She would absolutely know.

I’d had some long talks with her when I first started looking for Sister Light. Rosie was always a high-strung woman. Prone to nervous laughs, mostly at the wrong times. She was also one of the few hardcore scientists I’d met who hadn’t lost her faith. She went to synagogue every week and took frequent trips to Israel.

The last time I spoke with her was ten days ago. I’d wanted to bone up on the Nibiru stuff so I would have the ammunition to counter whatever programming they’d force-fed to the girl. Rosie was in a hotel room in Toronto, about to begin a big three-day international symposium on NEOs (near-Earth objects). Nibiru was on the agenda because NASA and other groups wanted to have a clear and cohesive rebuttal to the growing number of crackpot conspiracy theories. Now that the Mayan calendar thing was well behind us, the apocalypse junkies had really gotten behind the imaginary, invisible, rogue dwarf star.

Can you imagine what those conversations must be like? All those scientists, with all that scientific data, trying to combat something with zero supporting evidence—and having a hard time doing it. Emails and phone calls were choking NASA’s Spaceguard program, Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking, Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, Catalina Sky Survey, Campo Imperatore Near-Earth Object Survey, the Japanese Spaceguard Association, and Asiago-DLR Asteroid Survey, the Minor Planet Center, and other organizations whose job it was to look for things in space that could endanger the Earth.

And some pinhead from Fox News even snuck in a question about it at a White House press conference, which made it blow up even bigger.

Rosie must have been feeling it, too. She was even more jumpy than usual when we spoke on the phone.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked.

“It’s complicated.”

“I bet.”

“There are protestors outside the convention center. Hundreds of them, from all over.”

“Seriously? Why? What are they protesting?”

“They… um… think we’re here to decide on how best to hide the truth from the world.”

I laughed. “Ri-i-i-i-ight. That’s why they brought the top astrophysicists from around the world together. That’s why they advertised the conference. That’s why they’re doing it all in plain sight, because you’re all trying to hide something.”

“This is serious, John. The crowds are really scary. We have a lot of security, and they don’t want us to leave the convention center without an escort. They even have police patrolling our hotels.”

“That’s nuts. What do they think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know. We have a conference in a few minutes. Someone from Homeland is coming in to talk to us about it.”

“Homeland? Why them? Most of the apocalypse cults aren’t dangerous. At least not in that way. I mean, sure the Heaven’s Gate people killed themselves, but that was mass suicide, not terrorism. It wasn’t a terrorist thing. They weren’t looking to hurt anyone else.”

“I don’t know, John. I’ll call you in a couple of days. When I get back to California.”

“Okay.”

“But… with that girl you’re looking for… ?”

“Yeah?”

“Be gentle with her. She’s eighteen. She waited until she was of legal age before she joined that church.”

“I know, but—”

“Maybe she really believes in this.”

“If she does, that’s an arguable case for irrational behavior.”

Rosie took a few seconds with that. “Every religion looks irrational from the outside. It all looks crazy, from a distance. If you’re not a believer. We Jews believe in plagues of locusts, giant bodies of water parting, burning bushes, people being turned into pillars of salt. You Christians worship someone who cast out demons and raised the dead. Why should we be allowed to believe in that stuff and this girl not be allowed to believe in something like Nibiru?”

“Hey, you’re the one who told me that the laws of physics and gravitational dynamics can’t support the presence of a celestial body that big without us seeing its effect on pretty much everything. You went on and on about that, sweetie. You’re the rational got-to-measure-it-to-believe it science nerd. I’m just a hired thug.”

She usually laughed at stuff like that. She didn’t this time.

She told me again that she’d call me, and that was the last time I talked to her.

I’ve been trying to get through to her office since the conference ended, but her voicemail’s jammed. Probably crank callers asking about Nibiru. Rosie was pretty high profile in the news stories about the gig in Toronto. She’s been very vocal about the scientific impossibility of it all.

Wish I could get her on the phone. Any new info she could give me might help with breaking Sister Light away from the Church of the Nomad World.

I’d need it, too, because my read on Sister Light was that she was more a true believer than a lost soul. That’s important to know because you have to have an approach. The lost ones are beyond conversations. They are terrified of finding out that they’re wrong. So much so that they’ll hurt themselves rather than face the truth. Buddy of mine had to call parents once to tell them their daughter slashed her own throat when she spotted the pick-up team coming to take her home.

Imagine that.

Fifteen-year-old girl who’d rather take a pair of fabric scissors to her throat instead of going back to whatever hell she’d fled. Whether their problems are real or imagined, kids like that are sometimes too far gone.

Not everyone can be saved. The people here at the Church should understand that. They believe only their initiates are going to hitch a ride on Nibiru. The rest of the unworthy or unrepentant will become stardust.

Stardust

.

Sounds better than saying we’ll all burn in hellfire, which is what most of these nutbags say.

Stardust doesn’t actually sound that bad.

Stardust.

Star stuff.

I spotted her five minutes after I climbed the wall. Sitting on a bench by herself. No watchdogs.

Sister Light.

She was five foot nothing. A slip of a thing, with pale hair and paler skin, and eyes the color of summer grass. Not especially pretty. Not ugly. No curves, but a good face and kind eyes.

Intelligent eyes.

She was sitting on a stone bench in a little grove of foxtail palms and oversized succulents. A small water feature burbled quietly and I think there was even a butterfly. You could have sold a photo of that moment to any calendar company.

All around the grove was a geometric pattern of white rectangular four-by-seven foot stones. They fanned out from where she sat like playing cards. Four or five of them, covering several acres of cool green grass

The girl was wearing a white dress with a pale blue gardening apron. White gloves tucked into the apron tie. Her head was covered with the requisite blue scarf that every woman in the Church wore. The men all wore blue baseball caps with circles embroidered on them. Symbolic of the nomad world, I supposed.

I’d come dressed for the part. White painter’s pants, white shirt, blue cap.

Stun gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, hidden by the shirt. Syringe with a strong but safe tranquilizer. A lead-weighted sap if things got weird. A cell phone with booster chip so I could talk to Rosie, Lee or, at need, my backup. Three guys in a van parked around the corner. Three very tough guys who have done this before. Guys who are not as nice as I am, and I’m not that nice.

As I approached she set down the water bottle she’d been drinking from and watched with quiet grace as I approached.

She smiled at me. “You’re here to take me back, aren’t you?”

-4-

I slowed my approach and stopped at the edge of the little grove.

“What do you mean, sister?” I asked, pitching my voice so it was soft. The smile I wore was full of lots of white teeth. Very wholesome.