23: Cobalt, 1

pro·so·po·poe·ia
1. personification, as of inanimate things.
2. a figure of speech in which an imaginary, absent, or deceased person is represented as speaking or acting.

"I heard it Hafi, I heard it!" Khaled twisted in his seat to find the disturbance, his seatbelt grinding against his shoulder, but it was in vain; the noise had been everywhere, and the buildings themselves were shaking. The traffic down the Fifthway was jerking along uncertainly in the aftermath of what had sounded like the world rupturing along its axis. Khaled could think of no other way to describe it, no experience he could draw on for reference. Not an earthquake. Nothing so tame.

There was the weird feeling of lightness, like the ground beneath their sedan had broken off from the rest of the planet and was drifting away. Briefly, Khaled wondered if that was what had happened. Then he dismissed it as an anxious delusion. Impossible.

Would Earth...?

No. Impossible.

A flawless sapphire cincture kissed the golden desert ridges in the distance, where the Fifthway snaked around the coast, away to the Spanish cities in the North. The Rappais lapped at the desert's jagged feet in jealous protest. West of and around the great highway, Piskadh stood on a great outcrop that forced apart the waters and the shore like an ancient accord, while the irreproachable sky smiled in the glass reflections of the city towers. This was the tripartite assembly of blue, yellow, and grey that populated the planet. Green things had never evolved here; life had come to Cobalt on spaceships.

But Khaled and his children had forgotten that beauty long ago, in the instant that it all came apart. An eerie, impatient calm drowned the Eagle Eye Gorge in the seconds between the celestial convulsion and the arrival of the cloud above the Western horizon.

"Allah help us," Hafa uttered into the silence. In the backseat, little Nada began to cry. Afeef, her thirteen-year-old brother, urgently tried to shush her. The eldest, Murshid, simply stared through the tinted window at the second sky - an unbroken line of dust, segregating the two quarreling blues beyond the city.

Khaled had a silly thought.