The Twelve

65


The explosion in the basement, fueled by the fiery ignition of thirty-two hundred pounds of highly compressed diethyl ether inhalant, produced a release of energy roughly equivalent to the crash of a small passenger jet. With nowhere else to go, its explosive force rocketed upward, seeking any alley of travel to accommodate its rapidly oxygenating expansion—stairwells, hallways, ductwork—before folding back on itself and blasting through the floor. Once it was unleashed into the larger spaces of the building, the rest was up for grabs. Windows blew. Furniture went airborne. Walls were suddenly there no longer. It rose and as it rose it expelled a gyring wake of pure destruction like a tornado in reverse, everything flung up and out from its white-hot heart, until it found the bones of the structure itself, the steel girders and meticulously chiseled limestone blocks that had suspended its roof above the Iowa prairie since the days of the pioneers, and blew them all to pieces.

The Dome began to fall.

Three miles away, the spectators in the stadium experienced the destruction of the Dome as a chain of discrete sensory occurrences: first a flash, then a boom, followed by a deep seismic rattle and a clamping down of blackness as the city’s power grid collapsed. Everybody froze, but in the next instant something changed. A new force roused to life inside them. Who could say who started it? Insurgents planted in the stands had already begun their assault on the guards, but now they weren’t alone. The crowd rose up in violence, a wild mob. So ferocious was their undammed fury that as they fell upon their captors it was as if their individuality had dissolved into a single animal collective. A swarm. A stampede. A pod. They became their enemy, as all must do; they ceased to be slaves, and so became alive.

On the field, Guilder was … dissolving.

He felt this first in the backs of his hands—an abrupt constriction of the skin, as if he were being shrink-wrapped. He held them up to his face. In numb incomprehension—the pain had yet to arrive—he watched as the flesh of his hands puckered and began to split open in long, bloodless seams. The sensation spread, dancing over the surface of his body. His fingertips found his face. It felt like touching a skull. His hair was falling out, his teeth. His back bent inward, drawing him into an old man’s stoop. He fell to his knees in the mud. He felt his bones collapsing, crumbling to dust.

“Grey, what did you do?”

A shadow fell.

Guilder lifted his face. The virals filled his darkening vision with a final image of their magnificence. My brothers, he thought, what is happening to me? Help me, my brothers, I am dying. But he saw no kinship in their eyes.

Betrayer.

Betrayer.

Betrayer betrayer betrayer …

Other things were occurring—gunshots, voices yelling, figures running in the dark. But Guilder’s consciousness of these events was instantly subsumed into the larger awareness, cold and final, of what was about to happen to him.

Shawna, he thought, Shawna, all I wanted was a little company. All I wanted was not to die alone.

And then they were upon him.


The conclusive unfolding of events, which accounted for just thirty-seven seconds in the lives of the participants, occurred in overlapping frames of simultaneous movement collapsing toward the center. Illuminated only by firelight—the barrels at the periphery continued to burn—and the virals’ phosphorescent glow, the scene possessed a whiff of hell. The virals, finished with Guilder, his body scattered in desiccated pieces that were more dust than corpse, had assembled in a loose line. They appeared to be regarding Amy with a look of caution. Perhaps they did not know yet what she portended; perhaps they were afraid of her. Peter, his weapon reloaded, was firing in bursts into their massive figures, though without visible effect; the bullets skimmed pointlessly off their armored bodies in bright sparks; they didn’t so much as glance in his direction. From the other side of the field, Alicia was moving forward with her pistol raised, just as Nina and Tifty were racing downfield to flank them. The plan was now moot; they had only their instincts. Standing erect on the platform, Amy raised her arms. From each wrist hung a long length of chain. She jerked them into the air and began to rotate them at her wrists, swinging them in wide, accelerating arcs. Spinners, Peter realized. Amy was making spinners, to disorient the virals. Faster and faster the chains whirred in the air above her head, a hypnotic blur of movement. The creatures froze, entranced. With an avian dart, Amy’s head tipped to the side; her gaze compacted, calculating the angle of attack. Peter knew what was about to happen.

Amy Harper Bellafonte, fully weaponized. Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, airborne.

As she shot forward, she let the chains fly, snapping them from her body like a pair of whips. Simultaneously she tucked her head to her chest, aligning her posture in midflight so that she would meet the closest among them feetfirst, chest-high, her physical person transformed at the moment of impact into a battering ram with twenty-foot iron wings. She was a fraction of their size, but momentum was on her side; she sailed through the first one, blasting him backward; by the time she landed, the chains had found their targets, wrapping two others around their necks. With a hard yank she drew the left one toward her, buried her face beneath his jaw, and shook him like a dog with a rag in its mouth.

He howled.

And, with a jet of blood and a bony cracking sound, died.

She unfurled him from the chain with a snap of her wrist, rotating the body away like a top. Her attention turned to the second viral, but the balance had shifted: the element of surprise was gone; the hypnotic effect of the spinners had worn away. The creature launched toward her, their bodies meeting in an uncontrolled collision that sent them both tumbling end over end away from the platform. Amy wrenched the chain free but seemed disoriented; she crouched on her hands and knees in the dirt. A kind of whole-body rippling moved through the remaining virals, their shared consciousness reassembling, achieving focus. One more wink of time and they would fall on her like a pack of animals.

Which they might have, if not for the small one.

Peter’s mind had yet to parse them as anything more than a collective; he was forced to do so now. One of the virals was different. In bulk and stature he appeared no larger than a man. In the instant before the others leapt upon Amy, he beat them to the punch; with a compact aerial bound he alighted between her and her attackers, turning to face them, claws raised, his body in a posture of challenge. His chest expanded in a massive intake of breath; his lips pulled back, exposing his teeth.

The blast of sound that followed was completely out of proportion with the size of the body that produced it. It was a howl of purest rage. It was a roar that could have felled a forest, flattened a mountain, knocked a planet off its axis. Peter literally felt himself pushed back by it; his eardrums popped with pain. The small viral had bought Amy only a second, but it was enough. As she rose to her feet, the others shot forward.

Chaos.

Suddenly it was impossible to tell what was happening or where to shoot, the images of battle too quick for human eyes to compute. Peter realized he had expended the last of his rounds, but the gun was useless anyway. He glimpsed Alicia advancing from the far side of the field, still firing her pistol.

Where were Tifty and Nina?

He looked downfield. Nina was racing toward the platform, the bomb clutched to her chest. Tifty was behind her. She waved her free arm over her head, yelling at the top of her lungs: “You bastards! Look over here! Hey!”

The one that took note—did it grasp her intentions? Did it know the meaning of what she held? It did not so much launch as lob itself toward her, dropping in a four-limbed spread like a spider on silk. Tifty saw it first. As he raised his weapon he tried to push Nina aside, but the effort came too late; as with all things falling, the leisureliness of the viral’s plunge was an illusion. It crashed into the two of them, Tifty taking the brunt. Peter expected the bomb to go off, but that didn’t happen. The viral seized Nina by the arm and flung her away, casting her spiraling over the dirt; then it turned toward Tifty. As Tifty raised his weapon, the creature engulfed him.

A scream. A gunshot.

It wasn’t a decision. There were no pros and cons. Peter dropped his gun and made for the bomb where it lay in the dirt, running for all he was worth.


The only two people who saw it all were Lore and Greer. And even then, it was Greer alone, the man of faith, whose prayers had afforded him a deeper comprehension of the scene, who was able to make sense of it.

Viewed from the control room, the battle on the field played out with a flattened quality, rendered more decipherable by distance. At one end lay Eustace, unconscious or dead, and between him and the platform, the body of Tifty Lamont; Nina was gone, hurled into the darkness; Alicia, on the opposite side, was the only one still firing. At the center stood the platform; Amy, having wrenched herself free from the melee, had vaulted to the top of the armature. Her tunic was in shreds, stained with the dark wetness of blood; one clawed hand clutched her side, as if to stanch a wound. Even at this distance, Greer could discern the harsh labor of her breathing. Her transformation was complete, yet one human vestige remained: her hair. Black and wild, it tumbled freely around her face. In another moment her attackers would strike in overwhelming force, yet her posture did not communicate retreat. There was something invincible about her, almost royal.

Then he saw Peter, racing downfield. Where was he going? The semi?

No.

Greer blasted from the room and down the stairs. He would part the crowd with his body, his fists, his blade if he had to. Amy, Amy, I am coming.


Alicia would not be denied. She had consecrated her existence to this holy fact. She had felt it since the cave: a singular longing drawing her forward, as if she were being pulled down the length of a tunnel. As she moved toward the virals, firing her weapon—her bullets, she knew, would do no actual damage; she only wanted to draw their attention—she was a being of only one thought, one vision, one desire.

Louise, I will avenge you. You have not been forgotten. Louise, you, too, are my sister in blood.

“Show yourself, you son of a bitch!”

Her bullets skimmed and flashed. She dropped her empty magazine, rammed another home, and resumed firing. Through gritted teeth she advanced, murmuring her dark prayer. He would know her, feel her; it could not be otherwise. It was a thing of destiny, that she should be the one to kill him, to wipe him from the face of the earth. He was Julio Martínez, Esq., Tenth of Twelve. He was Sod of the bench and the grunting exhalations. He was all the men in all the years of history who had violated a woman in this manner, and she would drive her blade deep into the dark heart of him and feel him die.

One of the virals swiveled toward her. Of course, Alicia thought; she would have recognized him anywhere. His physique was identical to the others’, and yet there was something distinctive about him, an air of haughtiness that only she would be able to detect. He regarded her through soulless eyes lidded with bored languor; he appeared, almost, to smile. Alicia had never seen an expression on a viral’s face before; now she did. I know you, his bland, arrogant face seemed to say. Don’t I know you? Don’t tell me, let me guess. I’m certain I know you from someplace.

You’re damn right you know me, she thought, and drew the bayonet from her belt.

They launched toward each other simultaneously—Alicia with the blade raised above her head, Martínez with his great taloned hands reaching forward like a prow of knives. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object: their trajectories intersected in a headlong, grappling collision, Martínez’s vastly greater mass passing both through and under her, sending her pinwheeling over his head. In her moment of uncontrolled flight, Alicia acknowledged but did not yet feel the lacerations on her arms and face where his claws had torn into her flesh. She hit the dirt and rolled once, twice, three times, each rotation defusing her momentum, and sprang to her feet again. She was winded, stumbling, her head chiming with the impact. Somehow she had maintained her grip on the bayonet; to lose it was to accept defeat, unthinkable.

Martínez, twenty feet away, had dropped to a froglike squat, his hands splayed like paddles on the dirt. The smile had morphed into something else, more playful, full of rich enjoyment. He seemed about to laugh. Goddamn your laughing face, Alicia thought, raising her bayonet once more.

A shape was falling toward them.


The bomb, the bomb, where was the bomb?

Then Peter saw it, lying just a few yards from Tifty’s body. He skidded in the dirt and scooped it to his chest. The plunger was intact, the wires still connected. How would it feel? Like nothing, he thought. It would feel like nothing.

Something blasted him from behind, hard as a wall. For a moment everything left him: breath, thought, gravity. The bomb went spiraling away. The ground unfurling beneath him and a flash of mental blackness; then Peter found himself face-up in the mud.

The viral loomed above him; their faces were mere inches apart. The sight seemed to cross the wires of Peter’s senses, as if he were tasting nightfall, or listening to lightning. As the creature tipped its head, Peter did the one, last thing he could think of, believing it would be the final gesture of his life: he cocked his head in concert, willed his mind into absolute focus, and looked the viral dead in the eye.

I am Wolgast.

Then Peter saw: he was holding the bomb.

Help me.


Alicia, sister. Alicia, he is yours.

Martínez never saw it coming. In the fraction of a second before he uncoiled his massive body, Amy landed behind him. With a snap of her wrists she jetted the chains forward to encircle his frame like a pair of lassos, pinning his arms to his sides. The smile melted into a look of surprise.

Now, said Amy.

With a mighty pull she drew Martínez upright, exposing the broad meat of his chest. As Martínez tumbled backward, Alicia landed, straddling his waist, driving his body to the ground. The bayonet was poised above her head, wrapped in her fists. And yet she did not make it fall.

“Say it!” she yelled over the roaring in her ears. “Say her name!”

His eyes sought to focus. Louise?

And with these words, and all that she was, Alicia brought it down and drove it home, killing him in the ancient manner.

* * *

The final seconds of the battle of the field were, to the crowds in the stands, an incomprehensible blur of movement. Not so to Lucius Greer. Greer understood, as no one else could, what was about to happen. The chains that Amy had employed to restrain Martínez were now pinning her to his corpse. Alicia was struggling to turn him over in order to release her. They were sitting ducks, and yet the remaining virals had yet to fall. Perhaps Martínez’s death had caused a break in their communal train of thought; perhaps the shock of seeing one of their own perish beneath a human hand had rendered them immobile; perhaps they merely wished to prolong the moment of victory, and thus extract the fullest measure of satisfaction from their final assault; perhaps it was something else.

It was something else.

As Greer charged across the field, another figure was rushing from his right. A glance was all he needed for his eyes to learn what his mind already knew. It was Peter. He was shouting, waving. But something was different. The virals sensed it, too. They snapped to attention, their noses darting, tasting the air.

“Look over here, you bastards!”

Peter was naked to the waist, his torso slick with blood—warm, fresh, living rivers of blood that coursed down his arms and chest from the long, curving wounds of the blade still clutched in his hand. His intentions were clear: he would draw the virals away from Amy and Alicia, down upon himself. He was the bait; what was the trap?

And Greer heard:

I am Wolgast.

I am Wolgast.

I am Wolgast.

Greer ran.


Alicia saw it, too.

Amy was still pinned to Martínez’s body. The chains that tethered her had wound upon themselves; every pull only drew them tighter. Howling in frustration, Alicia saw Peter racing toward the virals; saw their bodies swiveling, heads cocking, eyes blazing with animal attraction, the pleasure of the kill.

Peter, no, she thought. Not you. After everything, not you.

She never knew how Amy got loose. One moment she was there and the next she wasn’t. The empty shackles would be found just where Amy had left them, attached to chains still hopelessly lashed to Martínez’s body; in the ensuing days, as each of them puzzled over the meaning of this fact, opinions would differ. To some it meant one thing, to some it meant another. It was a mystery, as Amy was a mystery; and like any mystery, it said as much about the seer as the seen.

But this came later. In the split second that remained, all Alicia knew was that Amy was gone; she was soaring away. A streak of light, like a shooting star; then she was falling, down upon Peter.

“Amy—”

But that was all she said.


Because Wolgast loved her.

Because Amy was home.

Because he had saved her, and she him.

And Peter Jaxon, lieutenant of the Expeditionary, heard and saw and felt it all; he felt it all at last. In a single meeting of their eyes, Wolgast’s whole life had poured into his own. Its comprehensive sorrows. Its bitter losses and aching regrets. Its love for a forgotten girl, and its long sojourn through a hundred years of night. He saw faces, figures, pictures of the past. A baby in its crib, and a woman reaching to lift it into her arms, the two of them bathed in an almost holy light. He saw Amy as she had been, a tiny child, full of strange intensity, alone in the world, and the lights of a carousel and stars in a winter sky and the forms of angels carved in the snow. It was as if these visions had always been a part of him, like a recurring dream only lately remembered, and he felt profoundly grateful to have seen them, to give them witness in the final seconds of his life.

Come to me, he thought. Come to me.

He raced headlong. He cast himself into the hands of God. He sensed but did not see Greer streaming toward him, and Wolgast barreling from behind with the bomb clutched to his chest, aiming his body for the heart of the pod. And in the last instant, Peter heard the words:

Amy, run.

And: Father—

And: I love you.

And as Wolgast dove into their midst, one clawed thumb poised on the plunger; and as Amy likewise swooped down upon Peter to hurl him away, taking the brunt of the destruction in his stead; and as the last of the Twelve in their fury fell upon Wolgast—Wolgast the True, the Father of All, and the One Who Loved—a hole in space opened where he had stood, dark night burst to brightest day, and the heavens rent with thunder.





66


It came to feel as if there were two cities in the minutes that followed: the grandstands, where chaos reigned, and the field below, a zone of aftermath, of sudden calm. A beginning and an ending, standing adjacent but apart. Soon the two would merge, as the crowd, the violence of its uprising exhausted, absorbed the amazing fact of its liberty and began to disperse, going where it liked, including the field; they would find it one by one, drifting down, moving tentatively as their bodies tasted freedom. But in the near term, the combatants on the field were left to themselves, to take a final measure of the living and the lost.

It was Alicia whom Peter awakened to see. She was blackened, bruised, bloodied. Much of her hair had been burned away, tendrils of smoke still rising. Peter, she was saying. She hovered above him, tears streaming down her cheeks. Peter.

He struggled to speak. His tongue moved heavily in his mouth: Amy? Is she—?

Alicia, softly weeping, shook her head.

Somehow Greer had survived. The blast had flung him far away. By all rights he should have been dead, and yet they found him lying on his back, staring at the starlit sky. His clothing was shredded and seared; otherwise he appeared untouched. It was as if the force of the blast had moved not through him but around him, his life protected by an invisible hand. For a long moment he neither spoke nor moved. Then, with an exploratory gesture, he raised a hand to his chest, patting it cautiously; he lifted it to his face, tracing his cheeks and brow and chin.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

Eustace, too, would live. At first they believed he was dead; his face was drenched in blood. But the shot had gone wide; the blood was from his left ear, now gone, shorn like a plant plucked from soil and replaced by a puckered hole. Of the detonation itself he had no memory, or none he could fully assemble beyond a chain of isolated sensations: a skull-cracking blast of noise, and a scorching wave of air passing above, then something wet raining down, and a taste of smoke and dust. He would escape the night with only this one additional disfigurement to a face already bearing plentiful scars of war and a permanent ringing in his ears, which would, in fact, never abate, causing him to speak in an overly loud voice that would make people think he was angry even when he wasn’t. Over time, once he had returned to Kerrville and risen to the rank of colonel, serving as military liaison to the president’s staff, he would come to regard this as less an inconvenience than a remarkably useful enhancement to his authority; he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

Only Nina would depart the field unscathed. Hurled away by the viral that had killed Tifty, she’d been thrown clear of the blast zone. She had been moving upfield when the bomb went off, its concussive force blowing her backward off her feet; but in the preceding moment she’d been the only one to witness the death of the Twelve, their bodies consumed and scattered in a ball of light. All else was a blur; of Amy, she had seen nothing.

Nothing at all.


But one of them had fallen.

They found Tifty with his gun still in his hand. He lay in the mud, broken and severed, his eyes rimmed by blood. His right arm was gone, but that was the least of it. As they gathered around him, he labored to speak through his fitful breathing. At last his lips formed words: “Where is she?”

Greer alone seemed to understand what he was asking. He turned toward Nina. “It’s you he wants.”

Perhaps she understood the nature of the request, perhaps not; none could tell. She lowered herself to the ground beside him. With trembling effort, Tifty lifted his hand and touched her face with the tips of his fingers, the gentlest gesture.

“Nitia,” he whispered. “My Nitia.”

“I’m Nina.”

“No. You’re Nitia. My Nitia.” He gave a tearful smile. “You look … so much like her.”

“Like who?”

Life was ebbing from his eyes. “I told her …” His breath caught. He had begun to choke on the blood that poured from his mouth. “I told her … I would keep you safe.” Then the light in his eyes went out and he was gone.

No one spoke. One of their own had slipped away, into darkness.

“I don’t understand,” Alicia said. She glanced at the others. “Why did he call her that?”

It was Greer who answered: “Because that’s her name.” Nina looked up from the body. “You didn’t know, did you?” he said. “There was no way you could.”

She shook her head.

“Tifty was your father.”

In due course, there would come a full accounting. A pickup would race onto the field; they would watch three people emerge. No, four. Michael and Hollis and Sara, holding a little girl in her arms.

But for now they stood silently in the presence of their friend, the core of his life laid bare. The great gangster Tifty Lamont, captain of the Expeditionary. They would bury him where he’d fallen, in the field. Because you never leave it, Greer explained; that’s what Tifty always said. You might think you can do it, but you can’t. Once you’d stood there, it became a part of you forever.

No one ever left the field.





67


The weather failed to cooperate. January in Iowa—what had they expected? Bone-numbing day followed bone-numbing day. Food, fuel, water, electricity, the complex enterprise of keeping a city of seventy thousand souls running—the joy of victory had quickly been subsumed by more mundane concerns. For the time being the insurgency had assumed control, though Eustace, by his own admission, had no particular knack for the job. He felt overwhelmed by the volume of detail, and the hastily assembled provisional government, composed of appointed delegates from each of the lodges, did little to lighten his load; it was bloated and disorganized, half the room always squabbling with the other half, leaving Eustace to throw up his hands and make all the decisions anyway. A degree of docility among the population remained, but this wouldn’t last. There had been looting in the market before Eustace was able to secure it, and every day there were more stories of reprisals; many of the cols had tried to slip anonymously into the populace, but their faces were known. Without a justice system to try the ones who surrendered, or those who had been captured by the insurgency in advance of the mob, it was hard to know what to do with them. The detention center was bursting at the seams. Eustace had raised the possibility of retrofitting the Project—it was certainly secure enough and had the additional advantage of isolation—but this would take time and did nothing to address the problem of what to do with the prisoners when the population began to move south.

And everybody was freezing. Well, so be it, Peter thought. What was a little cold?

He had formed a close friendship with Eustace. Some of this was their shared bond as officers of the Expeditionary, but not all; they had discovered, as the days passed, that they possessed compatible temperaments. They decided that Peter should lead the advance team that would travel south to prepare Kerrville for the influx of refugees. Initially he’d objected; it didn’t seem right to be among the first to leave. But he was the logical choice, and in the end, Alicia sealed the case. Caleb is waiting for you, she reminded him. Go see to your boy.

The exodus itself would have to wait till spring. Assuming Kerrville could send enough vehicles and personnel, Eustace planned to move five thousand people at a time, the composition of each group determined by a lottery. The trip would be arduous—all but the very old and very young would have to walk—but with luck the Homeland would be empty within two years.

“Not everybody will want to go, you know,” Eustace said.

The two of them were seated in Eustace’s office, in the back room of the apothecary, warming themselves with cups of herbal tea. Most of the buildings in the market had been taken over by the provisional government to serve various functions. The latest project to occupy them was the tallying of a census. With all the redeyes’ records having been destroyed in the Dome, they had no idea who was who, or even how many people there were. Seventy thousand was the generally accepted number, but there was no way to know precisely unless they counted.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

Eustace shrugged. The left side of his head was still bandaged, giving his face a lopsided appearance, though balanced by his clouded eye. Sara had removed the last of Peter’s stitches the prior day; his chest and arms now bore a road map of long, pinkish scars. In private moments, Peter couldn’t stop touching them, amazed not only by the fact that he’d inflicted these wounds upon himself but also that, in the heat of the moment, he’d barely felt a thing.

“This is what they know. They’ve lived their entire lives here. But that’s not the whole reason. It’s good to right a wrong. I don’t know how many will feel that way once we start moving people south, but some will.”

“How will they manage?”

“I suppose how people always manage. Elections, the rough business of building a life.” He sipped his tea. “It’ll be messy. It might not work at all. But at least it will be theirs.”

Nina came in from the cold, stamping waffles of snow from her boots. “Jesus, it’s freezing out there,” she said.

Eustace offered her his cup. “Here, warm yourself up.”

She took it in her hands and sipped, then bent to kiss him quickly on the mouth. “Thank you, husband. You really need to shave.”

Eustace laughed. “With a face like mine? Who cares?”

That the two of them were a couple was, as Peter had learned, the worst-kept secret of the insurgency. One of the first things Eustace had done was issue an executive order permitting flatlanders to marry. In many instances this was a technicality; people had been paired up for years or even decades. But marriage had never possessed official sanction. The list of couples waiting to be married now ran to the hundreds, and Eustace had two justices of the peace operating night and day out of a storefront down the block. He and Nina had been among the first, as had Hollis and Sara.

“Good news,” Nina said. “I just came from the hospital.”

“And?”

“Two more babies were born this morning, both healthy. Mothers doing fine.”

“Well, how about that.” Eustace grinned at Peter. “See what I’m telling you? Even on the darkest night, my friend, life will have its way.”


Peter made his way down the hill, hunched against the wind. As a member of the executive staff he was permitted the use of a vehicle, but he preferred to walk. At the hospital he headed for Michael’s room. Power had been only partially restored, but the hospital had been one of the first buildings relit. He found Michael awake and sitting up. His right leg, encased in plaster from ankle to hip, was suspended from a sling at a forty-five-degree angle above the bed. It had been touch and go for a while, and Sara had thought he might lose the leg; but Michael was a fighter, and now, three weeks later, he was officially on the mend.

Lore was sitting by the bed, manipulating a pair of knitting needles. Eustace had put her to work as a foreman at the biodiesel plant, but any free moment found her back at the hospital, at Michael’s bedside.

“What are you making?” Peter asked her.

“Hell if I can say. It was supposed to be a sweater, but it’s coming out more like socks.”

“You should really stick to what you know,” Michael advised.

“Just you wait till you’re out of that cast, my friend. I’ll show you what I know. It’s nothing you’ll forget.” She looked at Peter, slyly smiling to make sure he got the joke. “Oh, I’m sorry, Peter. Got a little carried away. I guess I forgot you were there.”

He laughed. “It’s okay.”

She gave one of her needles a wave. “I just want to mention, in case our boy here takes a turn for the worse, I’ve always thought you had a very nice look to you. Plus, you’re a war hero. I’d be interested in anything you had to say, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“Of that I have no doubt.” She dropped the yarn to her lap. “As it happens, my shift begins in thirty minutes, so I’ll leave you two to talk about me.” She rose, bagged her knitting, patted Michael on the arm, then thought better of it and kissed him on the top of his head. “Need anything before I go?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine, Michael. You’re far from fine. You scared the living hell out of me is what you did.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Keep saying it, bub. One day I’ll believe you.” She kissed him again. “Gentlemen.”

When Lore was gone, Peter took her seat. “Sorry about that,” Michael said.

“I don’t know why you keep apologizing for her, Michael. You’re the luckiest guy on planet Earth, as far as I’m concerned.” He tipped his head toward the bed. “So how’s the leg really?”

“It hurts like hell. Nice of you to finally visit.”

“Sorry about that. Eustace is keeping me busy.”

“So how many have you found?”

Peter understood that Michael was asking about the other First Colonists. “The number we’re hearing is fifty-six. We’re still trying to track everyone down. So far we’ve found Jimmy’s daughters, Alice and Avery. Constance Chou, Russ Curtis, Penny Darrell. The Littles are going to take some time to sort out. Everybody’s spread all over the place.”

“Good news, I guess.” Michael stopped, leaving the rest unstated. So many others, gone.

“Hollis told me what you did,” Peter said.

Michael shrugged. He looked a little embarrassed, but proud, too. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

“You ever want a job in the Exped, you let me know. Assuming they’ll have me back. The next time we talk, I might be in the stockade.”

“Peter, be serious. They’ll probably make you a general for this. That or ask you to run for president.”

“Then you don’t know the Army like I do.” And yet, for just a moment, he thought: what if? “We’ll be leaving in a few days, you know.”

“So I figured. Don’t forget to bundle up. Say hello to Kerrville for me.”

“We’ll get you in the next trip, I promise.”

“I don’t know, hombre, the service here is pretty good. The place kind of agrees with me. Who’s going with you?”

“Sara and Hollis and Kate, but that’s obvious. Greer’s staying to help with the evacuation. Eustace is putting a team together.”

“What about Lish?”

“I’d ask her if I could find her. I’ve barely seen her at all. She’s been riding out on this horse of hers. She calls him Soldier. What she’s doing I have no idea.”

“I’m sorry you missed her. She came by this morning.”

“Lish was here?”

“Said she wanted to say hello.” Michael looked at him. “Why? Is that so strange?”

Peter frowned. “I guess not. How did she seem?”

“How do you think? Like Lish.”

“So there wasn’t anything different about her.”

“Not that I noticed. She wasn’t here very long. She said she was going to help Sara with the donations.”

As interim director of public health, Sara had discovered that the building that served as the hospital was, as she’d long suspected, a hospital in name only. There was almost no medical equipment, and no blood at all. With so many people injured in the siege, and babies being born and all the rest, she’d had a freezer brought over from the food-processing facility and had instituted a program of blood donation.

“Lish as a nurse,” Peter said, and shook his head at the irony. “I’d like to see that.”


What became of the redeyes themselves was never fully understood. Those that hadn’t been killed in the stadium had essentially ceased to exist. The only conclusion to be drawn, supported by Sara’s story about Lila, was that the destruction of the Dome, and the death of the man known as the Source, had caused a chain reaction similar to the one they’d seen in Babcock’s descendants on the mountain in Colorado. Those who’d witnessed it described it as a rapid aging, as if a hundred years of borrowed life were surrendered in just a few seconds—flesh shriveling, hair falling out in clumps, faces withering to the skull. The corpses they’d found, still dressed in their suits and ties, were nothing but piles of brown bones. They looked like they’d been dead for decades.

As the day of departure approached, Sara found herself working virtually around the clock. As word had spread in the flatland that actual medical care could now be had, more and more people had come in. The complaints varied from the common cold to malnutrition to the broad bodily failures of old age. A few seemed simply curious about what seeing a doctor would be like. Sara treated the ones she could, comforted those she could not. In the end, the two felt not so very different.

She left the hospital only to sleep, and sometimes eat, or else Hollis would bring meals to her, always with Kate in tow. They had been quartered in an apartment in the complex at the edge of downtown—a curious place, with wide, tinted windows that created a permanent evening light within. It felt a little eerie, knowing that the former occupants had been redeyes, but it was comfortable, with large beds made with soft linens and hot water and a working gas stove, on which Hollis concocted soups and stews of ingredients she didn’t want to know about but which were nonetheless delicious. They would eat together in the candlelit dark and then fall into bed, making love with quiet tenderness so as not to wake their daughter.

Tonight Sara decided to take a break; she was dead on her feet, and starving besides, and missed her family keenly. Her family: after all that had happened, how remarkable these two words were. They seemed the most miraculous in the history of human speech. When she had seen Hollis charging through the entrance of the Dome, her heart had instantly known what her eyes could not believe. Of course he had come for her; Hollis had moved heaven and earth, and here he was. How could it have been otherwise?

She made her way up the hill, past the toppled wreckage of the Dome—its charred timbers had smoldered for days—and through the old downtown. To move freely, without fear, still seemed a little unreal to her. Sara thought about stopping into the apothecary, to say hello to Eustace and whoever else was around, but her feet refused this impulse, which quickly passed. With anticipation lightening her step, she ascended the six flights to the apartment.

“Mummy!”

Hollis and Kate were sitting together on the floor, playing beans and cups. Before Sara could uncoil the scarf from her neck, the girl leapt to her feet and flew into her arms, a soft collision; Sara hoisted Kate to her waist to look her in the eye. She had never told Kate to address her by this name, not wanting to confuse her more than necessary, but this had turned out not to matter; the girl had simply done it. Having never had a father before, Kate had taken a little more time to adapt to Hollis’s role in her life, but then one day, about a week after the liberation, she had started to call him Daddy.

“Well, there you are,” Sara said happily. “How was your day? Did you do fun things with Daddy?”

The little girl reached toward Sara’s face, wrapped her nose with her fist, and made a show of snatching it from Sara’s face, popping it into her mouth, and pushing her tongue against the inside of her cheek. “I haf yur nose,” she said thickly.

“Now, give that back.”

Kate, beaming wildly, blond hair bouncing around her face, waggled her head with playful defiance. “Nuh-uh. It’s mine.”

Thus, the tickling, and laughter from all sides, and the theft of more bodily parts, and the eventual return of Sara’s nose to her face. By the time the struggle was over, Hollis had joined in. Cupping the back of Kate’s head, he kissed Sara quickly, his beard—warm, familiar, full of his scent—pressing like wool against her cheeks.

“Hungry?”

She smiled. “I could eat.”

Hollis dished her out a bowl; he and Kate had already had their dinner. He sat with her at the little table while she dug in. The meat, he confessed, could have been just about anything, but the carrots and potatoes were passable. Sara hardly cared; never had food tasted so good as it had the last few weeks. They talked about her patients, about Peter and Michael and the others, about Kerrville and what awaited there, about the trip south, now just a few days off. Hollis had initially suggested that they wait until spring, when the travel would be less arduous, but Sara would have none of it. Too much has happened here, she’d told him. I don’t know where home is, but let’s let it be Texas.

They washed the dishes, set them in the rack, and readied Kate for bed. Even as Sara drew the nightshirt over the little girl’s head, she was already half-asleep. They tucked her in and retreated to the living room.

“Do you really have to go back to the hospital?” Hollis asked.

Sara took her coat from the hook and wriggled her arms into the sleeves. “It’ll just be a few hours. Don’t wait up.” Though that was exactly what he’d do; Sara would have done the same. “Come here.”

She kissed him, lingering there. “I mean it. Go to bed.”

But as she put her hand on the knob, he stopped her.

“How did you know, Sara?”

She almost, but not quite, understood what he was asking. “How did I know what?”

“That it was her. That it was Kate.”

It was odd; Sara had never thought to ask herself this question. Nina had confirmed Kate’s identity in their clandestine meeting in the back room of the apothecary, but she needn’t have; there had never been a trace of doubt in Sara’s mind. It was more than the child’s physical resemblance that told her so; the knowledge had come from someplace deeper. Sara had looked at Kate and instantly understood that of all the children in the world, this one was hers.

“Call it a mother’s instincts. It was like … like knowing myself.” She shrugged. “I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“Still, we were lucky.”

Sara had never told him about the foil packet; nor would she ever. “I’m not sure if you can even call something like this luck,” she said. “All I know is we’re here.”


It was after midnight by the time she was finishing her rounds. Yawning into her fist, her mind already halfway home, Sara stepped into the last examining room, where a young woman was sitting on the table.

“Jenny?”

“Hi, Dani.”

Sara had to laugh—not only at the name, which seemed like something from a distant dream, but the girl’s presence itself. It wasn’t until she’d seen her that Sara had realized that she’d assumed Jenny was dead.

“What happened to you?”

She shrugged sheepishly. “I’m sorry I left. After what happened in the feedlot, I just panicked. One of the kitchen workers hid me in a flour barrel and got me out on one of the delivery trucks.”

Sara smiled to reassure her. “Well, I’m glad to see you. What seems to be the trouble?”

The girl hesitated. “I think I may be pregnant.”

Sara examined her. If she was, it was too early to tell. But being pregnant got you a spot in the first evacuation. She filled out the form and handed it to her.

“Take this to the census office and tell them I sent you.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

The girl stared at the slip of paper in her hand. “Kerrville. I can’t believe it. I barely remember it.”

Sara had been filling out a duplicate evacuation order on her clipboard. Her pen paused in midair. “What did you say?”

“That I can’t believe it?”

“No, the other thing. About remembering.”

The girl shrugged. “I was born there. At least I think I was. I was pretty small when they took me.”

“Jenny, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“I did. I told the census taker.”

Flyers, how had they missed this?

“Well, I’m glad you told me. Somebody may be looking for you. What’s your last name?”

“I’m not really sure,” Jenny said, “but I think that it was Apgar.”