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No one would be meeting her here today.

“You said you saw what looked like lasers?” Connie asked, fighting the tremor in her voice.

“I know what you’re thinking, Ms. Temple,” he said. “I saw the video of your boy with that light coming out of his hands. But best not to draw any conclusions about any of this.”

“No,” she agreed.

“There’s a coffeemaker down in the galley. A little cream is all for me.”

Connie went below, grateful for the suggestion. She started the coffee and then found herself gripping a cup so hard the handle broke. She found another and filled a cup for each of them and carried them back up.

Merwin took his and drank, easily holding the boat on its station with slight turns of the wheel and little thrusts of the engines.

“I’m seventy-four years old,” he said, and shrugged again, this time like he was trying to get that fact to roll off his shoulders. “I was drafted into Vietnam. Way before your time, but it was a nasty war, that one.”

“I guess wars usually are.”

He smiled and laughed a little. “Yes, they are, generally. Well, there was this kid, just been bumped to corporal on account of the regular corporal was dead. Nice enough fellow. Only one day, after he’d had no sleep for three days, and no hot food in five days, and had two buddies shot . . .” He stopped then for a moment, breathed hard, and looked away.

She waited.

“As it happened, they captured an NVA—sorry, North Vietnamese Army regular. This NVA was injured, so he couldn’t keep up when his compadres retreated. So, corporal decides to question him. The NVA spits in the corporal’s face. Long story short, the corporal shot him in the neck.”

Silence.

“War crime, that was, shooting a helpless prisoner. Court-martial offense. At least it would have been if anyone had ever reported it.”

“You didn’t report it?”

Merwin shrugged, heavily this time. “No, ma’am. No one reported me for shooting that man in the neck. Because we were all of us hungry and tired and scared and very, very angry. And the oldest of us was just twenty years old.”

“Sam wouldn’t . . .,” she started to say.

“Oh, well, Ms. Temple, there are genuine saints in this world: I married one. But there aren’t many. I like to think Drake—my grandson, Drake, not that old corporal—I like to hope, anyway, that he found the strength to . . . But he was always a troubled boy. Especially after my son died. The stepfather . . . young Drake’s stepfather . . .” He blew out a breath. “But I don’t know and you don’t know.”

“What happens when we do know?” she asked in a small voice.

“I suppose we’ll behave like a bunch of holier-than-thou hypocrites. Because the alternative is to look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we are capable of dark and terrible things.”

They were quiet on the ride back to the dock. Connie shook his hand.

“Thanks for taking me and for talking with me. That must be a very hard thing to carry all these years.”

The old man smiled, and there was a glint of steel in his eyes. “Not the way you think, though, Ms. Temple. See, what’s hard is knowing I took pleasure in that act of revenge. And knowing if I had to do it all again, I’d still pull that trigger.”

She slowly released his hand and stared, stricken, into eyes that were cold and cruel, as he said, “Dark and terrible things. And the joys they bring.”

GAIA WAS
MOVING
faster, almost at a normal walking speed. The leg was healing. It would have healed altogether if she’d been able to sit and focus on it. But the two mutants were on her trail, and in addition to that she had to keep moving to stay ahead of the fire, which had quickly burned to the edge of the forest and merely awaited some encouragement to spread farther.

It had occurred to Gaia that inhabiting a body meant she, too, was vulnerable to smoke and fire. She had run through her mental inventory of powers that would save her from smoke inhalation. Nothing.

At least the pain was under some control now. The music in her ears helped distract her. The song was called “When All the Lights Go Out.” There was a lot of yelling. Gaia decided she liked yelling music best.

She walked straight down a gravel road, counting on the fact that she had a small lead and was in open ground now where she would see Sam and Caine before they caught up to her. They were a manageable threat. What worried her far more was the knowledge that Little Pete was looking at her. She could feel him watching her. And while Nemesis was fading fast, he wasn’t dead yet.

Bodies were definitely a mixed blessing—they kept you alive, they focused power, and they allowed you to move about. But they felt pain, and they could be killed.

What would happen to the great and glorious creature called the gaiaphage if this body died?

The truth was, she didn’t know. She might end up like Little Pete, a disembodied ghost. Or she might actually, truly, die. Cease to exist.

They hungered, these bodies. Constantly. It was like an insistent, nagging voice in her head:
Feed me. Feed me now!

She found a dead body by the side of the road, a boy. At first glance he didn’t seem to be injured. But when she used her foot to push him over, she saw a chunk of wood protruding from his back near his spine. He might not even have known it was there, and had simply bled to death as he walked from the lake toward Perdido Beach.

Well, one less to kill.

She quickly stripped off his clothing and put it on. It was filthy and stained with blood, but her own clothing was worse and now too small as well. It might confuse her pursuers. She ate some of his thigh, then quickly moved onward. In a while she would try out her speed again. This slow walking was boring.

She reached the highway just as a yellow school bus half covered in graffiti came rattling toward her. It stopped by the side of the road, and a dozen kids climbed out. They were carrying implements and buckets. Two of them manhandled a wheelbarrow out through the back door.

One of them, a girl with black hair, looked up, saw Gaia, and frowned uncertainly. Other kids stared past Gaia and pointed not at her but at the forest fire, which was certainly generating a lot of smoke. Even here, far from the trees, Gaia could smell it.

Gaia walked straight to the group, who were now heading into the field, tossing what looked like fish heads and bones ahead of them. The fish heads were instantly devoured by seething masses of worms, which then allowed the kids to pass unharmed into the field, dragging their buckets with them.

Gaia pulled out one earbud.

“Better get to work,” a boy said to Gaia.

But the black-haired girl, who had been watching her narrowly, said, “I don’t know you.”

“No, you don’t,” Gaia agreed. She didn’t want to alert and panic the others, so she avoided a light show and simply swung a backhand that crushed the girl’s head and killed her instantly.

The bossy boy said, “What the—”

He dodged her first punch; her second one caught him a glancing blow that shattered his arm. He opened his mouth to scream, but he never had the chance. Her hand found his throat and crushed his larynx as easily as crushing a grape.

She tossed his body behind the bus, where it wouldn’t be seen by the kids now moving slowly across the field.

There were ten in all. She followed them at a quick walk, stepping between rows of plants heavy with green pods. She caught up to the nearest girl and punched her once in the back and snapped her spine.

Nine.

The second one had time to yell, however, before Gaia knocked her head cleanly off her shoulders and set it flying to land between cabbages.

Eight.

The shout, cut short, alerted the rest of the workers, who spun and died, died, died as she easily killed three with blasts of green light.

Seven. Six. Five.

BLAM! BLAM!

One of them had a weapon. He fired fast and panicky. Gaia swept her beam and cut him in two.

Four.

No, there was a second gun. Too late!

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Gaia spun around, not so much knocked by the impact as by the spasm of pain. She fell on her back.

“Get her! Get her! Get her!”

BLAM! BLAM!

“I’m out of bullets!”

Gaia tried to sit up, but something inside her was badly damaged, and the pain was extraordinary.

In one ear Social Distortion sang “Story of My Life.” It was a song both upbeat and melancholy.

A girl with a knife rose up beside her. Gaia threw an invisible punch that sent the knife wielder flying.

Sudden noise behind her, feet on soft dirt: Gaia twisted to see and was hit in the chest with a spiked baseball bat.

She grabbed the bat with lightning reflexes, held it, and with her other hand burned a hole through her assailant.

Three.

Gaia pushed herself up and shook her head. She was woozy. Her head was pounding; her eyes didn’t want to focus; her chest hurt. Blood was leaking from her in too many ways.

Unable to see clearly, she swept a beam of light three hundred sixty degrees. Again. Again. A scream cut short.

Two.

She had to prioritize. What should she heal first? What was killing her?

She lifted her new shirt and saw that the nail wound in her chest was small compared to the bullet hole. And worse still, far worse, was the exploded exit wound where the bullet had come out of her side. She pressed her hand on that and focused.

She blinked tears from her eyes and saw two people running away, already back at the highway, racing toward Perdido Beach. She aimed a beam after them, but there was no aiming now: they were fuzzy in the distance, and she hit nothing.

Killing everyone in the FAYZ was proving more difficult than she’d expected.

Staying alive was proving more difficult.

Why did everything have to be difficult? It was unfair. It was wrong. She was the gaiaphage, and what were they? Weak things made of meat and blood and bone.

Like you, Darkness, just like you
.

Gaia gasped. The voice was in her head. His voice. Nemesis. He was seeing. He was learning from her mistake in taking on a body.

That’s right, Nemesis. See how weak a body makes you?

That would confuse him, she hoped. That would delay him. But at any moment Nemesis could make his move, and things would go from difficult to very hard indeed. She didn’t have time to lie here and recover. And Sam and Caine . . .

It began to occur to her then that the outside world might also be difficult to conquer, especially if they were ready for her. Stealth would be demanded. She must escape from this place without the humans outside realizing who and what she was. Once outside she would gain in power. She was, after all, a sort of virus that would propagate. She would attract followers. She would take control of other humans. She would . . .

Conquer.

Gaia, the gaiaphage-made-flesh, lay on her back and stared up at the blue sky.

“Story of My Life” was just ending.

Somewhere, way out there, past the thin shell of atmosphere, past this tiny solar system, somewhere out there in the unimaginable distances of the galaxy, was the place where the gaiaphage had first been conceived.

All that way, all that time, millions of years, to arrive here. To feel blood leaking from a human body into the dirt beneath her.

It could not end like this. The gaiaphage was destined for more, meant to transform. Its mere existence had begun to alter the laws of physics that ruled this planet.

Today the FAYZ, tomorrow the planet.

But right now she . . . it—whatever—was very tired.

“You’re back,” Astrid said to Albert. “I heard you were.”

“Yes. And we’re getting a trickle of food in from the fields already. Some teams have come back in, but I’ve pushed some others back out.”

Astrid nodded. “Probably a good thing.”

“Just probably?” Albert demanded.

“Gaia will come after us. It could be in a day; it could be in ten seconds. Having some of the people in different locations might make it harder for her to kill us all.”

She had called a hasty meeting in what had once been the mayor’s office. It struck her that if the barrier really came down there would once again be a real mayor in Perdido Beach. A week from now, or a month, or whenever, some responsible adult would be sitting here deciding important issues of trash collection and water and curfews and assorted other things that would not be life and death.

Albert was there; so were Edilio, Dekka, Quinn, and Diana. She’d have liked to have Jack there as well: he was not especially useful, but he was smart. Lana, too, might have been helpful, but she was busy, to put it mildly.

More, much more, Astrid wished Sam was there. Even Caine would have been welcome. They were facing what was probably the final battle, and she had no soldiers except Dekka and Orc. Dekka was strong and brave, as was Orc, but they were nothing to Gaia.

Astrid had begun to believe that the time had come to plan for after. And now she was afraid there would be no after. The barrier would come down, and the only person walking out into the world would be Gaia.

There was one person she wished wasn’t there: Diana.

It was Astrid’s meeting, but it was Albert who asked Diana the question. “Diana, you’ve been with this gaiaphage-Gaia thing. Everything you know.”

Diana glanced at Astrid, and Astrid saw that Albert had intercepted that look. So had Dekka.

There was a painfully long silence. Now even Quinn and the distracted Edilio noticed.

“Hey,” Quinn said. “No secrets.”

Astrid, as calmly as she could, said, “Tell them everything you know, Diana.”

For once Diana did not see the need to be difficult. “Gaia’s body is growing fast. She needs food constantly, and she doesn’t care where she gets it. She doesn’t seem to have powers of her own, really, except for what she had as the gaiaphage: the power to reach directly into minds, especially of moofs, people with powers, and especially those she’s been connected to in the past. She can cause them terrible pain and fear and—”