A brilliant ceiling of stars hung above us.
“I didn’t think New York had stars,” said Damon, craning his head back to take them all in. “At least, not the kind in the sky.”
I stared into the heavens. “The whole East Coast hasn’t produced much in the way of pollution in the last two weeks, and the cold weather helps.”
This was the first time I’d come up onto the roof since everything had started, and the dense star field that greeted us had been startling. The moonless night was a factor, but still, these were the stars I’d only ever met deep in the countryside.
It felt like the gods were peering down from their perches, gloating as they watched Gotham struggle below.
“You sure you want to do this tonight?” asked Damon.
I looked down at the blackness between the buildings. “This is the perfect night. Anyway, we don’t have much choice, do we?”
Memories of Sunday school filtered into my mind. Tonight was the epiphany, the night when the Magi followed the stars to bring their treasures to the baby Jesus. We would be using our own magic to find treasure tonight, and I was hoping the stars, and the gods, would be kind.
“Are you a wise man, Damon?”
“Definitely clever, not sure about wise.”
Shivering, I zipped my coat up tighter around my neck. Irena and Aleksandr had scraped the snow off the deck up here to melt for drinking water—it was easier to carry a bucket down a flight of stairs than up six. The temperature had plummeted; it was well below zero. A stiff wind began blowing, and we made for the wall at the end of the deck for some protection.
“I need a wise man tonight.”
Damon laughed. “Then wise I am.”
I studied the void of New York below. “No lights anywhere,” I whispered to myself. From this angle, the only evidence that a city existed around us were the dark patches where the stars were blotted out by nearby buildings.
In a shifting pool of light from his headlamp, Damon settled on a bench against the wall and started working with my cell phone, attaching cables from it to my augmented-reality glasses. When the tech company had sent me the glasses before all this started, I’d thought I might get some amusement out of them; as it turned out, they might save our lives.
I sat on the railing next to Damon, gathering myself into a ball against the cold, and looked into the darkness, imagining the millions of people huddled out there. “You know what drove the twentieth century, laid the foundation for the world as we know it?” I ventured.
Damon fiddled with the phone. “Money?”
“Well, yeah, that, plus artificial light.”
Without artificial light, humans were scared animals that scurried into their nests at sunset. Darkness brought out the monsters that existed in our primal collective imaginations, the creatures from under the bed, all of which disappeared with the flick of a switch and the warm glow of an incandescent bulb. Modern cities were filled with massive and awe-inspiring structures, but without artificial light, who would want to inhabit their dark interiors?
“Did you know that it was light that made Rockefeller into a titan?”
As an entrepreneur, I’d always had a fascination with how famous businessmen had started out.
“Wasn’t it oil?”
Damon had the augmented-reality glasses on and was sweeping his head back and forth, muttering under his breath. Something wasn’t working.
“Oil was the currency, but light was the product. It was America’s desire for light that drove Rockefeller into, well, the spotlight.”
Damon chuckled at my unintended joke.
“Before he began supplying kerosene to New York in the 1870s, when the sun went down America went dark. Kerosene was the first cheap, clean way to make artificial light. Before that, Rockefeller was just a down-and-out businessman sitting on a patch of soggy petroleum in Cleveland, not knowing what to do with it.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Damon, not really listening.
“Yep, Cleveland was the Saudi Arabia of Wild West–era America, and by the early nineteen hundreds he was producing more kerosene than could be used for lighting alone, so guess what came next?”
“Rock Center?”
“Cars. Did you know that the first cars were electric? In 1910 there were more electric-powered cars on the streets of New York than gas-powered ones, and everyone back then assumed that electric cars were the future—they made a lot more sense than the crazy engines that ran on controlled explosions of volatile, toxic chemicals. But Rockefeller funded Ford to make sure that gas-powered cars, not electric, would be the way of the future, so he would have a place to sell his oil.”
“I think I got it working,” said Damon. He had the glasses on again and was swiveling his head back and forth.
“And, poof, there you have the mess of the twentieth century, the Middle East, all those wars, the world’s reliance on oil, and a good chunk of global warming. Even maybe what’s happening now. It all sprang out of the desire for light.”
“That’s because being in the dark sucks,” said Damon, coming up to sit beside me and handing me the AR glasses. “Try them on.”
Taking a deep breath, I put them on and turned off my headlamp. Looking to the east, I saw tiny glowing dots of red in the darkness down at street level, spread out across the city.
“I loaded the map data from your treasure hunt app into the glasses,” explained Damon. “They’re connected now, wirelessly. So the spots where you buried those bags will appear as red dots through the AR glasses when you look through them.”
“Yeah, I see them.”
After what had happened with Chuck, we’d decided it was too dangerous to go out during the day to collect the food we’d stashed. Lauren had begged me not to, and I’d promised her I wouldn’t. But we’d used up just about the last of our food. There had been riots at the emergency centers, and I didn’t want anyone going there. Even so, we needed to eat, and Lauren and Susie were planning on going up to Penn and Javits with the kids the next day to wait in the food lines.
Unless I went out tonight to retrieve what we’d hidden.
We’d come up on the roof to confirm that the streets were as dark as we imagined, and to see if there were any lights out there. It was pitch black.
“You sure you don’t want Tony or me to come with you?”
“We only have one set of night-vision goggles. Two people in the dark is a liability if one of them can’t see. And I’m the only one available who actually buried the food, so I’m best equipped to figure out where it is.” I paused. “Anyway, with martial law in place, we should only risk one of us going out.”
Damon shrugged his okay. “So you won’t need to look at your phone at all. Just walk toward the red dots.”
In the pitch black of the streets, my phone would have lit up like a beacon, attracting unwanted attention.
“When you get near one of the spots, just tap the screen in your pocket and the AR glasses will cycle through the pictures you took when you buried the bags. If you pull the night-vision goggles over them, you should be able to overlay the images pretty well.”
Taking my phone from him, I tapped, and a series of faint, layered images of pictures I’d taken when burying the packages appeared.
“What you were talking about is interesting, but that’s the past,” said Damon.
I played with my new toy, zooming in and cycling through the images.
“I’m more interested in the future, in being able to predict it.”
“You’re obsessed with the future, aren’t you?”
Damon sighed. “If I’d been able to see just a little of it, I might have been able to save her.”
I sometimes forgot what had happened to him. “I’m sorry, Damon. I didn’t mean to be, well …”
“Don’t be sorry. By the way, I have an idea of how we could get Chuck’s car down from that vertical parking garage.”
I was getting very cold already, and I realized I’d have to bundle up more if I was going to stay outside for a few hours on my scavenging trip. I’d better get the .38 from Tony, just in case. “Really? What’s the idea? In short form.”
In the light from my headlamp, Damon grinned. “Where there’s a winch, there’s a way.”
I made my way slowly through the frozen landscape. It took me half an hour to walk the two blocks to the nearest buried bags. At least with the extreme cold, the streets didn’t smell, and I wasn’t worried about falling into a pile of wet human feces if I slipped.
The night-vision goggles used a combination of low-light imaging with near-infrared illumination, so even in the pitch black I could see well. With the infrared flashlight in my pocket, I could even light up the world in a brilliant, sparkling green if needed.
The red dot indicating the nearest bag location had grown in size as I’d approached, expanding until it was a red circle about twenty feet across—the GPS’s approximate margin for error.
Damon was a clever kid.
Standing in the middle of the circle, I kicked aside a garbage bag and tapped the phone screen in my pocket. The image associated with this spot popped up on the AR glasses. It closely matched the storefront and light pole I was seeing through the night-vision goggles. When I backed up a few paces and stepped to the left, the images lined up. Perfect.
Dropping to my knees, I pulled off my backpack, taking the folding shovel out of it. With the butt of the shovel, I whacked the frozen surface a few times until it cracked, and then pulled big chunks of surface ice and snow away. I shoveled into the softer snow underneath, expanding the excavated area in a concentric spiral.
It was heavy work, and by the time my shovel hit the first bag, my back was killing me. I brushed away the snow with my gloved hands and pulled two bags out. In the ghostly light of the night-vision goggles, I looked inside one of them.
“Doritos,” I snorted, shaking my head. “I love Doritos.”
Reaching down, I pulled out the other bags and began stuffing them into my backpack while I looked to the next glowing red circle, about forty yards away. Above me, the steely pinpoints of the stars shone brightly between the buildings.