Do Something

Urquhart watched the news stream in and tried to call up the familiar distancing, the well-practiced art of spectatorship. Keep telling yourself it's only a movie, it's only television, it's just some dark imagining brought to you by those nice folks who gave you Pearl Harbor.

It was a line he'd taken often enough in the past but this time it wouldn't do.

This time his heart would not be still. The seal wouldn't hold, his worlds kept colliding, there was no way to be apart from it, no possibility of an Outside. He thought of Emily and felt the anxiety burning, building. He looked at Macarthur, distracted and aloof.

"One of us has to do something," he said.