Of all the possible saviors, you told him, it was the most unlikely that deflected the apocalypse: a tortoise. Your little brother made a face, which made you only insist that it all was true—that the creature was as big as a house, with a shell as hard as iron, and that day, when everyone else had given up, it was the tortoise alone who made the slow march across the field that lay in the moonfall’s path. Hundreds of years old and slower than a tugboat, but it made it.
