Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

COUNTDOWN TO ZERO HOUR 12 HOURS AND 14 MINUTES

EVERYONE IN THE control room wondered if they had just watched a man die.

Ethan stared at Maggie. Maggie stared at the pool’s water-level meter. Had it worked or not? Were they okay or, after all that, were they still on the brink of ruin?

There was nothing to do but wait.

In the silence, it all replayed in Ethan’s head.

For the rest of his life, however long that might be, he would never shake the panic and chaos he had heard over the radio, the soundtrack to the images they’d all witnessed on the audio-less security feed from the cameras inside the spent fuel pool building. They’d all stared helplessly at the screen as their own fate and the life of one man entwined in one horrific scene. And now that it was over, they didn’t even know if it had worked.

The possibility that it could all have been for nothing was almost too much to bear. After all that, they could be right back to where they’d started. And the most terrifying part of all was that there was no plan B.

“Maggie. Where are we at?” Ethan said, pacing.

The controller never took her eyes off the gauge. “Still too early to know,” she said.

Ethan grabbed the back of a chair and pushed it forward, banging it into a desk. Everyone flinched and turned.

“Did it work or did it not?” he said, his voice loud and angry.

“Both inflow pumps are on,” Vikram said. “They’re flowing at max—”

“Yes, but did it work ? If it didn’t, we need to know that. We need to know that now .”

Ethan’s face was bright red as he paced back and forth like a caged animal. Everyone glanced at each other, unsure of what to do. That he expected them to know if it had worked was not only irrational, it was impossible. They couldn’t have the figures yet. It would take some time to see if the water going in was holding and rising.

“If it didn’t work,” he said, his voice booming, “then we need to find—”

“Okay, Ethan,” Joss said quietly, her hand under his elbow. “Let’s just calm—”

“No!” he said, wrenching his arm away. “‘Let’s just calm down’—no, Joss. How about let’s just do our fucking jobs.”

“Ethan.”

“How about let’s just not kill a man for no reason.”

“Ethan—”

“How about let’s just try to stop a nuclear meltdown from destroying—”

“Ethan!”

Joss’s final scream worked like a slap across the face. He looked around with a dazed What just happened? expression, his mouth moving as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know what. Instead, without a word, he left the room, the door closing quietly behind him.

The only one who didn’t watch any of this was Maggie. She just kept staring at the water-level gauge, waiting for the needle to go up.

Gloved hands pumped rhythmically on Steve’s chest under the bright lights of the decontamination unit. Rapid-fire orders were shouted, muffled beneath thick, redundant layers of protective hazmat gear. The room of medics scrambled, knowing every second meant something.

“He’s got a pulse,” someone said as someone else unbuckled the dive helmet and slid it off. Steve’s eyes were closed, his skin blue, his lips parted; a faint pulse was one of the few indications that there was still any hope. Layer by layer, everything Steve wore was stripped off him and tossed in a pile in a corner of the room. Soap and water washed his bare skin, which was rapidly changing from pink to red. Raw, open wounds on the tips of his fingers were expanding. In less than a minute, Steve was naked, exposed and laid bare in a room filled with people who were completely covered and protected from head to toe.

“Get that out of here! Now!” someone yelled, gesturing toward the contaminated wetsuit and gear. It was shedding radiation, working against their efforts, but in an all-hands-on-deck moment, there wasn’t time to dispose of it properly. Someone grabbed the pile, chucked it into the hall, then got back to work.

The gear lay in a puddle in the empty, quiet hallway. Muffled, chaotic sounds of shouted vital signs and running water continued inside the room. From beneath the heap of wetsuit, Steve’s personal dosimeter bleated out a steady warning. Down the hall, standing in the threshold of the break room, Matt was the only one who heard it.

Ethan could just make out the Mississippi River through the branches of the trees. The sky had partially clouded over, a gray, monochromatic coating over patches of soft blue. If it were any other day, or even a mere handful of hours earlier, it would have been an idyllic scene.

But it wasn’t any other day, it was the day the unthinkable had happened. He watched the rising smoke that came from smoldering piles of crash debris and the flames that still billowed out of others.

The firefighters and National Guardsmen down below moved with skilled precision, individuals working as cohesive units. Men and women exposed to the worst of it so that other men and women would be spared the worst of it. He wondered how many of them had thought, This isn’t what I signed up for . He doubted many had.

Hearing footsteps down the hall, Ethan didn’t bother turning. He knew who it was. Joss came up beside him and stared out the window too. Neither of them spoke for some time. They just stood there. Remembering what had been, looking at what was, wondering what would come.

“They’re probably close to North Dakota by now,” Ethan said finally.

Joss glanced over. Ethan didn’t look back. “Your family?”

He nodded. “She knows not to take any main roads, so I’m not worried about I-35. But maybe they’re stuck in traffic anyway. I don’t know.”

Joss didn’t say anything. They both just looked out at the destruction.

“We have a code,” Ethan said after a while. “It’s different depending on which direction to head. But the idea is the same. If Kristin gets a text with the code, she knows. Something happened. Get the kids and get out.”

Joss waited. Ethan realized with amazement that even after all these years, Joss knew when he had more to say but wasn’t yet able to access it. Impatience was one of her strongest personality traits. But with him, for whatever reason, she’d always had the patience to wait while he found his way to where he needed to go. Today, that grace only made the guilt worse.

“I don’t remember what I did first,” he confessed. “Did I start a checklist or did I text my wife? I was in charge. I was at the controls when it happened. This was on my watch. And my instinct was to put myself first. My family. I put them first. Over everything.”

“You’re human,” Joss said. “Anyone would do that.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Yes. I would.”

He didn’t respond. For the first time, he finally understood what she had always tried to tell him. She wanted to change the world. He wanted to have a family. He didn’t understand why they couldn’t do both. She didn’t get how he didn’t see they couldn’t.

Today, he got it.

“There’s a lot you’ve been right about,” he said. “You tried to warn us.”

“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” she said.

“Joss, your dissertation was titled ‘Nuclear Spent Fuel Pools: A Problem That Without a Solution Will End Mankind.’ That’s not hindsight.”

“Well. Feels a little on the nose now. But yeah, I tried to warn you.”

There was a silence between them that, if they were honest, had started fifteen years ago. After a while, Joss was the first to talk.

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said.

He didn’t know if she meant today or then. “What wouldn’t?”

“If we’d stayed together.”

She meant then . As if the guilt already weren’t enough, his mind went back to that day. Driving to her house to pick her up. The look on her face as he put her bags in the trunk and she’d realized his bags weren’t there. How hard they’d both cried during the ride. How she’d walked into the airport alone and never looked back.

“If you’d come with me to Washington,” she said, “if we’d taken on the suits together, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. They won’t change unless they have to.”

“So that’s why you came back.”

“I know when I’m beat,” she said, her voice tinged with resentment. “Wait—you didn’t think I came back for you?”

For the first time since that morning, Ethan actually cracked a smile. This was a filling-in-the-blanks fifteen years in the making. This was what healing looked like.

“At least you tried,” he said.

“I tried. Every court needs a jester.”

There was something in her voice when she said that—after all, he knew her emotional junk drawer as well as she knew his—something in her tone that said she now understood too. Understood what he was trying to say. That you didn’t have to spend your one life saving the world just because you saw the problem. It didn’t have to be you. There was also something to be said for just living a life, and that didn’t make you a coward or selfish. There was value in enjoying what’s here, what’s beautiful, what’s now. Not overthinking it. Just enough is enough. Sure, you could spend your life tilting at windmills, but to what end?

“Joss, the world needs people crazy enough to try to save it.”

She smiled ruefully. “But it’s only worth saving if it’s full of people whose first impulse is to protect the ones they love.”

They turned at the sound of running feet coming down the hall. Dwight was breathless, his face unreadable. When he spoke, there was a slight tremble to his voice.

“We got a reading on the water level.”