This is the second book of my Apocalypse series. Its prequel is The Arrangement (found in Novels & Novellas). While this story can be read on its own, I believe the reader will have deeper understanding and appreciation from having read that one first.
***
"Damn it, Brent. I can't just drop everything and jump on a plane halfway across the world, because of another of your crazy theories," Lauren Masters was losing patience with her ex-husband.
Brent Jacobs was brilliant. A genius, in fact. It was what had attracted her to him from the moment they met at summer science camp. She had been just nine, and at twelve he was already the star of their little world. His ideas were extreme at times, more fiction than science, but always with enough basis in accepted principles not to be easily dismissed. They had been an unlikely pairing.
Of course, it had been a decade before they became anything more than friends. His All-American blond good-looks and blue eyes set him apart from other doctoral candidates at Oxford. She was a lowly undergraduate taking his tutorial on plate tectonics. With her Scottish ginger hair, freckles, and hips her Grandmam called 'childbearing,' the last thing she expected was for Brent to renew the adolescent flame that had resulted in her first kiss.
But from the beginning, he called it a meeting of the minds. And when their bodies met a few months later, Lauren swore it was a nine point eight on the Richter scale. But their marriage had ended more like the Pacific Ring of Fire...seemingly constant eruptions, molten lava, and endless destruction.
"Lauren, listen to me." He pleaded on the other end of the video conference.
Even in the dim light that enveloped him, she could see the dark circles and worry lines that were beginning to mar his gorgeous visage. Of course, at forty, most men had a few lines here and there. But they seemed deeper, more pronounced than they had just a few weeks ago when he had visited.
"Lauren, god damn it. Those are my girls too. And I want, NEED to know they are safe." She could see him running his fingers through his short-cropped hair with just enough waves to tempt any woman to do the same. Goddess knew she had loved doing it. So many, many times.
"Brent, I am in the middle of exams here. I have two papers in the final stages of edits for Science and the Royal Society. And Elise has not been doing well lately. I was called to school twice this week. You know that she cannot manage these kinds of sudden changes. It just isn't possible right now," she tried to sound logical even if she knew his once great mind was beyond logic.
He sighed heavily as his fingers scrunched in his short hair. Lauren knew what that meant; Brent was finished arguing. "I did not want it to come to this," he said before the screen went black.
Lauren considered trying to ring him back. Demand to know what he meant by 'come to this.' Her skin prickled. When he was determined, Brent was almost like the tsunamis that they studied, unstoppable and dangerous to anything or anyone that stood in his way.
But the clock on her office wall reminded her that she had just half an hour to get across town to the special school that their daughter attended. Picking up her keys and donning the rain slicker that hung on the back of her office door, she opened the door.
An odd feeling stopped her for a moment. She looked back inside the small office with its dark bookshelves and rows upon rows of texts and journals. The small window behind her desk provided little light on a dreary English spring day like this. She felt as if she were forgetting something. More accurately as if she would forget it, as if she had to memorize this place.
A woman of science, Lauren was never comfortable with these odd sensations that came over her occasionally. Her Irish grandmother had called it the 'sight' and claimed it was a gift that ran strongly in the women of their family. As much as Lauren had loved her eccentric Grandmam, it was all just mystic rubbish as far as she was concerned.
As ridiculous as the theories that Brent had pursued and espoused for the past seven years...doomsday prophesies that caught the Internet afire. When an eminent scientist and former 'golden boy,' like Brent spoke, it gave needless credence to radicals.
Lauren walked swiftly across the lush green lawns dotted with the austere buildings of learning that had stood for centuries as a beacon to the world's greatest minds. Before Elise's birth and their divorce, Brent had been as much a part of this place as she was.
But as they sought out other great minds in the hopes of unlocking their child's potential, Brent had drifted more and more towards radical pseudo-science. Lauren recognized that he had always stood upon the edge of accepted theory, but with each disappointment, he seemed to slip further away from them and her.
Starting the engine of her eco-friendly hybrid car, she forced her mind from the past. Even though the school was just a couple of miles away, she focused on the road and driving. Not upon things which she could not change.
This school had a reputation as one of the best in the country in dealing with Autistic Spectrum Disorders such as Elise's. But over the past month, her daughter's increasingly erratic outbursts had strained even their resources. If Lauren were honest with herself, Elise's behaviors lately were straining her emotional reserves.
She loved her youngest child, but sometimes she could not help wishing things had been different. Wishing that Elise had been as bright and caring as her older sister Megan. Wishing that science could give them the key to unlocking the world in which her child lived. Wishing that just once when she hugged Elise at the end of the day, her child would look into her eyes, smile and embrace her back.
But as her father had said when her mother left them for another man and family, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride."
***
Brent Jacobs ran his fingers through his hair, stopping halfway and bunching them up until the mild pain registered enough to quiet his mind.
His ex-wife had never been one to 'buy his snake oil' as they used to tease about it jovially. She was always the first to challenge his theories, to punch holes in them. And he was a better man and scientist for it.
Damn it; he missed that almost as much as he missed making love to her until neither could breathe and then falling asleep in one another's arms, too tired to even move. Of course, waking her up with a steaming cup of her favorite English breakfast tea only to make love again was not bad either. The perfect start to the day. A perfect start that Brent had not known for over seven years now. Seven long lonely, celibate years. Because once you tasted the kind of love they shared, twin flames Grandmam called it, you did not settle for anything less.
No, seven years of missing her perfect mind. The only one that could ever match his own...since that summer when the tiny red-head with the freckles, big green eyes, and attitude had spoiled his summer fun at science camp. He never stood a chance once his childhood nemesis began to blossom into womanhood. She was the only one he wanted — the only one he ever would.
He missed the team that they had always been. He was the big ideas man and she the logistician. The only one that could make his ideas work. And he needed that right now. Almost as much as he needed to protect her and their daughters. Lives depended on it. Lives of people he cared about.
Over the past twenty years, he had seen enough lives destroyed at the whim of Mother Nature. But none of that, not even the worse, that still brought the occasional nightmare when he awoke trembling, sheets tangled, his bed wet with sweat, not even that utter destruction would match the global scale of what he knew was to come.
But what he knew did not matter as much as what he did not know...when. And Lauren held that key. If anyone could tweak the algorithms of their simulation to give an accurate enough prediction to save lives, it was his wife.
Ex-wife, he corrected himself. But that word never seemed right. He smiled as he thought of the sad country song he had first heard as a little boy. Yes, Lauren Masters Jacobs was the only woman he had ever loved and the only one he ever would. And that would not change until the day they placed a wreath upon his door and carried him away. He found himself humming the melody as he fought back the tears.
