My da tells me he has a way to ward off the Coughs.

“You see?” he says, brandishing a sheaf of scribbled equations with a expression of pure delight. The spidery numbers seem to me as though they might crawl off the paper and colonize the kitchen if given half a chance, but Da’s eyes are glittering. “It’s going to work this time, Lid. I swear it!”

“Da,” I sigh. “You’ve been saying that for the last ten years.”

“Ah, look, hon—this time’s different,” he wheedles. The stack of papers finds itself thrust again into my reluctant hands. “If you find a single miscalculation, I’ll shut up on the whole subject. Promise!”

“Well...”

He cuts me off, of course.

“That’s my girl. Here, take these notes, too.”

“Just... Da, what does this even have to do with the Coughs?”

He gives me a contemplative look and continues shoving reams of paper around his catastrophically messy desk.

“Lidya... do you believe in destiny?”

----------


The first time Da starts up the Smasher in our cramped back yard, he attracts a crowd that rings clear around the house, gawking and chattering, ignoring the searing summer heat.  Some are there to socialize. Some to enjoy the spectacle. Others are merely there to jeer.

Everybody agrees that Da is completely nuts.

“You tryin’ to do what?” cackles Pencil Jacobson, one claw-like hand hooked over the fence to support her weight. “You tryin’ to build a world? You mad as a ray-bee dog!”

“Rabies, Pencil, not ‘ray-bee’,” my da says absently. “And it’s technically a universe, not a world.”

Pencil’s whooping guffaw stabs my eight-year-old ears.

“A universe? Wit’ stars, and moons, an’ all? You think you Gawd or sumthin’?” Pencil finds this absolutely hilarious. “’E thinks he’s Gawd! Yes, he does! Hoo, and his lil’ girl’d be Jeebus then, huh? Haw haw!”

“Pencil, I ain’t Jesus!” I say desperately. Pencil’s eye takes on a nasty gleam.

“Izzat so, girlie?”

The next thing I know Pencil has me lifted up in her wrinkled arms and is swinging me around to show the crowd.

“Hey, looky here!” she yells. “It’s Lidya Jeebus, daughter of the man who thinks ‘e’s gonna make a universe! Lessee if she can do some miracles!” and with that, she tosses me toward the skies.

I hover briefly, hands and feet grasping at some nonexistent ledge to save me from my fall. Only hot, empty air meets my desperate touch. The earth drags me down.

And then I am caught, my fall cushioned by a familiar plaid fabric that smells of dirt and ink and chemicals. My da wraps his arms around me protectively, and I sob into his chest.

Pencil Jacobson laughs in the background.

----------

“Da! Are you out here?” I dump the bag of rubbery carrots and dry lettuce on the kitchen counter, and poke my head through the door to our back yard. Da is standing beside the 50-foot metal expanse that is the Smasher, scanner in hand, searching for cracks in the outer shell.

“Hey!” he beams at me, looking up from his work. “Lid, you’re back! Did Derrick have those carrots I was ask—”

“Da, they—”

“Huh? What?”

I take a deep breath.

“They shot down plane over Berlintown this morning. A Cougher.”

Da pauses, expression somber.

“They say the guy who shot it down had two sisters in Caern. It was headed north and, well... he wanted to protect them, I guess. So he brought it down in Berlintown. Full payload.”

Da puts down the scanner.

“Berlintown’s not too far away. The virus will be here soon.”

“We should leave.”

“You should.”

“What?”

“I’m not going, Lidya.”

Why?” I ask desperately. “You can’t stay here!”

“Ah...” He turns away from me, back to his beloved particle collider. “Remember what I told you about destiny? I have a project to finish, Lid’, and fate’s not stupid enough to interfere with something this important. I won’t die. Not until this I’ve done this.”

“You’re crazy. You think the Coughs will just... evaporate or something, so that you can finish your stupid experiment? Life doesn’t work like that, Da!” I feel tears burning up the back of my throat. “I’m not going to leave you here!”

“I’ll be safe.”

“What makes you so sure?”

When Da looks at me, there is only sureness on his face.

“Destiny,” he says.

----------


The first man I ever see with the Coughs might as well be dead already. He is skeletally thin, with an air of brokenness about him. His arms dangle listlessly at his sides, displaying toothpick-thin bones. He crouches by the side of the road, naked and unseeing.

At first I think he’s merely starving.

The man stares at me, cloudy eyes expressionless. “Get away,” he croaks. “Get out o’ ‘ere.”

I shrug my shoulders and start to trudge away. In the five years since the war started, there hasn’t been a single one of these people that I could save. I can’t feed them forever; they can’t feed themselves—the roads close, the supply lines are cut off, and soon only a few can afford the luxuries of food and drink. I’m not their guardian angel.

I hear a noise from behind me, a deep hacking sound, and turn in puzzlement, just in time to see the man standing a few hundred feet down the road, doubled over coughing. It wracks his frail frame, brings him down so that his knobby knees scratch across the boiling asphalt. One hand reaches up to his mouth as if trying to blot out the sound, and when it comes away it is dripping with blood.

The man tilts his head up me, sees me frozen and staring, and bares his teeth.

“Git,” he snarls.

I take his advice and run.

----------


Damn him.

I’m stomping along the shoulder of the road, my toes connecting rhythmically with each piece of garbage that litters the highway. A beggar glares at me from the shade under an old tarpaulin. Heat waves smear the fog line in front of me.

Damn him.

He told me to leave, that he didn’t want to see his daughter coughing her lungs out on the street. I told him it didn’t matter. They’ll bomb me anyway, I said.

He disagreed. It was a chance, after all.

Then come with me.

I’m sorry.

Sorry yourself!

Lidya...

I’m going down to talk to Derrick again. If we’re staying, we’ll need some more food.

Lid...

I’m going now, Da.

So here I am, trudging down to Derrick’s General Grocery, not expecting to find anything but a bunch of dried meat strips and rotten vegetables on its shelves, when I hear a call from along the road.

“Hey girl! How’s yer wacko daddy?”

“He’s not wacko!” I say angrily, defending him in spite of myself, and whirl around to face the source of the catcalls. “I— Pencil?”

And there she is, lounging across the road from me on taped-up chair, smack in the middle of midday heat. I haven’t seen her since I was ten, when the war started. She looks more like her name now, skinny and yellow with graphite-gray hair that flakes off her head and onto the parched earth beside her.

“Where were you?”

“Been’ around.” Pencil leers at me. “Miss me, eh?”

I’m not surprised to find that I still hate her.

“What are you doing out here, then?” I question, sauntering closer to her. “Just getting a tan?” I stop in front of her chair. “Soaking up the rays, maybe?”

“Hooooo, aren’t you a smart one?” Pencil leans in toward me, exaggerating her words so that I get a face full of her foul breath. A slow, sickly grin spreads across her withered face.

“I been to Berlintown, girlie.”

I recoil, and Pencil Jacobson laughs in the background.

----------


“So how’s it gonna work?”

“Hmm?”

“What you’re making.”

I lean my chin on the desk, watching him. At the age of six, I have already learned enough mathematics  to rival a high school senior, but it’s not nearly enough to satisfy my gnawing curiosity.

“Remember how I explained to you about space and time?” Da asks, lifting me up onto his lap where I have a better view of his work.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, our universe started out as a tiny little bubble of spacetime, right?”

“And then it grew and grew!” I finish for him.

“Exactly! Well, what I’m trying to do now is to make another little bubble, one that could start the same process all over again. A lot of energy in just the right place—” he gestures to the paperwork around him. “—And I can build a universe!”

“Why?” I ask eagerly.

“Why? Well, maybe...” he shrugs and looks away. “Maybe because so much is wrong with this one, I suppose.”

Four years later, the bombing starts.

----------

Incubation times vary.

This is why Da gets the Coughs first.

Even though I was the one who got a mouthful of Pencil’s virus-laden breath.

“It’s ok,” he tells me, after a particularly nasty fit. “You did everything you could. You warned me to stay away. It’s not your fault I chose to ignore you.”

“You never did listen to me, Da,” I reply wryly, willing my tears to evaporate.

“Guess it means I’m going to finish earlier than expected.”

“You still believe that?”

“I’ll always believe it. This is what I’m meant to do, Lid’.”

I smile sadly. If only I were so sure.

---------


“They’re gonna bomb us out.”

“What? When? How do you know?”

“Next few weeks, probably. Somebody intercepted a transmission yesterday. Not that we can do much about it, though, huh?”

“No...”

“I’m leaving, Lidya. You should, too.”

“Good luck, Derrick.”

I trudge back home, disheartened.

----------


Da keeps working right to the very end, preparing the Smasher for its final run. He shows me how to read the measurements.

“These are the numbers we want,” he says. “Don’t forget them.” I promise I won’t.

His health is going, though, his lungs failing him day by day. I can hear him coughing from anywhere in the house, his rattling breaths punctuating the silence between fits. When I start, too, we become a symphony—a kennel of unhappy dogs barking at our fate.

More regularly now, we hear explosions in the surrounding lands, and see plumes of smoke curling over the horizon. Da stands outside anyway, working through the clouded air and the muggy heat. He calls me over from time to time—Take a look at this, try that. I nod, and bite my lip.

One day he comes inside with his hands shaking so hard he can’t hold his tools.

“Almost done,” he gasps. “Go—you get out there and finish it.” I do as I’m told: go outside, set the dials, start it up. I feel oddly numb. His dream, our dream, has finally been set in motion, but I’m living in a nightmare.

Inside, my da slumps against the wall, breathing harsh and labored. But he grins at me anyway.

“Just think,” he whispers. “A universe! A whole new cosmos from one tiny piece of nothingness! A blossom... expanding...”

“Forever and ever, Da.”

“Maybe there’ll even be a place like this someday, eh, Lidya?”

“Maybe so.”

He coughs again, hunches over and clutches his chest. With one violently shaking hand, he reaches up to touch my face.

“Maybe... maybe we’ll be back...”

“Yeah...”

“With... a...” A fit of coughs wracks his body. “A happier... ending, hmm?”

I can only nod as he leaves me.

Alone, I stand up, and go outside to check the Smasher. Its display glows green in the dim light. The numbers are perfect.

It worked.

I’m dying.

It worked, though.

I go inside, sit down beside him, close my eyes, and listen to rumble of bombers in the distance.

“Lidya... do you believe in destiny?”

“Yes, Da. I do now.”