Thirty days.
The countdown has started, North America shivers under the shadow of a massive alien spacecraft, and humanity is hurtling toward an unknown future that lurks at the end of the timer. Somewhere, somehow, the heroes are making their plan...
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PEARSON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
AUGUST 2, 11:32 PM
The girl beside me checks her dead phone for the thirteenth time since the turn of the hour. I didn't mean to start counting. I assumed she actually had a signal at first, but that was always more hope than rational observation. Hope that anyone had a signal here. That the wifi outage was just a tech glitch on the airport's side. That the massive, blinking brick in the sky that's wiped out all communications for the last eight days decided it was done with us, and just up and disappeared.
I check my watch. It reads the time like it should, and I want so badly to lean over and tell the girl half-past eleven just so she'll stop checking. Her phone screen is blank. It has been since day two of her arrival, and she's been stranded like the rest of us for the better part of seven days. Or maybe she just moved here from a different terminal. The lineup at this gate's unofficial charging station has got so long, someone's started monitoring the outlets, kicking each new batch of people off when they exhaust their quarter-hour. It's enough to put a phone on life support, but I haven't even seen this girl try.
She's not looking for the time. I know that. But admitting it means admitting to hypocrisy, because I haven't stopped checking my living watch or dead phone either.
Gate D35, Terminal 1 is a study in exhausted travelers. I haven't talked to many, but I recognize the woman with the anxious toddler from my flight from Portage la Prairie. I feel for that kid. The old man who sat beside them on the airplane seems to have bonded with her, and has kept her busy with anything from nursery rhymes to origami boxes since our two-hour layover in Toronto saved our lives. The little bay around the gate is carpeted with makeshift beds, but there's a gap beside the window where you could still see smoke off the runway's end until yesterday. Nobody wants to be reminded that our plane would have been among the next to leave.
I pull my jacket tighter. It doesn't matter anyway. The wind that downed a jet and swatted two small aircraft off the tarmac when the alien craft appeared hasn't left us. Not really. There's a lull when the sun peeks between our ground and sky horizons for a half-hour twice a day. For the remaining twenty-three, you could convince me Toronto sat above the Arctic Circle. That it was natural for the sun to make such a fleeting appearance, and that December—not August—was responsible for blasting us with single-digit temperatures and that relentless, frigid wind.
The girl checks her lifeless phone again. It's 11:43.
My bedtime was an hour ago, but though I've slept less than a college student for the last eight days, my body refuses to feel tired. Probably because I can't shut my brain up any more than I can stop my heart from beating. Maybe tonight's the night they'll start allowing stranded passengers onto the planes. I still see them leaving every quarter hour, blinking lights like inverse shooting stars off to make friends with the spacecraft overhead. I know they won't get up to that altitude. They're being careful. They must be, if they're still allowing planes to fly at all, carrying billionaires or injured people out to safer cities where the sky still remembers what color it's supposed to be.
