The Long Earth

sipped their coffees and inspected their phones and laptops. Some were laughing, even though Jansson could clearly hear the echoing voice of a cop loudspeaker urging everybody to get indoors or step away, on top of the sirens’ wail.
    ‘People aren’t believing it, Chief.’
    ‘Tell me about it.’
    She abandoned the car and, flashing her badge at everyone who got in her way, pushed through the lines to the Capitol mound. The racket of the sirens, echoing from the concrete, was deafening, maddening. Down the four big staircases around the Capitol building itself people were spilling out, members of the State legislature, lobbyists, lawyers, in sharp-pressed business suits. And at the foot of one flight of steps a more ragged group of civilians was sitting, watched over by a loose ring of armed cops and Homelands officers. These folk, it turned out, had been in the Square when the warning came, and had been immediately rounded up, their Steppers confiscated along with their phones and any weapons. Jansson, just outside the perimeter, searched for familiar faces among the resentful, scared crowd of tourists, shoppers, business types. Some of them wore proud-to-be-a-Stepper wrist bands that they brandished at the officers who contained them.
I’m no Humanity-Firster! Look at this!
    And there was Rod Green, sitting a little way from the rest.
    She sat down with Rod. He was eighteen years old, she knew, but looked younger. He wore jeans and a dark jacket, his strawberry-blond hair cut short. He looked like any other student. But there were lines around his mouth, his eyes. Frown lines, lines of resentment and hate.
    ‘You did this. Didn’t you, Rod?’ She had to yell to make herself heard over the sirens. ‘Come on, kid, you know me. I’ve kept an eye on you for years.’
    He eyed her. ‘You’re the one they call Spooky.’
    ‘You got me. Did you do this?’
    ‘I helped.’
    ‘Helped who? Helped how?’
    He shrugged. ‘I brought it to the square in a big backpack. I delivered it, but I don’t know where it’s stashed. I also don’t know how it was armed. Or how it can be disarmed.’
    Shit, shit. ‘Is this necessary, Rod? Do all these people have to die just so you can get back at Mommy?’
    He sneered. ‘Well,
that
bitch is safe.’
    That shocked Jansson. Maybe he didn’t even know that his mother, Tilda Lang Green, off in a colony on some remote Earth, was dead of a cancer. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. ‘Do you even think it’s going to do any good? I know you people have it in your heads that Madison is some kind of stepping hub. But you can’t stop up the Long Earth. Even if you flatten the whole of Wisconsin people will just keep on stepping from wherever—’
    ‘I only know one thing about the bomb.’
    She grabbed his shoulders. ‘What? Tell me, Rod.’
    ‘I know
when
.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two minutes forty-five seconds. Forty-four. Forty-three …’
    Jansson stood up and yelled at the cops, ‘Did you hear that? Report it in. And get these people out of here. Their Steppers – for God’s sake, give them back their Steppers!’
    The cops didn’t need telling twice, and their captives rose in a mob, panicked by Rod’s overheard words. But Jansson stayed by Rod’s side.
    ‘It’s all up for me,’ Rod said. ‘I can’t step. That’s why I came here. It seemed right.’
    ‘Right, hell.’ Without warning she grabbed him, picking him up under knees and shoulders like a child, and, straining, lifted him off the ground. He was too heavy for her, and she immediately fell under him, but she switched her Stepper before the two of them hit the ground.
    And she landed on her back, on green grass. Blue sky overhead, just like on the Datum today. The sirens had gone away. The scaffolding frame that had been erected here in West 1 to interface with the Capitol loomed over her.
    Rod, lying on top of her, convulsed, puked over her, and started to froth at the mouth. A paramedic in an orange jumpsuit pulled Rod aside.
    ‘He’s a phobic,’ Jansson said. ‘He needs—’
    ‘We know, ma’am.’ The paramedic took a syringe from her pack and shot him up in the neck.
    The convulsions eased. Rod looked Jansson in the eye. He said clearly, ‘Two minutes.’ Then his eyes rolled up and he was unconscious.
    Two minutes
. The word went out across Madison Zero, and its nascent twins to East and West, and around a watching world.
    And the stepping began.
    Parents carried their