Aurora(17)

You just gotta be careful not to say it out loud.

Thom’s Suburban swung around and pulled to a stop ten feet from where Ann-Sophie stood waiting. Thom opened his door himself, moving faster than the airport worker who was lunging toward it, and he opened it with such conviction that the guy rapped his knuckles on the handle.

“Sorry,” Thom threw at him, and he meant it, but, hey, c’mon, how many times have I asked Lisa to tell you guys I open my own goddamn doors? He covered the ten feet between himself and Ann-Sophie in a rush. He pulled her into an embrace.

“You’re all right,” he murmured in her ear. “The kids are fine. We are going somewhere safe.” He was holding her tightly, and she returned the embrace for a moment, but when she moved to pull away, he held on a moment longer, not releasing her. “Just take a second. Stay calm.”

“I’m fine. Let go of me.”

He did, and she pulled back. He was surprised by the animosity in her eyes. Really? Now? Sure, they’d had that Thing they’d been trying to work through, but every married couple had their thing, and aren’t times of crisis supposed to bring people together? But he realized, as he looked into Ann-Sophie’s bottle-green eyes, that nothing had been forgiven, nothing was going to be put behind them, and he was about to trade a nineteen-thousand-square-foot house overlooking the Pacific Ocean for a thirty-two-hundred-square-foot apartment in a reconditioned nuclear-missile silo a hundred miles outside of Provo, Utah, that he would share with a vindictive Nordic witch.

For the first time that day, the end of the world was sounding like a teensy bit of a drag.

Over Ann-Sophie’s shoulder, Thom saw his second distressing sight. Lisa, his assistant, was hurrying toward him, her heels click-clicking in that self-important way he hated. She had her hands out in front of her, palms down, making a “please be calm” gesture before anybody had even begun to freak out.

Thom pulled away from Ann-Sophie and spoke to Lisa before she could speak to him. “Where are the kids?”

“On board.”

It occurred to Thom later—much later—that if your wife, the mother of your children, is angry with you for a thousand offenses and holds myriad grievances and you’re about to go into isolation together and you’d rather not enrage her further, it is better to direct questions about her children’s welfare to her and not to your assistant.

Lisa, no dummy, caught herself after her instinctive two-word reply and gestured to Ann-Sophie, as if to cede the matter to her. Ann-Sophie just shook her head, the question already answered. “Yep.”

“Bags?”

Lisa hesitated. She was a likable person, brisk, competent, and not looking to her job for social advancement. She was extremely well paid, which was all she asked, aside from a modicum of respect, which she got from everyone she dealt with except Thom. Her boss could be snappish, demanding, and never, ever remembered a single personal detail she shared with him. In that regard, Thom’s spouse and his assistant had an unspoken sense of allegiance, and an uneasy peace.

Ann-Sophie answered Thom’s question about the luggage on Lisa’s behalf, completing the role reversal between spouse and personal assistant. “The bags are on the plane, Thom. The clothes were last washed a week ago, the phones are charged, and the batteries were all refreshed in February.” She looked at Lisa. “Would you like me to tell him?”

Thom looked back and forth between them. “Tell me what? What’s going on? Why are we—”

He stopped mid-sentence as the first Suburban, the one from which Ann-Sophie had alighted, was pulling away, giving him a clear view of the air stair that had been folded down from the Gulfstream. There, standing at the base of it, was a tall, athletic-looking man in his mid-forties in a crisp pilot’s uniform and aviator shades. Marques fully looked the part of the former Air Force pilot turned sky chauffeur and he was, in many ways, Thom’s favorite accoutrement of his success. His own pilot, a decorated veteran, no less, who was ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. And there he stood now, tall, fit, shoulders squared, chest thrust out, ready to lift them all the hell out of there and tear into the sky, headed for safety while the world lit on fire beneath them.

But Marques was not alone.

For a moment, Thom didn’t understand the image. His brain couldn’t decode the light waves that were reaching his retinas, couldn’t turn them into a rational perception that matched his understanding of reality. Marques, his pilot, his transportation guru, his getaway driver, for God’s sake, was not alone. There was a Black woman next to him, six or seven years younger than Marques, with the fingers of her right hand interlaced with the fingers of his left. OK, so Marques had a woman with him.

But it got even weirder. Because the woman, the one who was acting like Marques’s, uh, companion or something, had another human beside her. This person was small—maybe three feet high, so what’s that, four years old or so?—and this undersized human was clinging to the left leg of the woman for support and safety.

Marques has a fucking wife and kid? And he brought them?

“Marques needs to speak with you,” Lisa offered, pointlessly.

“No,” Thom said.

She hadn’t asked a question and wasn’t looking for a decision, so Thom’s answer made no real sense, except to him. To him, the single word meant “No, Marques cannot bring his fucking-news-to-me wife and kid to my fucking Sanctuary,” but he was too stunned to get the words out.