Everyone at the table knew that they were still fighting a war that would take lifetimes to win. They all knew that the world would never be the same. Despite all of this, they also knew that there were still people in the world worth fighting for.
The End
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PROLOGUE: POPOCATEPETL
Popocatepetl had reverted to relative calm after the eruptions of 2016, but CENAPRED, the National Center for Disaster Prevention, continued its constant vigil of the volcano, aided in these telemetric observations by the Mexican Secretariat of the Interior and experts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as the collaboration of the US Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory.
A week before the First Emergence, all fifteen stations on the slopes of Popocatepetl began to detect seismic activity as well as a spike in the levels of SO2 and CO2. The telemetry, analyzed by CENAPRED’s processing hub, triggered a series of automated messages to private cell phones and email addresses. Within the hour, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee—made up of researchers from UNAM and CENAPRED—met to review more than fifty telemetric signals. The committee immediately recommended the government institute a phase-3 yellow alert and evacuate a radius of twenty kilometers.
The decision saved thousands of lives, a relatively small comfort given the millions of deaths to come.
For four days, nearby Mexico City and Puebla experienced a tremor or two every twelve hours, the shocks hovering around 2.5 in magnitude. Then, on the morning of the fifth day, Popocatepetl erupted violently with the force of 18 megatons of TNT, sending a column of ash fifteen kilometers into the air and a wave of lava—the pyroclastic flow—rushing down the slopes at 300 km/h.
Everything in a ten-kilometer radius was obliterated. For another fifteen kilometers beyond that, trees and structures were cropped close to the ground. Mere minutes after the eruption, the entire Izta-Popo Zoquiapan National Park had been laid waste, and several nearby towns were scorched and shattered.
As the plume spread tephra into the stratosphere over the next eight hours, it triggered torrents of volcanic ash rain through which lightning jagged ferociously, kindling fires among felled trees throughout the park.
Beneath the ugly bruise of the sky, relief efforts began in the seared zone around the blast area, and prevailing winds off the Gulf pushed the ash toward Mexico City, where fifteen centimeters soon coated cars and streets, exacerbating the accustomed smog and causing multiple deaths from respiratory failure and collisions. The day after the eruption, the sun never shone on the capital. During that ominously long night, citizens were urged to remain indoors at all costs. Private automobiles were prohibited from circulating.
The seventh day after Popocatepetl’s quickening, the flow of magma suddenly ceased. To investigate, a CENAPRED technician named Julio Quintero Flores guided a drone over the smoking caldera. Its camera captured something truly inexplicable.
Buoyed by black slag was a huge ovoid stone, two hundred meters from tip to tip.
The director general of CENAPRED, Miguel Ramos Zepeda, immediately reconvened the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, and initial hypotheses were put forth in a barrage of data-driven speculation as members drew on their own expertise and robust webs of research connections.
None of them could have possibly guessed at the truth.
At 7:49 a.m. on the third day since the explosion, as the committee watched in silent horror, the massive stone split like a cocoon. Wedging themselves into the crack came six sapphire talons the length of pickup trucks, glinting in the half-light as they slowly pried the ellipsoid open. Then, through that gaping crack, something unspeakably massive clawed its way out into the pumice-choked, steaming air.
The drone caught a quick glance at a white-hot impassive eye before the signal went dead.
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