Show Notes
When the reactor at the heart of a West Virginia mill city explodes, its night engineer runs for twenty minutes without warning anyone and reaches a fence he has never seen. Outside it, eleven years have passed. The blast has bent time around the plant, so the nearer anyone stands to it, the slower their clock runs, and the city inside is still living its worst night while the towns along the fence watch through telescopes.
Those towns have watched him run past their families for more than a decade, and they spit at his name. Yet the company that owned the plant, whose order he signed the night it blew, wants him back inside, because he alone knows the deepest streets and families have saved for years to have their people carried out.
Every step he takes in there costs his wife and children days of their lives, and a single morning's rescue can cost them three years. As a slow fire creeps toward the people he is sent to reach, each trip forces him to choose whom he carries out and whom he walks past again, while his family grows older without him.
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