The Carrington Warning

Dr. Lena Vasquez stands at the lectern in the Hall of the Americas and tells a room of dignitaries that a coronal mass ejection larger than anything on record is already in transit, a billion-ton wave of charged particles that will burn out every transformer on the continent. Ground the flights, she tells them. Harden the grid. Act now. Senator Harrison thanks her for her passion and reminds the room that she predicted the end of the world two years ago, too. The applause starts at the back and rolls forward.

She leaves the stage without finishing her slides, believing she still has hours. She is standing at a corridor window, trying to breathe, when the building's hum stops and the lights along the Mall start to die in sequence, like falling dominoes. The traffic signals go black. A plane comes in low and banks too hard, clips the top of a hotel and vanishes into orange fire. Then the screaming starts.

Being right has bought Lena nothing but a head start. Her go-bag is six blocks away in her hotel room, packed three days ago: water purification tablets, a first-aid kit, a printed map of the eastern seaboard, a satellite phone that is probably useless now. Between her and it are twelve floors of pitch-black stairwell and a capital in panic. Somewhere in Colorado is a number she kept meaning to call.