could think of to say. And right then, it was the only thing that made any sense.