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  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.”

  THREE

  77 HOURS, 37 MINUTES

  “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.

  Diana and Gaia had reached a high point, up in the hills above the gaiaphage’s mine shaft. For the first time Diana could really see that beyond the dome the hills soared much higher still. They were standing on a series of foothills, really, but with enough altitude that in the other direction Diana could see the distant blue haze of the ocean. There were low, dark smears where the islands sat.

  “Huh. I know where there’s food,” Diana said.

  “You told me: Perdido Beach,” Gaia said. “But I’m not ready to go there. Are you so stupid you don’t remember?”

  “I really am getting sick of being called stupid,” Diana snapped. “You can call me Mother. Or you can call me Diana. I’ll take either one.”

  Gaia hesitated, stared at Diana, then blinked.

  Diana screamed. “Aaaaahh! No, no, no!” She felt the hot knife in her head. The pain was terrible and terrifying, like some desperate animal inside her head trying to rip its way out.

  The pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Maybe it had lasted three seconds, but it had felt much longer.

  Had it lasted longer still, Diana would have gone mad. She was on her knees, trembling, fighting the urge to vomit up the nothing in her stomach.

  “You don’t make demands,” Gaia said. She came close: just a child, but with a power no child had ever held. Her eyes were blue. Her hair was so dark, it was almost black. She ran her chubby child’s fingers over Diana’s back and neck, probing, feeling, like a cook assessing a piece of steak. “You serve me. You’re a slave. My slave.”

  Diana nodded, unable to speak as the sense memory of that pain echoed in her skull.

  Gaia relented. “But in using this spoken human language I have to call you something. So I’ll call you Diana.”

  “Lovely,” Diana said through gritted teeth.

  “Food?” Gaia prompted.

  “There’s an island. You can see it, that gray lump out in the ocean.”

  Gaia looked. “I see nothing.”

  “You see the ocean, the bluish stuff out there.”

  “No.”

  Diana considered this for a moment, looked around for what she needed, and said, “Do you see the stand of trees on that ridge? How many trees?” There were three, quite distinct from one another.

  “I can’t count them. They blur together.”

  “You’re nearsighted,” Diana said. She laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me? You’re a nearsighted devil child? You need glasses?”

  Gaia did not object to being called a devil child, apparently, as there was no stabbing pain. But she frowned at the term “nearsighted.” “Do you mean that your vision is better than mine?”

  Diana shrugged. “It has to do with the shape of your eyeball, I think. Bodies are like that: all kinds of imperfections. Also, you’re growing at an amazing, unnatural rate. So who knows what’s going on with your body?”

  It occurred to Diana to wonder whether Gaia could control the aging process. She had assumed that the gaiaphage caused it, but was it just some bizarre effect of the FAYZ?

  And she was still trying to figure out what Gaia knew and did not know. Gaia—the gaiaphage—had spent her life, if you could call it that, in a mine shaft. She could use language, but it always seemed forced. She knew many things, but there were also lots of holes in her knowledge. She was like a foreigner just coming to grips with a new society.

  Diana’s best theory—and she had not asked Gaia—was that Gaia knew what she had picked up from minds she had controlled or at least touched at different times. Minds like Diana’s. Like Lana’s. Like Caine’s, too, once upon a time.

  She flashed back to the time after Caine had come crawling away from the gaiaphage. He’d been raving, paranoid, sick almost to death. She had nursed him through it. Was that why, despite everything, he had never betrayed her?

  Gratitude? Caine?

  “You’ll need bigger clothing soon,” Diana said. “At this rate you’ll be healed and less, sorry, gross, soon. And you’ll be . . . developing.”

  “Developing?” Gaia seemed unsure whether this was an opportunity or a threat.

  “Never mind; I am so not ready for that conversation,” Diana said. “Anyway, there’s food on one of those islands out there.”

  “How do we get to this island?”

  “Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” Diana said.

  “On what?”

  “On what you can do, Gaia. On what powers you have. I saw you attack your fa—Caine. You moved him with your mind. Is that all you have? Telekinesis? What Caine has?”

  “I have access to all powers, Diana. The speed, the ability to move things with my mind, strength. I can switch gravity on and off. I have the killing light. I can heal.”

  “Then you can bounce like Taylor. You could teleport yourself to the island, get us both some food, and be back in a flash.”

  Gaia looked curious. “I don’t know Taylor.”

  Diana frowned. “Don’t you?” Interesting, she thought. “She’s got the power to teleport. She thinks, and then, click, she’s there.”

  Something that might almost have been embarrassment made a fleeting appearance on Gaia’s face. She didn’t like revealing her limits.

  Maybe I can use that.

  Use it for what? Are you her mother or her enemy?

  All of the above?

  Gaia closed her eyes and stood very still. Her expression was focused, questing for something, almost like she was praying. Finally she said, “That one, the one you called Taylor, she no longer exists as what she was. I cannot . . . reach . . . her power.”

  It took Diana a few seconds to figure out what she was hearing. Then it dawned. “You don’t really have many powers of your own; you can only use theirs, the moofs’, the mutants’. So you can�
��t do what Penny could do, because she’s dead. And Taylor?”

  “The mutations that enable powers are physical, but the power exists beyond their bodies as well. I can reach into that space and use those powers.” She spoke with acid condescension, like she was talking to a child, which was particularly strange coming from what looked like a child. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  But Diana’s breath caught, because she did understand one thing. “That’s why you didn’t let Drake kill Caine. It’s why we ran away. You can’t start by killing Caine or Sam or Brianna; if you do, you lose their powers.”

  Gaia looked smug. “All things are connected to me, stupid . . . Diana. My father’s power exists because he mutated and formed a field with me. When he dies, one end of that field will fail. The power that stretches between us will fail. Eventually, though, I will cause others to mutate. It’s my . . . my nature. It’s what I am. What I may lose today, I can gain back later. Over time.”

  Diana wondered if she dared to risk a question. They started walking along again, almost like friends, if you could get past the fact that they were a fifteen-year-old half broken in body and spirit and a pretty child filled with the mind and will of a terrible monster.

  Kind of a lot to get past there.

  Gaia could kill her at any time. Gaia could torture her at any time. Gaia had done the second but not the first. Why? Did she feel something for Diana? Or was Diana useful? If so, for what? Certainly not for her own power, which was simply the ability to gauge others’.

  “How do you know all this?” Diana asked, trying to make it sound admiring. In her mind she suddenly had an image of Astrid. Astrid would be furiously jealous if Diana understood the great mystery of the gaiaphage before she did.

  “I was created knowing some things. And I have learned other things in the course of my life. I use this body, but this is not me,” Gaia said. Her voice was still a child’s voice. “I am greater than any form I may take.”

  The tiny part of Diana that still fantasized about this beautiful girl being her actual daughter noted that Gaia had a healthy ego. That was the kind of thing a parent should notice, wasn’t it? She should beam with pride and say something like, Yes, Gaia is quite self-assured.

  Gaia is advanced for her age.

  Gaia is a gifted child.

  Gaia is imaginative: she thinks she’s a mass of green slime inhabiting a human body. Isn’t that cute?

  “It all happens because of me, Diana,” Gaia went on. She was marveling at her own power, her own uniqueness. “A script written long ago and very far away. Not that they ever imagined that I would be born, but that script, that virus, got a diet of hard radiation and a trace of human and other DNA. That wasn’t their idea; they were just trying to spread life around the galaxy.”

  “You’re talking about the meteorite that hit the power plant,” Diana said. This far Astrid had guessed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the disaster that had given Perdido Beach its nickname, Fallout Alley, was connected to what had happened later. “Wait. Human DNA?”

  “One human was in the power plant when the meteorite struck. His code and my code were melded together, fed by the uranium in the plant. And I was born. My real birth,” she added quickly, with a disgusted look at Diana. “My true birth. Not the crude freak show of this body’s birth, but the beautiful accident that made me.”

  Gaia’s high-pitched voice sounded excited. But that voice held no true sense of joy or wonder. It was high because her vocal cords were still short: a biological fact, not a reflection of the mind behind the voice.

  Or else she really was just a complete egomaniac.

  Diana wondered if this creature felt anything real, aside from a high opinion of herself and a lust for power. And she wondered where Gaia had picked up the phrase “freak show.” Whose mind had she ransacked to come up with that?

  What exactly did she know?

  Not everything, Diana thought, answering her own question. She hadn’t known about Taylor. Maybe that’s why she’s keeping me around and alive: to fill in the gaps in what she knows.

  “That crude freak show of a birth nearly killed me,” Diana said a little bitterly. It still made her ache inside, and the trauma to her body sapped her strength.

  This is not my daughter, Diana thought. That she looks like me, that she has Caine’s chin and my eyes, all of that is an illusion. Whatever my daughter was, or might have been, this is the gaiaphage.

  I am walking and talking with a monster.

  “We are near the place where I spent my . . . my childhood,” Gaia said. “I can feel it.”

  “The mine shaft? Yeah, I guess we are. We’re not going there, are we? If Sam is looking for you, he’ll go there.”

  “I’m hungry, stupid . . . Diana. I’ll go there and call the coyotes, if any have survived. A single coyote would feed us for a while.”

  “I don’t think there are many coyotes left. I think—”

  “I’m hungry! I’m hungry! I have to eat!” Gaia bellowed like a spoiled child. “This body must be fed! All you do is tell me what I can’t do! I can do whatever I want: I am the gaiaphage!” Her fists were clenched, and her face was white with fury.

  Rage. So that’s one emotion she has.

  Diana backed away, afraid that Gaia would go after her. She cringed, awaiting the stab of pain. But it didn’t come, because now Gaia was gazing past Diana.

  “What is that?”

  Diana turned and saw something so improbable it was hard to believe. They were in the hills, far from town, almost at the northernmost part of the FAYZ. But there, just outside the barrier, were two young men, both in their twenties, both outfitted in mountain-climbing gear with pitons hanging from webbing belts.

  The men seemed surprised and excited to see them. Diana was suddenly aware of just how odd she and Gaia must look: a bruised, bloodstained teenager and a young girl still partly covered in third-degree burns.

  The climbers stopped what they were doing—which was assembling a rickety aluminum ladder—and waved. The red-haired one took an iPhone out of his backpack and started to videotape.

  Diana gave him the finger.

  Red-hair laughed, a silent show.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Diana said.

  “No.”

  “They’re just a couple of idiots trying to climb up the dome and get pictures.”

  “They won’t get far,” Gaia said. “They can lean things against the barrier, but nothing will stick to it, and they cannot drive in nails.”

  “So they’ll fall down a few times.”

  “Stop talking. I need to concentrate.”

  “Concentrate on what?”

  Gaia smiled grimly. “On Nemesis.”

  Gaia closed her eyes. Her little fists clenched, then released. Every muscle in her body tightened. Her skin took on a glow that Diana had seen before: a faint, sickly green glow.

  The two men leaned their ladder against the dome. They didn’t notice what was happening to Gaia. They were discreetly looking away.

  Diana risked a small shake of her head: No.

  No, you need to run. You need to get out of here.

  But the redhead ascended with rope and pitons at the ready. At the top of the ladder he tried attaching a suction cup to the dome. It didn’t work.

  He shrugged at Diana, a little comically, like, Hey, I was hoping it would work.

  Then he tried banging in a piton. This made no sound within the dome, and it also made no mark.

  His partner handed up two more pieces of metal that Red-hair fitted into the existing ladder. This allowed him to climb another twelve feet on a rickety, single-pole structure.

  “Not exactly bright, are they?” Diana observed.

  Probably Gaia couldn’t do anything. Probably. But the little girl that was no little girl watched with teeth bared, eyes focused far away, seeming to enjoy whatever it was she was doing in that space that Diana could not enter.

  “For just a mome
nt, Nemesis,” she whispered.

  Despite the growing sense that something was about to go very wrong, Diana found herself fascinated at something she had not seen in what felt like a lifetime: adults. More than that, adults with clean clothing and clean, professionally cut hair. And they were unarmed, not even so much as a crowbar or a baseball bat. When was the last time she had seen anyone unarmed? Anyone over the age of four in the FAYZ had something, even if it was just a pointed stick.

  “You’re making me angry,” Gaia whispered. “I’m hungry.”

  Gaia’s eyes began to glow like someone had turned on a dim flashlight inside her head so that light bled just a bit around the rim of her eyes. Her fists were clenched tight. Her teeth made a cracking sound as she clamped her jaw.

  The redhead was now well over Diana’s height, but in no danger of making any progress. He had gotten himself into position to take some decent video, but he was at the end of his ladder. The dome was ten miles high in the center, and there was no ladder in the world that would cover even a tiny fraction of—

  “Ahhhh!” Gaia cried, and the whole world wobbled. It was like a small earthquake, but more, as if the air itself had been stirred.

  There was a blast of air in Diana’s face.

  A sound of rushing wind.

  And the red-haired man fell.

  He fell and hit the ground at Diana’s feet. Inside. In the FAYZ.

  The man lay stunned. He looked at them in amazement, looked back at his friend, who just stood with his mouth open, then grinned and said, “Whoa! This is cool!”

  Gaia made her little teeth-baring smile and said, “Food.”

  It had hit Little Pete in a way that was impossible to explain to someone who lived in the normal universe. Pete had no body, but he had just been punched, very hard. It had hurt. It had sent his mind spinning.

  He had never felt anything like it. It could only come from one person: the Darkness. The green, vaporous tendrils that had often reached to touch his mind had this time struck him.

  The gaiaphage. Had punched him. Hard enough to make his consciousness blink out for just a fraction of a second.