The Expanse - J.M. Dillard [1]
All that had changed now. Liz’s house—a historic landmark, a 1950s bungalow a short walk from the glittering shoreline—was one of several in a quiet neighborhood punctuated by native flora and fauna: fat, squat royal palms, fan-shaped palmettos, flame-colored hibiscus and birds-of-paradise, graceful white herons, and the occasional flamingo grazing for bugs on the front lawns.
She’d grown up in that house; her parents had left it to her when it became clear that her brother didn’t want it. Trip had always wanted to explore space; Liz had always made fun of him for it. What, Earth not good enough for you? He had taught her how to scuba dive, and when she’d been fascinated by the beauty of it, the sense of weightlessness, the freedom and excitement of exploring a totally different world, he’d said, Understand now? Space is like this ... free and open, and full of things no one’s ever seen before.
And Liz had retorted, Big difference. There are coral reefs here, and fish and a million other things, to look at, all nice and close together. Space is filled with a whole lot of nothing. A lot of nothing between all those stars. It’s cold and empty, and you can’t even breathe. ...
He’d gotten her on that point. Can’t breathe underwater, either. Does that mean we never should have invented oxygen tanks?
And then he started talking about his favorite subject, warp drive, which made the spaces between the stars seem a whole lot smaller. He talked about the possibility of life on other planets; if home was this great, what about the millions of other planets that had to be out there? And all the different types of fascinating aliens ... The Vulcans weren’t the entire universe, you know.
Liz wasn’t interested. She loved the Keys, loved Earth, and wanted to make the places she loved better; that was that.
Diving always made her think of her big brother; she smiled, lips pressed tightly together to avoid gulping in stinging, bitter seawater, as she swam beside a huge manta ray, its boneless body undulating gracefully. She wondered where Trip was at the moment, whether he was exploring a planet as beautiful as the undersea world he had introduced to her. She’d taken the boat out, and at the moment, was swimming toward a coral reef, one of her favorite spots, always filled with an intriguing cast of characters.
Liz never got there.
The seafloor beneath her shuddered, sending up pulses of cooler water from deep below; a school of silver tarpon surged upward past her, caught in the strange rising current. She was caught too, catapulted to the surface. The tide was so strong, her mask was forced up to her forehead; she lost her mouthpiece. When she came at last to the surface, she grabbed the side of the boat and gasped for air. It stank of smoke, of something scorched.
Liz got a good look back at the shore, and gasped again.
The far side of the island was engulfed by a wall of flame—stretching from the horizon up into the sky, blotting out the sun. The fire-wall was kilometers wide. It gouged deep into the earth, spewing debris in its wake—everything, every life form, incinerated beyond recognition.
And it was moving, with the inexorability of a tornado, towards Liz and the gulf.
Oddly, she felt no fear. What she saw was too incomprehensible, too massive; what she felt was awe. At the very least, the Key on which she lived—on which her neighbors lived—would be obliterated.
Overhead, the dazzling sky was momentarily darkened by a rush of seabirds fleeing: cranes, pelicans, gulls. Their cries were drowned out by the roar of the destruction.
Krakatoa, Liz thought. An entire island blown away without warning by a volcano. One day there, the next, gone. The birds had been first to leave there, too.
But the wall of fire encroached too methodically, at too