The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

other parts of the world. Maybe Umbra is about genetic engineering of plants. That could go wrong on a large scale, theoretically.”
    “But neither of them had a background in genetics,” Paige said. “And that kind of work is common now anyway, whatever the risks.”
    “We know this much,” Travis said. “When you turned on the cylinder for the president, and he saw the ruins of D.C., he knew at a glance that Umbra was responsible. That’s why he ordered the hit on the motorcade. But that only makes sense if he was already aware of the plan’s potential to go wrong in some big, specific way. That could be the same risk that Audra’s father saw, way back when he covered up the op-ed at Harvard. Whatever it was, it spooked him. Him and everyone on staff at the Independent.”
    Another long silence settled. The desert wind coursed through the Jeep, arid as blast-furnace exhaust.
    A few miles further on, Travis heard Bethany shift around in the backseat. He heard the zipper of her backpack open. He glanced and saw her take the cylinder into her lap.
    Then she stood up, holding the thing firmly in one hand and gripping the roll bar with the other. She leaned forward against the bar, braced herself, and leveled the cylinder straight ahead. She pressed the on button.
    The projection cone flared. The iris opened a few feet above and beyond the Jeep’s hood. From Travis’s position, looking upward at it, he could see only sky on the other side, the same washed-out blue as it was in the present. It made the iris nearly invisible. He wondered for a second if Bethany could feel the air rushing through it, then realized she wouldn’t: the airflow through the iris would be no different from the air already surging over the Jeep.
    He turned to ask her if she could see anything, but stopped himself before speaking. Bethany’s expression had gone blank, and the color had faded from her face. She stared unblinking at whatever she was seeing through the iris. Then she slowly pivoted, swinging the opening clockwise like a searchlight, gazing through at the landscape beyond. Whatever she was looking at, it was there in every direction.
    “What is it?” Travis said.
    “Stop the Jeep,” Bethany said. “Pull over.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I found the cars.”

Chapter Twenty-Four
    Travis pulled over. The highway was empty in both directions for all the miles they could see.
    Bethany was still standing in the back. She turned around, leaned over and rested the cylinder on the Jeep’s compressed soft top behind the backseat. The beam pointed sideways to the Jeep’s right. The iris hung fixed in the air at chest level, just beyond the freeway’s shoulder.
    Travis got out at the same time as Paige. He was already looking past the Jeep at the iris. Could already see through it. Could already feel his own thoughts going as vacant as Bethany’s had. A moment later all three of them were crowded at the opening, looking through. They stared for half a minute without speaking. Then Travis returned to the Jeep, shut it off, and pocketed the keys.
    He took the shotgun from where Paige had left it on the passenger side. He picked up Bethany’s backpack, hanging open with the SIG and all the shotgun shells inside it. Then he went to the cylinder and pushed the delayed shutoff button. He waited for the light cone to cut out, and then he secured the cylinder inside the pack. By the time he had it shouldered with the Remington, Paige and Bethany were already through the opening. He followed them.
    The desert on the other side looked like a shopping-center parking lot the day after Thanksgiving, except that it had no boundaries. The cars stretched as far as Travis could see in every direction. The visible horizon was five miles out, any way that he faced. The cars extended at least that far.
    They were parked grill-to-grill in double rows, each of which was separated by a lane of space just wide enough to drive down. The lanes branched out from the freeway, which itself remained clear.
    The cars were in perfect condition except for their tires and window seals, which had baked to crumbs over the decades and settled in a thick layer on the desert floor. The wind had leveled the crumbs out but hadn’t scattered them. Travis saw why: most of the cars were no more than an inch or two off the ground, sitting on their rims. All of them together would make a hell of a barrier against air currents at the surface.
    The cars’ paint jobs