Chapter Twenty
Desecheo Island facility
Denton’s attention was transfixed on the archival footage.
From the satellite, Qom was a handful of glittering diamonds on black velvet. And in the center of the diamonds, he noticed a brief flicker. At first, he thought it was just a glitch, a digital artifact in the footage. But a fraction of a second later the glitch was replaced by an object that looked like a bell-shaped jellyfish. A jellyfish that might’ve swallowed a bioluminescent tangerine.
For a second, the tangerine jellyfish remained stable. Then it grew, expanding as though the city was its next big lunch. An explosion at a jerky twelve frames per second.
Denton followed its hazy edges as it stretched outward in an ever-expanding sphere, shaking buildings and curdling the mountains
