The Private Journal of Maren Aldecott, née Hollis
Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, 20–21 A.M.

I write this by candlelight, which is a thing I do not take for granted anymore. Before the Meteor there were gas lamps enough that a woman could read past midnight without cost to her eyes. That is a small grief among so many large ones, but it visits me most evenings.

We came from Columbus, Ohio — what is left of it. Thomas, my husband, heard the rumors some months back. A city in the mountain west, still standing. A church, still organized. A stone, found in the Wasatch, that does things which ought not be done by stones.

I am writing this because Thomas says we should document our faith. He says that future generations will want to know what it felt like to live through the age of miracles. He is probably right. Thomas is usually right about such things. He has a preacher's confidence, which is its own kind of armor.

I have my own reason for writing. I want to see, in ink, whether I believe.

The city is not what I expected. I thought it would feel like a camp — desperate, hungry people jammed against one another, all their hope pressed thin as paper. Instead it is orderly. Purposeful. The streets are swept. There are queues for bread that move without argument. Children attend lessons in the mornings. Everyone seems to know what they are here for.

That should comfort me. Somehow it makes me nervous.

They let us into the hall today. Not the great ritual hall — I am told that is only for the leadership and the inner circle of congregants. But there is an adjoining chamber, separated by a heavy curtain, where pilgrims are permitted to stand and feel the emanation.

That is the word they use. Emanation.

Thomas gripped my hand so hard I thought he would break the small bones. He is not a man who shows feeling in public. He was breaking the small bones of my hand and he did not even know he was doing it.

The curtain between us and the stone was thick wool, and yet the light bled through it. Green. Not a soft green — not the green of growing things. Something more mineral. Something that belongs underground, in places where water has been pressing for a thousand years.

And the feeling.

I will try to describe it honestly, because I promised myself this journal would be honest. It felt as though everything I had ever thought — every silent prayer, every private doubt, every wish I had shouted into the dark after the Meteor came — was being pulled gently to the surface of me. Like cream rising. Like silt disturbed from a river bottom.

Thomas wept. He is not a man who weeps.

I stood very still and waited for tears that did not come. I thought about my mother, who died in the first winter after the Meteor. I thought about our daughter, Clara, who did not survive the crossing from Ohio. I thought about all the things I believe because I was raised to believe them, and all the things I believe because I have looked at this ruined world and decided that it cannot be the whole truth of existence.

What came up was not grief. It was something more unsettled. A question, rising.

I am not sure what that means.

A man named Whitfield addressed the congregation tonight. He was an engineer before the Meteor — railroads, I believe. He does not look like a prophet. He is a small, careful man with ink-stained fingers and spectacles that sit slightly crooked on his nose. He spoke with the precision of someone accustomed to explaining mechanical things to people who do not understand mechanics.

He said that the stone is a conductor.

Not of heat. Not of current, not in the way that copper wire conducts it. He said that Shardisite — that is the name the scientists have given to the green crystal — conducts intention. That it responds not to pressure or temperature, but to will. And that will, when organized and focused by enough human minds at once, produces a measurable physical force.

He was very careful with his language. He never said miracle. He never said God. He said: observable phenomenon. Measurable result. Replicable outcome.

And yet the room was trembling by the time he finished. Because what he described — the collective belief of thousands pressed through this enormous green lens — was precisely what the preachers had been promising for centuries, dressed up in the language of engineering.

I asked Thomas afterward whether it troubled him that the man never once invoked the Lord.

Thomas said: What does it matter what language he uses? The end is the same.

I have been turning that over ever since.

I have been speaking with a woman named Sister Pryce, who manages the distribution of foodstuffs near the eastern gate. She was a schoolteacher before the Meteor, and she has that quality of mind that teachers sometimes develop: a habit of precision, a refusal to accept fuzzy answers.

She told me something today that I cannot get out of my head.

She said that three men died working the Shardisite vein that produced the great stone. One was crushed in a rock fall — that is ordinary enough. But two others simply stopped. Their hearts, she said. Just stopped, in their chests, while they were cutting. They were young men. Healthy. No history of illness.

And there was a fourth man who did not die but has not spoken since. He sits in a boarding house two streets from ours. He eats when someone puts food in his hands. He does not sleep so much as he becomes absent. Sister Pryce says he stares at the wall and his eyes move, tracking something that is not there.

She told me this not as a warning. She told me as information. That is what frightened me most — she was not frightened. She said: We do not fully understand the crystal. It is only twenty-one years since it came. There is so much we do not yet know.

Twenty-one years. The same age as my Clara would have been, had she lived.

I keep thinking about that. The whole world has been changed by this mineral for exactly as long as a child takes to become an adult. And we already think we know enough to use it as a ladder to heaven.

No — twenty-one years since the Meteor. I write it wrong constantly. My body still counts the years from the old world.

January 18th is observed here with a solemnity that I have not encountered anywhere else. No other city I passed through on the way west marked the day at all. Some people refuse to acknowledge it, as though ignoring the anniversary will somehow thin the memory of what was lost.

Here they hold a service at dawn. Thousands of people standing in the cold, watching the sun come up over the mountains. The mountains which are, in places, still wrong — still scarred with veins of green crystal that the Meteor left behind, still emitting that faint pressure that you feel in the middle of the night when the wind is right and the city is quiet.

Thomas spoke today. He has become something of a lay preacher since we arrived — they recognized his gift quickly. He spoke about transformation. About how the world did not merely end on the 18th of January, 1886. It became something else. Something that had been waiting underneath to emerge.

He is very good at this. He has a voice that fills spaces and makes people feel that the space is warm.

I stood in the crowd and listened and felt the cold through my boots and thought about Clara, as I do every January 18th. She was born in summer and she died in winter and sometimes I cannot reconcile those two facts into a single understanding of the world.

Afterward, the congregation was told that a date had been set.

The ritual will take place at the spring equinox.

The hall hummed when the announcement was made. Not figuratively. The crystal in the adjacent chamber hummed, a low vibration that passed up through the stone floor into the soles of my feet.

I stood very still and waited again for something to rise in me.

It did not come.

More pilgrims every day. The city is straining against them now — the orderliness I admired when we arrived is being tested. There are arguments in the bread queues. Children sleeping in doorways. Someone has started charging money to let people stand near the hall at night, when the crystal is brightest, and I cannot entirely fault them for it because money has to come from somewhere.

Thomas has been spending his evenings in preparation meetings. He comes home long after I have retired and he does not wake me but I hear him moving through the dark, settling into the chair by the window, sitting with whatever he has been given to sit with.

Two nights ago I was awake when he came in and I asked him what they discussed in these meetings.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: They discuss what it means to truly believe.

I asked him if he truly believed.

He said: More than I have ever believed anything.

I asked him what that felt like.

He said it felt like being ready.

I lay in the dark after that, listening to him breathe, and I thought about readiness. About what a person is ready for, when they are ready to leave. I thought about Clara again. I thought about my mother. I thought about every person I have known who was taken from this world before I was done needing them.

I did not sleep well.

I sought out Sister Pryce today. I am not sure what I wanted from her. Possibly just the comfort of someone who asks precise questions.

We walked along the eastern wall of the city, where the pilgrims have put up canvas shelters against the stone. It is warmer there than it should be for March, which everyone attributes to the crystal's influence. Sister Pryce says it may simply be the density of bodies. She is like that.

I told her I was having difficulty with belief. I did not use those exact words — I said I was having difficulty with preparation. She understood what I meant.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said: Maren, I have been here since the stone arrived. I have watched every controlled experiment. I have watched a man die and a man go empty. And I will tell you what I know for certain.

The crystal does not ask whether you are good. It does not ask whether you deserve what you want. It asks only how much you want it, and whether the wanting is real.

I asked her what she believed would happen at the equinox.

She said: Something will happen. I am not certain it will be what is promised. I am not certain it matters.

I asked her if she was frightened.

She said: A little. Yes.

That was the most comforting thing anyone has said to me since we arrived.

Thomas received word today that he has been selected for the inner hall. He will stand within sight of the stone itself when the ritual begins.

He held the letter and read it three times. His hands were steady. That is Thomas — even joy in him is steady. He folded the letter carefully and put it in the breast pocket of his coat, against his chest, and then he looked at me and his expression was something I do not have a name for.

He said: Will you be in the outer yard?

I said: I will be wherever I am meant to be.

He held my hands. He said: I believe you will be taken with me. I believe your faith is stronger than you know.

I wanted very much to tell him the truth, which is that I do not know whether I believe in the Rapture, and I do not know whether the crystal cares about the Rapture, and I do not know whether belief and want are the same thing, and I have been sitting with all of this for months and it has not resolved into certainty no matter how hard I try.

Instead I said: I will be with you.

That was true, at least. As true as anything I know.

I cannot sleep. Thomas is sleeping beside me, deeply and without disturbance, the way he has slept every night of our marriage. I have always envied him that. The ability to put the day down and leave it outside the door.

The city is not quiet. Even at this hour I can hear them — pilgrims and congregants and the devout and the desperate, all the people who have walked hundreds of miles to stand in proximity to this stone and give it everything they have. There are hymns somewhere to the east. Someone is praying aloud in a voice low enough that I can hear the sound but not the words.

I have been sitting here for an hour trying to believe.

I do not mean trying in the effortful sense. I mean that I have been turning the thing over and over, trying to find the solid part of it, the place where it locks. I believe that the world was changed by the Meteor. I believe that the crystal is real, that it does things which cannot be explained by the natural laws of the old world. I believe that Thomas's faith is genuine and that the faith of thousands of pilgrims is genuine and that genuine things have weight.

What I cannot find is the part that says: and therefore you will be taken.

I will go to the outer yard today because Thomas will go into the inner hall and I will not be separated from him by anything as small as a gate. I will stand as close as they will allow me. And I will try.

That is all I have.

Maybe it is enough.

I do not know how to begin this entry.

I will begin with what I saw, because facts are more reliable than feeling right now.

The hall was filled beyond any capacity I could have imagined. I was in the outer yard, pressed among hundreds of other people who had not been given places inside. The morning was cold and pale, the mountains still carrying snow on their highest points, the sky that particular thin blue that comes before full dawn.

The light began before the prayer finished. I could see it through the hall windows — that deep emerald green, pulsing slowly at first, then building. The air carried the metallic taste that I have come to associate with the crystal when it is active. People around me were weeping. Praying. Some had their eyes closed. Some watched the windows with open mouths.

The hum.

I had felt it through the floor before. This was different. This was through everything — the air, my chest, the bone behind my eyes. A frequency that did not belong to anything human.

Then the woman to my left was gone.

Just — gone. Her shawl fell. It took a moment for my mind to register what had happened, because there was no flash, no sound, no sign. She was standing and then there was only her shawl and the empty air where she had been.

Then others. Three at once, to my right. A man in front of me. An elderly woman behind me.

I stood very still.

I kept standing.

I have found a candle and a corner. I am writing this on the floor of what was a common room, which is now a room full of other people who are also still here, also also still here, all of us with that same expression that I cannot name.

Thomas is not here.

I knew it before I went inside the hall. The inner hall was almost empty — just scattered clothing on the floor and the soft, fading glow of the crystal overhead. The stone is dark now, or nearly. Whatever it held, it has released.

Thomas's coat was on the floor by the eastern pillar. He had been standing near the front, near the stone itself, just as he was promised. His coat was folded — no, not folded, it had simply kept the shape of him for a moment after he was gone, and then settled. His spectacles were beside it. One lens cracked.

I sat down on the floor next to his coat and I stayed there for I don't know how long.

The leaders are saying the ritual worked. They are saying the faithful have been gathered. I have heard them speaking to the survivors and they use words like: completion, and: fulfillment, and: chosen.

No one has yet said what I keep thinking.

The crystal did not know my daughter. It did not know my mother. It did not know the young man who stands in a boarding house two streets from here and stares at a wall and tracks something we cannot see. It does not know Thomas, whatever it has done with Thomas. It does not know theology or merit or grief.

It knows only how much you want something. How deeply. How completely. Without reservation or question or the part of you that stays up past midnight wondering if wanting and believing are the same.

Thomas believed completely. He was ready.

I was not.

I am sitting with my husband's coat and I am trying to understand what that means.

Sister Pryce is still here. I am not surprised by this. She is the kind of woman who asks precise questions, and precisely questions were not what the stone was measuring.

We have been taking walks again. There is a lot to walk through. The city is quieter now — not peacefully quiet, but hollowed quiet. Entire families reduced to one parent, one child, one bewildered grandmother standing in a doorway. There was a rail accident two days after the equinox, forty miles east: the engineer vanished at the controls. Three cars derailed. People are very careful now about getting on trains.

Sister Pryce told me today that she has been gathering accounts. She is trying to understand the pattern of who was taken and who was not.

She says she cannot find a pattern. Devout elders remained. Young children were taken. Men who had arrived as pilgrims just the week before vanished, while congregants who had spent their lives in this church stood untouched in the hall. One woman whose faith had reportedly been questioned by the leadership for years was among the first to disappear from the inner hall.

I asked Sister Pryce what she concluded from this.

She said: The crystal is not a judge. It is an amplifier. It does not measure righteousness. It measures resonance. Whatever belief was carried by those ten thousand voices in that hall on that morning — the crystal caught it and spread it outward until everyone, everywhere, whose inner self resonated at the same frequency was swept up into it.

I asked her: resonance with what?

She said: With the expectation of departure.

We walked in silence for a while after that.

It is spring. The mountains are losing their snow. There is a smell in the air that I associate with Ohio in April — that cold-earth-and-new-grass smell that means the winter did not kill everything after all.

I have been carrying Thomas's coat. I know that is probably strange. I wear it over my own coat when the nights are cold. It is too large for me and I look ridiculous and I do not care.

I have been thinking, these past weeks, about what it means that I was left behind.

The leadership calls the ones who remain the Witnesses. They say we were kept here to testify. They say our continuing presence in the world is itself an act of faith — we tend what the faithful left behind, we carry the story forward, we await what comes next.

I have tried that story on. I have held it up to the light. There is some truth in it. There is also, I think, a great deal of what Sister Pryce would call imprecision.

Here is what I actually believe:

The Shardisite crystal is a thing we found in the ground twenty-one years ago. We do not understand it. We understand less of it than we think we do — three men died digging it up, and the fourth one's eyes move over something the rest of us cannot see, and those are not the signs of something we have mastered. The crystal amplifies will. That is real. That is measurable. The rest — the theology, the promise, the sacred destination of everyone who vanished — that is something we have laid over the top of the facts like a cloth over a wound, because the wound is too difficult to look at bare.

Thomas believed with everything he had. I believe that. I believe he is gone. I do not know where.

Clara died in a winter crossing from Ohio. I do not know where she is either. I have never known. I have only hoped.

What I find, now that the stone is dark and the city is quiet and I have had three weeks to sit with the shape of my own surviving, is this:

I was not taken because I had doubts. Because I kept asking questions. Because I could not find the place in my faith where it locked into the certainty that the crystal required. For twenty-one years I have thought of this as a failing. A softness. Evidence of some insufficiency of character.

This morning, I walked past the man who stares at the wall. He was in his doorway, sitting in a chair someone had placed there for him, turned toward the street. The April light was on his face. His eyes moved. Always moving, tracking something.

Nobody knows what happened to the people who were taken. Nobody knows whether they arrived anywhere. Nobody knows if the crystal sent them somewhere real, or only sent them — the way a river sends a thing into the ocean, which is not a destination so much as a dispersal.

And I thought: the stone took the certain ones. The ones who had stopped asking.

It left behind the ones who were still in conversation with the question.

Maybe that is not a punishment.

Maybe that is the other kind of grace.

I am still here. I am still asking. The world is broken and strange and threaded through with green crystal that we barely understand and probably never will, and something terrible and enormous happened in a hall three streets from where I sleep, and my husband's coat smells like him less every day.

But I am here.

The questions are still here with me.

And I have come to believe — in the only way I know how to believe anything, which is slowly and reluctantly and with both hands open — that the ones who are still asking are the ones the world still needs.

Whatever the stone thought it was choosing, it did not choose wrong when it left me behind.

I am keeping the coat.

This document was recovered among ancient ruins in the hills above what we now call the Cascadian Reaches by a company of explorers in 1422 A.M. It is the only known first-person account of the ritual performed in the settlement then called Salt Lake City [identity confirmed by cross-reference with pre-meteor cartographic fragments], believed to have ultimately caused the disappearance of an estimated 75 million souls.

As best can be surmised, Maren Aldecott survived the Evangelical Rapture and eventually lived a seemingly solitary life in the region. It appears she reached old age. Her journal, if genuine, stands among the earliest surviving first-person accounts of the Age of Collapse — and the only one written by someone who stood close enough to the stone to feel it choose.