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“Why do I get the feeling we have a crazy twelve-year-old daughter?” Astrid muttered.

Sam looked at Astrid with affection so obvious a blind man would have seen it. The days of wondering whether they would be together were over. It wasn’t that either of them had said it quite that way; it was just the way it was, it was there, it was a fact. It was chiseled in granite.

Astrid stood with legs apart, arms crossed, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans so torn and ripped they looked like they’d been tailored with a chainsaw, her once-long blond hair now hacked short, her cool, judgmental blue eyes still judging, still watching the world more closely than anyone else.

She was still Astrid the Genius, the girl who had so intimidated Sam back before the FAYZ that he hadn’t even let himself think about asking her out, or even talking to her. She had been so far above him—at least in his own eyes—that she was practically on a different planet.

The funny thing was that he was still in awe of her, but she was no longer unattainable. She wasn’t the icy, distant Athena looking down at him from Olympus with affection mingled with disappointment. She had committed. She had bought in. And now it was as if an invisible FAYZ barrier of their own encircled just the two of them, defined them, and made each of them hate the idea of being apart.

They spent their days and their nights together, and they still disagreed, and they still argued, and they sniped, and they were absolutely bound together into one.

Unbreakable unless by death.

Which was a very likely outcome, and a thought that wiped the smug, contented look from Sam’s face.

Endgame. That word had quickly become part of conversation in the FAYZ. He had tried to quash it. Edilio had tried to quash it. Down in Perdido Beach, Caine had tried to quash it. It wasn’t good for people to start thinking things were coming to an end.

But Sam was thinking it himself, and he was trying to imagine that ending. Each time he tried, each time he ran the clock forward in his imagination, the fantasy would fall apart. He believed it was the endgame. He felt it in his bones. He just didn’t think he was going to make it out.

When he saw the end, it was always a terrible one. And he always saw himself watching others leave the FAYZ while he did not.

When had that morbid thought first surfaced? Had it been there festering in the back of his mind for a long time? Had it only now broken through to conscious awareness because people were talking about the endgame?

Endgame. It can mean more than one thing, he thought.

But it was all nonsense, all speculation. None of it meant anything. None of it mattered, not really. It would end how it ended.

Edilio and Dekka arrived. They had very sensibly not brought Toto back with them.

Sam didn’t get up, just gave them a wave as they climbed aboard the docked houseboat. Edilio plopped into a deck chair. He was weary and dusty. It would be wrong to say that he looked old—he was still physically a teenager, a sunburned, dark-skinned guy in jeans and boots, with a desperate-looking cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, over shaggy dark hair. He didn’t look old, but in some way it was impossible to define, he looked like a man, not a boy.

That impression came only partly from the fact that he was carrying an assault rifle slung over one shoulder.

“Word from PB is that Caine is trying to get Orc to force people away from the barrier and back to work,” Edilio said.

“Maybe not such a bad idea?” Sam said.

“Except it’s not working,” Dekka said. “Orc won’t go near the barrier. He doesn’t want anyone to see him. You know, the way he is. There’s, like, no produce down in Perdido Beach, not even cabbages,” Dekka went on. “If it wasn’t for Quinn still bringing in fish, they’d all be starving again. I’d almost say we need Albert back, if he wasn’t such a backstabbing little worm.”

Dekka had never looked young; she’d been born with a serious face that over time had become forbidding. When she was annoyed—as she was now—her expression could become downright intimidating. And an angry Dekka was a storm front coming.

“I guess you heard about Breeze?” Dekka asked, changing the subject. There was a mix of exasperation and affection in her tone. Dekka might not be over Brianna, but she had made peace with her rejection. The infatuation had burned out, but the love was still there.

“Oh, we heard,” Astrid said. “You just missed her.”

Edilio wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Something was on his mind. “We’re vulnerable here. We don’t know where Diana and that freak-show baby of hers are. And we don’t know what kind of power Gaia has—except that if she was really a normal kid, she’d be dead. We don’t even know what they want, what they’re after. Maybe they don’t want anything, though most likely . . .” He shrugged. “But the bigger vulnerability is probably down in PB. We got, what, two hundred fifty kids all together, between the lake and PB? Give or take. At least half of them are down there right now where the highway hits the barrier. Waving and crying and writing notes. Especially the littles, man. It’s not just no work getting done; it’s that they’re out in the open with no one protecting them.”

“They’re a target,” Astrid said.

“Big one,” Dekka said.

“That’s Caine’s territory down there,” Sam said, shifting uncomfortably at the temptation to palm off responsibility on his alienated brother.

“Yeah, but a lot of them are our people. Lake people,” Edilio argued. “You notice it’s quiet around here? Half our people walked ten miles down to PB so they can cry looking at their family.” He didn’t say that with a sneer. Edilio didn’t own a sneer.

Astrid said, “We have the same two top priorities we’ve had since the start: keep people fed and stop those trying to destroy us.”

Sam smiled privately at the rather grandiose phrasing.

“We need a plan beyond hoping Breeze finds Drake and Diana and Gaia,” Edilio said.

“I was kind of hoping you had one,” Sam said. He was joking, but Edilio wasn’t smiling.

Sam had the odd feeling that he’d just been caught goofing off in class. He sat up straighter and unconsciously lowered his voice half an octave. “You’re right, Edilio. What is it you want to do?”

At some point, and Sam could not really pinpoint quite when, Edilio had stopped being his sidekick and become his equal, his full partner. The change had permeated the consciousness of the population at the lake, had become fact without anyone having to announce it. No one anymore told Edilio they’d have to “check with Sam”: in everything except for a battle, Edilio was in charge.

Sam could not have been more pleased. He had discovered about himself that he had no talent for details. Or managing. And it was a wonderful thing to be able to lie in bed with Astrid and not feel the whole world was depending on him. In fact, glancing up at her now, with her sleeveless T-shirt gapping at the side, and the amazing line of her legs, and . . . He forced himself back to Edilio.

“Okay, a couple things. First, while we have time, I want to prepare for the worst,” Edilio said. “We don’t have much extra food, but I want to stop people eating the last of the Nutella and Cup-a-Noodles. I want to put that stuff on a boat we’ll anchor out in the lake. Also some of the vegetables that Sinder is growing, the stuff that won’t spoil. I don’t want us getting caught flat-footed again. From now on, people want to eat, they had better get their butts back to work.”

Sam nodded. “Yeah.” Up above, the sky was cloudy. But they were not quite normal clouds. They moved in a strange pattern, seeming to slide by, swifter close in, slower off in the far northern distance. Toward the southeast the sky turned dark blue. It was all part of the dome effect.

The newly transparent sphere that contained the FAYZ was twenty miles in diameter, with the nuclear power plant at its center. That meant that directly over the power plant the top of the sphere was ten miles up. At that point the top of the sphere approached the stratosphere, up beyond clouds, beyond much oxygen. It was quite a bit lower here at Lake Tramonto, which was near the northwest edge. This close to the barrier they could be seen from the outside by anyone with a decent set of binoculars.

Just forty-eight hours after the barrier had gone clear it was still very strange to Sam to be able to look across Lake Tramonto and see the rest of Lake Tramonto. There was a marina over there, probably not a mile from where he was sitting. There were boats, and people, too, though not more than a handful. Some had ventured out in the boats to nose right up against the barrier and look in, like people staring at the animals in the zoo. There was one over there right now with two guys pretending to fish but actually shooting video. Sam waved and felt foolish.

Life in the FAYZ had changed.

As if to make that point, Astrid shaded her eyes and looked off to the north. “Helicopter.”

There was a helicopter with some sort of logo, maybe a news station or a police department, impossible to read from this distance. It was hovering above the “out there” marina, most likely aiming a camera into the dome. Perhaps focusing, as well as they could from that distance, on the four of them sitting there.

Sam fought a sudden childish impulse to give them the finger.

Edilio was still talking, and for the second time Sam felt like a distracted student in class.

“What we need most of all is simple information,” Edilio was saying. “What are Drake and Diana and that kid going to do? And what can they do? Right now we’re blind.”

“Irony,” Astrid said. When everyone just stared at her blankly, she sighed and explained, “For the first time we can see the real sky, and the world outside of this fishbowl, and we’re still blind.”

“Ah,” the three said in unison. “Yeah, right.”

“You know, it’s not a witty remark if I have to explain it,” Astrid said, obviously disgruntled.

“I want to talk to Caine,” Edilio said. “I’m going to head down to PB. We need to work together.”

“You want me to come?” Sam asked.

“If it’s you down at the barrier trying to get kids motivated, it will just get Caine pissed off. And we don’t have time for that whole enemies thing. To be honest with you . . . Well, I was wondering, Sam . . . I mean, just a suggestion . . .”

Sam smiled affectionately at his friend. “Dude: if you got a job for me, just tell me what it is.”

“It’s not just a job. It’s . . . Okay, here it is: Even Breeze can’t be everywhere. She searches, but she doesn’t search smart. I love her, but she just zooms around randomly and doesn’t let anyone tell her where to look.”

Sam nodded. “You want me to go looking for trouble.”

“Breeze is all over the area around PB, looking for any sign that Gaia and Drake are heading toward town—and of course making sure the TV cameras see her. But maybe Gaia is holing up somewhere, waiting. Getting stronger. Or maybe she’s on the move.”

Sam thought about it. “The mine shaft, the National Guard base, the Stefano Rey, or the power plant.”

“Same as my list. And you can’t take Dekka with you; I—we—need her here.”

“Who can I take?”

“We don’t know what Gaia can do. Sam, you may not be strong enough to take her,
it,
whatever. Not alone for sure, or even with Dekka.” He nodded respectfully at Dekka. “No offense to you, Dekka.”

Dekka nodded slightly to say no offense was taken. Dekka knew the limits of her powers.

“I don’t think we should wait for Gaia to choose the time and place,” Edilio said.

“She ran away with Diana and Drake,” Astrid said. “She didn’t come right back; she ran off. That doesn’t make me think she’s all that dangerous.”

Sam looked down and smiled. “If Toto was here, he’d call BS on that, Astrid. The gaiaphage did not choose to take on a body thinking it would get weaker. You know that.”

The mood, which had been light earlier, thanks to Brianna, had grown steadily darker. Edilio had brought reality with him. And reality had a bad feel.

Astrid was looking for something to say, some argument, but in the end all she had was, “I don’t want you getting killed, Sam. If you go after Gaia . . .”

“Edilio isn’t thinking I’ll go alone, are you, Edilio?” Sam said. He reached for her hand, squeezed, but she did not return the pressure.

“We should probably leave soon,” Edilio said. “One hour?”

Sam nodded, a condemned man accepting the inevitable sentence. “One hour.”

“I’M HUNGRY,”
GAIA
said, and not for the first time that morning. Drake had come in the night and brought some artichokes and a dead rat, but it wasn’t enough. Gaia had sent him right back out for more.

She was a very hungry girl. A growing monster.

At first Gaia had taken a little milk from Diana’s breasts, but her development was way too fast to allow her to survive on mother’s milk. And Diana’s body was a wreck—malnourished, bruised, beaten. Her body had had only four months to adjust to what should have been a nine-month pregnancy. And the birth itself, crying out in pain in a hot, dark cave . . . Well, she wasn’t in the best of shape.

For the last two days, as Gaia healed herself and grew, Drake had been sent off to forage for food. He had raided the fields; he had successfully attacked a cart heading from Perdido Beach to the lake; he had killed animals and brought them back to Gaia, who cooked them with a blast of light from her hands and ate them.

But her appetite was still growing. Her appetite was becoming dangerous. Diana no longer had even a small chance of taking any of the food for herself. And worse, more frightening still to Diana, were her daughter’s long, speculative looks. Gaia was not good at hiding emotion: she was looking at Diana as a possible meal. At times the girl would drool like a dog at feeding time.

They were following the barrier still, stolidly walking along the circumference of the space that everyone had come to call the FAYZ. Fallout Alley Youth Zone, a mordant label that Howard Bassem had come up with. Howard: no longer alive. Himself eaten by coyotes.

So Drake was off foraging yet again, and Diana was in the unusual position of hoping her hated foe would succeed, and quickly.