Sunfail (2015) by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile [Savile, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781617754067
Google: Fp6OCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1617754064
Goodreads: 25329976
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-10-08T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

“HEY, CHRISTIAN! DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?”

Christian Eikner glanced up, his frown turning into a begrudging smile as he realized who was interrupting him. “For you, always.” He waved a hand at the others he’d been talking to and broke away from their little group, stepping toward her. “Been awhile, how’re you doing, Finn?”

“You know how it is, all work and no play makes Finn a dull chica.” She shook her head, shrugged, then smiled. “You?”

Christian rubbed a hand over his head. She wasn’t sure if he was basically saying he’d lost a few more hairs, or if he was trying to flatten out the few errant ones that remained.

He was a nice guy, and regularly joked that Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart had made him cool. She’d never had the heart to tell him not even an industrial freezer could make him cool. Cool just wasn’t in his DNA.

“Not too bad, but as you can imagine, we’re a little busy trying to keep the lights on everywhere,” he said with that self-deprecating grin of his. She looked over his shoulder to where his coworkers were waiting impatiently for him to be done flirting. He seemed to sense the daggers being aimed at his back. “So, what’s up?”

“I have a question and I figure you’re the one person I know who could answer it.”

“I always like questions I can answer. Fire away.”

She wasn’t sure of any other way to say this, she wasn’t even sure what, exactly, she was thinking, but it seemed to make sense in a crazy way and she just wanted him to tell her she was wrong so she could drop it. “This is going to sound nuts, but do you think there’s been a shift in the magnetic poles?” He looked at her, and for a moment she expected him to laugh. He didn’t. She pushed on: “I’m thinking about the blackouts, obviously, but the animals too, the birds falling from the sky, the stampedes from Yellowstone, the dogs, the shoals of fish. The end-of-the-world stuff. All of it.” She had his full attention.

“I’m going to ask you a question in return, Finn: where did you hear about this?” His usual easy-going, affably shy demeanor vanished. He seemed . . . what? Angry?

His friends were staring. One of them started toward the two of them.

Great, an audience.

“I remembered something I heard in a lecture,” she explained quickly, trying to marshal her thoughts into some semblance of order. “This history professor was talking about significant natural events and how they’ve shaped our world and our culture. It was about the nature of societal collapse—how things didn’t have to be asteroids from the sky and huge extinction events to end a society as we define it.”

“And that got you thinking about polar shifts?”

“During part of the lecture he mentioned the last polar shift, which was, what, maybe forty thousand years ago? Sometime during the last glacial period?” Christian nodded, confirming her time line. “But one of

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