He appeared to want to say more but closed his mouth. Shane regarded each of them.
“Shall we vote?”
As she packed her and Lali’s bags into the trunk of the Subaru and buckled her daughter into the booster seat, Shane marveled that Murdock’s car was already gone. Still military in his ability to rise at the crack of dawn. Quinn was still showering, and Kai would be the last to leave, going over the house with bleach in addition to the deep-cleaning crew that would arrive the next day. She and Lali had eight hours to Des Moines and another five by bus back to Lawrence. She was brooding on the dread of that interminable trip when she spotted a figure in the woods. At first, her stomach dropped. Her vision grayed. Specters of blue-jacketed FBI agents and SWAT killers, guns drawn, surrounding the cabin, ready to put a bullet through her and take her daughter. Shane even began to put her hands in the air. Then she realized the figure was just Allen. Wearing his dark toboggan cap and smoking. He waved. The hazy winter sun had been in her eyes.
The lump shot up her throat without warning, and she turned away from Lali. Do not let her see you cry again.
But to do this, she had to leave her daughter. She had to stalk off toward the woods, down the path that led to the lake. The early morning was awash in blue-gray mist, and Shane wanted nothing more than to simply vanish into it.
“Mama?” Lali wondered behind her. “Mama!”
“Just a minute,” Shane yelled back over her shoulder. But she kept walking, practically running. The tears broke, and her feet carried her farther until she was in the woods, alone, huffing and weeping, the crystal sheen of the lake visible just beyond the mist.
A moment later Allen emerged from the fog.
“Shane?” He approached her carefully, his old-man pants flapping around stocky legs. “You okay?”
She was trembling all over. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she whipped away from it. “Get off.”
Tears coated her face, snot crusted her upper lip like Lali, who never felt embarrassed by letting a tantrum collect mucus there. Allen stayed a step back.
“You’re upset we’re not going to murder people.”
“Fuck you, Allen,” she spat. She started toward the shore to get away from him. He followed.
“Shane.” She kept walking. “Shane, stop.” He grabbed her elbow, and when she tried to yank it away, he held on. “Stop.” He pulled her to him. “The vote went against you. It’s over. Trust me, I know.” He took her shoulders and looked her in the eyes. She thought of her parents and what had happened to them. “Shane, you made the argument that had to be made,” he said.
Her cheeks were freezing, and her ears sang with pain. The CO2 plumed around each of their mouths and mingled between them. She was so lonely all the time.
“That’s not why—” she sobbed. “What are we doing? It’s too late. We are too late.”
“It’s not too late.” He pulled her against him. She let herself be held because what else could she do? She lay one pained ear against his shoulder, and he covered the other with his gloved hand, like he knew how much it hurt.
“Of course it’s too late,” she sobbed. “Of course it is.”
Shane wept. Everyone stood by watching in disbelief as their home slipped away, looking at each other, wondering if anyone would do anything about it. The five of them were supposed to be the affirming flame. The last hope. Gazing through tears at the arachnid limbs of the trees, the wind blew frigid air into her eyes, and she knew they stood there, in this moment, at a fiery crossroads.
T
HE
Y
EARS OF
R
AIN AND
T
HUNDER
: P
ART
III
2031
We were still in the office at midnight when Kate got a text and everything changed. We couldn’t have known it then, but it was the moment when the bill began to fall apart, when the internal schisms of A Fierce Blue Fire widened into chasms, and nearly ten years of work began to evaporate in the span of a few weeks.
It was July 29, 2030, a grueling Monday because we’d already been in the office all weekend. Everyone had left for the night except myself, Kate, Liza, Tom, Coral, and Rekia. After being stalled for the past five months, our legislation had found life in the Senate. The addition of massive pork projects had a waffling Ohio senator coming aboard and another from Iowa said she was close. This would be enough to carry it at least into reconciliation with the House version. We were deep in an argument, Tom and Rekia butting heads, Coral trying to referee, when Kate interrupted.
“Liza,” she said, staring at her phone. “Turn on CNN.”
At first, there was still confusion as to what had happened, but by 3 a.m. of July 30 we had the basics: three bombs, three power plants, and a communiqué from 6Degrees, also known as the Weathermen, claiming responsibility. We all sat there, reading and watching until dawn. I remember Kate’s face tight, her eyes haggard, and the one thing she uttered before she went home to collapse from exhaustion: “Motherfuckers just cost us our Ohio senator.”
But it would be worse than that. A Fierce Blue Fire had made a huge bet: that we and our followers could fundamentally realign the American political system, and when Mary Randall won with a bipartisan coalition of voters, vowing to take aggressive action on climate change, it all felt within reach. Kate and the rest of us had done the slow, careful work of movement building. We’d constructed Outposts in communities long abandoned by the Left, and as renewable industries spread, it began to create politically contestable areas that had been rock-solid red for generations, all of it paving the way for Randall and a coalition of climate hawks to take control, a once-unthinkable development.
That night I recalled the euphoria following the ’28 election, when our gamble on Randall held the promise of a religious awakening, and the dust storm that followed just weeks later. A decade of drought followed by insatiable winds that picked up what looked like most of the soil of Arizona, North Texas, and Oklahoma, and blew it eastward. We all watched it advance in real time on the internet, first as it rocked vehicles on their struts and choked livestock across the cattle states, packing their stomachs full of dirt. A handful of people who couldn’t get out of the storm’s path actually suffocated in the open air. Crossing over the Appalachians, the vast nebula finally reached the East Coast. Kate and I woke the morning of its arrival because Dizzy was going ballistic, pacing back and forth, running to the window and then running away. For two days most of the Mid-Atlantic watched through the dustlight of shifting red, orange, yellow, and blue as those fine grains of silt reflected sunlight fifty miles above in mesospheric clouds. It looked like the dawn of hell itself.
THE DUST BOWL RETURNS, trumpeted the Post. Masks and goggles sold out, people duct-taped their windows and still the grit penetrated everything. In our apartment, it came in through crevices we could never entirely seal. We opened the cupboards and the plates were all coated. You couldn’t leave a glass of water out for a minute without it tasting like sand. Kate’s hair turned stiff and gray, and I’d close my mouth and feel my molars crunch on the grit. We could look out the office windows, over the Potomac, and see nothing but the headlights and taillights of traffic, fuzzy in the beige gloom beneath an iridescent alien sky. As Randall took office and hearings began, one could tell there were a lot of Republican lawmakers who wanted to get climate legislation done, survive their future primaries, and never look out the window at anything like that ever again.