The Twelve

29

Freeport, Texas

Michael Fisher, oiler first class—Michael the Clever, Bridger of Worlds—aroused from a deep and dreamless sleep to the sensation, unmistakable, that somebody was fucking him.

He opened his eyes. Lore was straddling him, her spine bowed forward, her brow glazed with a glinting, sex-fired sweat. Flyers, he thought, hadn’t they just done this? Most of the night, in fact? Hugely, hilariously, in every position allowable to human physiology in a sleeping berth the approximate dimensions of a coffin?

“Good morning,” she announced with a grin. “I hope you don’t mind I got started without you.”

Well, so be it, Michael thought. There were certainly worse ways to face the day. From the flush of her cheeks, he could tell that Lore was well on the way, and, come to think of it, he wasn’t far behind. She had begun to rock her hips, the weight of her sex lapping against him like waves on a beach. In and out went the waves.

“Not so fast, mister.”

“For Christ’s sake, keep it down!” a voice barked from above.

“Shut up, Ceps,” Lore replied, “I’m working in here.”

“You’re making me hard! It’s disgusting!”

This conversation seemed to Michael to be occurring in some distant orbit. With everyone bunked together, nothing but thin curtains for privacy, you learned to tune things out. But the feeling was more than that. Even as his senses sailed away into pure physicality, something about sex, its hypnotic rhythms, prompted in him a kind of disassociation. It was as if his mind were lagging three steps behind his body, sightseeing its way through a landscape of various concerns and sadnesses and emotionally neutral images that rose before him like bubbles of expanding gas in the boiler. A decaying gasket that needed replacing. The delivery schedule of fresh crude down from the depot. Memories of the Colony, which he never otherwise thought about. Above him, Lore continued on her journey, while Michael drifted in this current of mental disloyalty, trying to will his attentions into alignment with hers. It seemed the least he could do.

And in the end, he did. Lore’s accelerating passion won the day. By the time they pulled the curtain back, Ceps was gone. The clock above the hatch read 0630.

“Shit.”

Michael swung his feet to the floor and yanked on his jumpsuit. Lore, behind him, wrapped her arms around his chest.

“Stay. I’ll make it worth your while.”

“I’m first shift. If I’m late again, Karlovic will chew my ass for breakfast.” He stuffed his feet into his boots and swiveled his face to kiss her: a taste of salt, and sex, and something all her own. Michael wouldn’t have said it was love between them, exactly. Sex was a way to pass the time, but over the months their relationship had evolved, little by little, into something more than habit.

“You were thinking again, weren’t you?”

“Who, me?”

“Don’t lie.” Her tone wasn’t bitter, merely correcting. “You know, someday I’m going to fuck all the worries out of you.” She sighed and relaxed her grip. “It’s all right. Go.”

He rose from the berth and took his hard hat and gloves from the post. “I’ll see you later?”

She had already lain back down on the cot. “That you will.”

As Michael exited the barracks, the sun was just lifting over the Gulf, making its surface shimmer like a sheet of hammered metal. It might have been the first week of October, but the heat was already building, the ocean air tart as ever with salt and the sulfurous stench of burning butane. With his stomach growling—food would have to wait—he strode at a brisk clip across the compound, past the commissary and weight cages and DS barracks to the Quonset hut, where the workers on the morning shift had gathered. Karlovic, the chief engineer, was calling out assignments from the roster. He shot Michael a cold glance.

“Are we interrupting your beauty sleep, Fisher? Our mistake.”

“Right.” Michael was zipping his jumpsuit. “Sorry.”

“You’ll be even sorrier. You’ll be firing up the Bomb. Ceps will be your second. Try not to blow up your crew.”

Distillation Tower No. 1, known as the Bomb, was the oldest of the lot, its rusty bulk held together by a combination of patch welds, baling wire, and prayer. Everybody said it was a matter of time before she was either decommissioned or launched a cooking crew halfway to Mars.

“Thanks, boss. That’s swell of you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Karlovic swept his gaze over the group. “All right, everyone. Seven days until we ship. I want those tankers full, people. And Fisher, hang back a minute. I want a word with you.”

The crews dispersed to their towers. Michael followed Karlovic into the hut. Christ, what now? He hadn’t been late by more than a couple of minutes, hardly worth a dressing down.

“Listen, Dan, I’m sorry about this morning—”

Karlovic didn’t let him finish. “Forget it, that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” Hitching up his pants, he lowered his bulk into the chair behind his desk. Karlovic was heavy in the true sense, not fat but large in every aspect, a man of weight and heft. Tacked on the wall over his head were dozens of sheets of paper—duty rosters, work flows, delivery schedules. “I had you on the Bomb anyway. You and Ceps are the best I’ve got for hotwork. Take it as a compliment I’m putting the pair of you on that cranky old bitch. If I had my druthers, that thing would be in the scrap pile.”

Michael didn’t doubt that this was so; on the other hand, he knew strategically timed praise when he heard it. “So?”

“So this.”

Karlovic slid a sheet of paper across his desk. Michael’s eyes fell quickly to the signature at the bottom: Victoria Sanchez, President, Texas Republic. He quickly scanned the letter’s three short paragraphs. Well, I’ll be, he thought.

“Any idea what this is about?”

“What makes you think I would?”

“You were the last crew chief on the offload. Maybe you caught wind of something while you were up there. Talk around the depot, extra military hanging around.”

“Nothing that rings a bell.” Michael shrugged. “Have you spoken to Stark? Maybe he knows.”

Stark was the refinery’s chief security officer. He was something of a loudmouth and liked the lick too much, but he generally commanded respect among both the oilers and DS, if for no other reason than his prowess at the poker table. His caginess with the cards had cost Michael a bundle, not that the scrip was any big loss—within the fences of the refinery, there was nothing to spend it on.

“Not yet. This won’t sit well with him, though.” Karlovic studied Michael. “Aren’t you guys friends? That whole California thing.”

“I know him, yeah.”

“So maybe you can grease the gears a bit. Act as a sort of, I don’t know, unofficial liaison between DS and the military.”

Michael allowed himself a few seconds to probe his feelings. He’d be glad to see someone from the old days, but at the same time he was aware of an inner disturbance, a sense of exposure. The self-contained life of an oiler had, in many ways, rescued him from the grief of losing his sister, occupying the mental space she had left behind. Part of him knew he was hiding, but the rest of him didn’t care.

“It should be no problem.”

“I’ll count it as a favor. Handle it how you like.” Karlovic angled his head toward the door. “Now get out of here, you’ve got oil to cook. And I meant what I said. Watch your ass with that thing.”

Michael arrived at the distillation tower to find his crew, a dozen roughnecks, standing around wearing expressions of puzzlement. The tanker with its cargo of fresh slick sat idle. Ceps was nowhere to be seen.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why aren’t you people filling this thing?”

Ceps crawled from beneath the heating element at the base of the tower. His hands and bare arms were caked with black goo. “We’ll have to flush her first. We’ve got at least two meters of residuum in the base.”

“Fuck sake, that will take all morning. Who was the last crew chief?”

“This thing hasn’t been fired in months. You’d have to ask Karlovic.”

“How much crude will we have to drain off?”

“A couple of hundred barrels anyway.”

Eight thousand gallons of partially refined petroleum that had been sitting for who knew how long: they would need a large waste tanker, then a pumper truck and high-pressure steam hoses to flush the tower. They were looking at twelve hours minimum, sixteen to refill it and light the heating element, twenty-four before the first drop came out of the pipe. Karlovic would pop an aneurysm.

“Well, we better get started. I’ll call in the order, you get the hoses ready.” Michael shook his head. “I find who did this, I will kick his sorry ass.”

The draining took the rest of the morning. Michael declared the leftover oil unusable and sent the truck to the waste pools for burning. Bleeding off the junk was the easy part; flushing the tank was the job everyone dreaded. Water injected into the top of the tower would clean out most of the residuum—the sticky, toxic residue of the refining process—but not all; three men would have to suit up and go inside to brush down the base and flush out the asphalt drain. The only way in was a blind port, a meter wide, through which they’d have to crawl on their hands and knees. The term for this was “going up the anus”—not an inaccurate description, in Michael’s opinion. Michael would be one of the three. There was no rule about this; it was simply his habit, a gesture toward morale. For the other two, the custom was to draw straws.

The first to pull a short straw was Ed Pope, the oldest man on the crew. Ed had been Michael’s trainer, the one to show him the ropes. Three decades on the cookers had taken their toll; the man’s body read like a logbook of catastrophes. Three fingers sheered off by the thrown blade of a rebar cutter. One side of his head and neck seared to a hairless pink slab by a propane explosion that had killed nine men. He was deaf in that ear, and his knees were so shot that watching him bend made Michael wince. Michael thought about giving him a pass, but he knew Ed was too proud to accept, and he watched as the man made his way to the hut to suit up.

The second short straw was Ceps. “Forget it, I need you out here on the pumps,” said Michael.

Ceps shook his head. The day had left them all impatient. “The hell with it. Let’s just get this done.”

They wriggled into their hazard suits and oxygen packs and gathered their gear together: heavy brushes on poles, buckets of solvent, high-pressure wands that would feed back to a compressor. Michael pulled his mask down over his face, taped the seals on his gloves, and checked his O₂. Though they’d vented the tower, the air inside it was still as lethal as it got—an airborne soup of petroleum vapors and sulfides that could sear your lungs into jerky. Michael felt a positive pop of pressure in the mask, switched on his headlamp, and knelt to unbolt the port.

“Let’s go, hombres.”

He slithered through, dropping down to find himself in three inches of standing muck. Ed and Ceps crawled in behind him.

“What a mess.”

Michael reached down into the sludge and opened the asphalt drain; the three of them began to sweep the residuum toward it. The temperature inside the tower was at least a hundred degrees; the sweat was raining off them, the trapped moisture of their breath fogging their faceplates. Once they’d cleared the worst of it, they dumped the solvent, hooked up their wands, and commenced spraying down the walls and floor.

Inside their suits, with the roar of the compressor, conversation was just about impossible. The only thing to think about was finishing the job and getting out. They’d been at it for only a couple of minutes when Michael felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see Ceps pointing at Ed. The man was just standing there, facing the wall like a statue, his wand held loosely at his side. While Michael watched, it slipped from his hand, though Ed seemed not to notice.

“Something’s wrong with him!” Ceps yelled over the racket.

Michael stepped forward and turned Ed by the shoulders. All he got was a blank stare.

“Ed, you okay?”

The man’s face startled to life. “Oh, hey, Michael,” he said, too brightly. “Hey-hey, hey-hey. Woo-woo.”

“What’s he saying?” Ceps called out.

Michael drew a finger over his throat to tell Ceps to cut the compressor. He looked at Ed squarely. “Talk to me, buddy.”

A girlish giggle escaped the man’s lips. He was heaving for breath, one hand lifting toward his faceplate. “Ashblass. Minfuth. Minfuth!”

Michael saw what was about to happen. As Ed reached for his mask, Michael seized him by the arms. The man was no kid, but he was no weakling either. He wriggled fiercely in Michael’s grasp, trying to break free, his face blue with panic. Not panic, Michael realized: hypoxia. His body convulsed with a massive twitch, his knees melting under him, his full weight crashing into Michael’s arms.

“Ceps, help me get him out of here!”

Ceps grabbed the man by his feet. His body had gone limp. Together they carried him to the port.

“Somebody take him!” Michael yelled.

Hands appeared to pull from the far side; Michael and Ceps shoved his body through. Michael scrambled into the port, tearing off his faceplate and gloves the moment he hit fresh air. Ed was lying face-up on the hardpan; someone had stripped off his mask and backpack. Michael dropped to his knees beside the body. An ominous stillness: the man wasn’t breathing. Michael placed the heel of his right hand at the center of Ed’s chest, positioned the left on top, laced his fingers together, and pushed. Nothing. Again and again he pushed, counting to thirty, as he had learned to do, then slipped one hand behind Ed’s neck to tip his airway open, pinched his nose, and pressed his mouth over the man’s blue lips. One breath, two breaths, three. Michael’s mind was clear as ice, his thoughts held in the grip of a singular purpose. Just as all seemed lost, he felt a sharp contraction of the diaphragm; Ed’s chest inflated, taking in a voluminous breath of air. He turned his face to the side, gasping and coughing.

Michael rocked back on his heels, landing ass-down in the dust, his pulse pounding with adrenaline. Somebody handed him a canteen: Ceps.

“You okay, pal?”

The question didn’t even make sense to him. He took a long drink, swishing the water inside his mouth, and spat it away. “Yeah.”

Eventually somebody helped Ed to his feet. Michael and Ceps escorted him into the hut and sat him down on one of the benches.

“How you feeling?” Michael asked.

A bit of color had flowed back into Ed’s cheeks, though his skin was damp and clammy-looking. He shook his head miserably. “I don’t know what happened. I could have sworn I checked my oxygen.”

Michael had already looked; the bottles were empty. “Maybe it’s time, Ed.”

“Jesus, Michael. Are you firing me?”

“No. It’s your choice. I’m just saying there’s no disgrace in calling it a day.” When Ed made no reply, Michael rose to his feet. “Give it some thought. I’ll back you, whatever you want to do. You want a ride to the barracks?”

Ed was staring disconsolately into space. Michael could read the truth in his face: the man had nothing else.

“I think I’ll sit here a while. Get my strength back.”

Michael stepped from the hut to find the rest of the crew hovering by the door. “What the hell are you all standing around for?”

“The shift’s over, Chief.”

Michael checked his watch: so it was.

“Not for us it isn’t. Show’s over, everybody. Get your lazy asses back to work.”

It was past midnight when Lore said to him, “Lucky thing, about Ed.”

The two of them were curled in Michael’s berth. Despite Lore’s best efforts, his mind had been unable to move on from the day’s events. All he kept seeing when he closed his eyes was the look on Ed’s face in the hut, like someone being marched to the gallows.

“What do you mean, lucky?”

“That you were there, I mean. That thing you did.”

“It wasn’t anything.”

“Yes, it was. The man could have died. How did you know how to do that?”

The past loomed up inside him, a wave of pain.

“My sister taught me,” said Michael. “She was a nurse.”

30

Kerrville, Texas

They arrived behind the rain. First the fields, sodden with moisture, the air rich with the smell of dirt, then, as they ascended out of the valley, the walls of the city, looming eight stories tall against the brown Texas hills. At the gate they found themselves in a line of traffic—transports, heavy mechanicals, DS pickups crowded with men in their thick pads. Peter climbed out, asked the driver to deposit his locker at the barracks, and showed his orders to the guard at the pedestrian tunnel, who waved him through.

“Welcome home, sir.”

After sixteen months in the territories, Peter’s senses were instantly assaulted by the vast, overwhelming humanness of the place. He’d spent little time in the city, not enough to adjust to its claustrophobic density of sounds and smells and overflowing faces. The Colony had never numbered more than a hundred souls; here there were over forty thousand.

Peter made his way to the quartermaster to collect his pay. He’d never really gotten used to the idea of money, either. “Equal share,” the governing economic unit of the Colony, had made sense to him. You had your share, and you used it how you liked, but it was the same as everybody else’s, never less or more. How could these slips of inked paper—Austins they were called, after the man whose image, with its high, domed forehead and beaked nose and perplexing arrangement of clothing, adorned each bill—actually correspond to the value of a person’s labor?

The clerk, a civilian, doled out the scrip from the lockbox, snapping the bills onto the counter, and shoved a clipboard toward him through the grate, all without once meeting his eye.

“Sign here.”

The money, a fat wad, felt odd in Peter’s pocket. As he stepped back into the brightening afternoon, he was already scheming how to be rid of it. Six hours remained until curfew—barely enough time to visit both the orphanage and the stockade before reporting to the barracks. The afternoon was all he had; the transport to the refinery was leaving at 0600.

Greer would come first; that way Peter wouldn’t have to disappoint Caleb by leaving before the horn. The stockade was located in the old jailhouse on the west edge of downtown. He signed in at the desk—in Kerrville you were always signing things, another oddity—and stripped off his blade and sidearm. He was about to proceed when the guard stopped him.

“Have to pat you down, Lieutenant.”

As a member of the Expeditionary, Peter was accustomed to a certain automatic deference—certainly from a junior domestic, not a day over twenty. “Is that really necessary?”

“I don’t make the rules, sir.”

Irritating, but Peter didn’t have time for an argument. “Just be quick about it.”

The guard ran his hands up and down Peter’s arms and legs, then produced a heavy ring of keys and led him back into the holding area, a long hall of heavy steel doors. The air was dense and smelled of men. They came to the cell marked with the number 62.

“Funny,” the guard remarked, “Greer doesn’t see anyone in close to three years, and now he’s had two visitors in just a month.”

“Who else was here?”

“I wasn’t on duty. You’d have to ask him.”

The guard located the correct key, inserted it into the tumbler, and swung the door open to a sound of groaning hinges. Greer, shoeless, clothed only in a pair of rough canvas trousers cinched at his waist, was seated on the edge of his bunk. His broad chest gleamed with perspiration; his hands were serenely folded in his lap. His hair, what remained of it, a silvering white, fanned to his massive shoulders, while a great tangle of beard—the beard of a prophet, a wanderer in the wilderness—straggled halfway up his cheeks. A deep stillness radiated off him; the impression he communicated was one of composure, as if he had reduced his mind and body to their essences. For an unsettling moment, he gave no indication that he was aware of the two figures standing in the doorway, causing Peter to wonder if the isolation had done something to his mind. But then he lifted his eyes, his face brightening.

“Peter. There you are.”

“Major Greer. It’s good to see you.”

Greer laughed ironically, his voice thick with disuse. “Nobody’s called me that in some time. It’s just Lucius now. Or Sixty-two, if you prefer. Most people seem to.” Greer addressed the guard. “Give us a few minutes, will you, Sanders?”

“I’m not supposed to leave anyone alone with a prisoner.”

Peter shot him a cold glare. “I think I can take care of myself, son.”

A moment’s hesitancy; then the guard relented. “Well, seeing as it’s you, sir, I guess ten minutes would be okay. After that my shift ends, though. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

Peter frowned. “Do we know each other?”

“I saw your signature. Everybody knows who you are. You’re the guy from California. It’s, like, a legend.” All pretense of his authority was gone; suddenly he was just a starstruck kid, his face beaming with admiration. “What was it like? Coming all that way, I mean.”

Peter wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “It was a long walk.”

“I don’t know how you did it. I would have been scared shitless.”

“Take my word for it,” Peter assured him, “that was a big part of it.”

Sanders left them alone. Peter took the room’s only chair, straddling it backward across from Greer.

“Looks like you made quite an impression on our boy there. I told you it would be a hard story to keep quiet.”

“It’s still strange to hear it,” Peter said. “How are you doing?”

Greer shrugged. “Oh, I get by. And you? You look well, Peter. The uniform suits you.”

“Lish says hello. She just got bumped to captain.”

Greer nodded equably. “A remarkable girl, our Lish. Destined for big things, I’d say. So how goes the fight? Or do I have to ask?”

“Not so good. We’re oh-for-three. The whole Martínez thing was a catastrophe. Now it looks like Command is having second thoughts.”

“That’s always what they’ve been best at. Not to worry, the winds will turn. One thing you learn in here is patience.”

“It’s not the same without you. I can’t help thinking it would be different if you were there.”

“Oh, I very much doubt that. This has always been your show. I knew it the moment I met you. Caught upside down in a spinning net, wasn’t it?”

Peter laughed at the memory. “Michael puked all over us.”

“That’s right, I remember now. How is he? I imagine he’s not the same kid I knew back then. Always had an answer to everything.”

“I doubt he’s changed much. Either way, I’ll find out tomorrow. They’re posting me down to the refinery.”

Greer frowned. “Why there?”

“Some new initiative to secure the Oil Road.”

“DS will love that. I’d say you’ve got your hands full with that lot.” He gave his knees a slap to change the subject. “And Hollis, what do you hear of him?”

“Nothing good. He took Sara’s death hard. The story is he’s on the trade.”

Greer considered this news for a moment. “On the whole, I can’t say I blame him. That may seem strange to say, knowing Hollis, but more than one man has gone that way under those circumstances. I imagine he’ll come around sooner or later. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

“And what about you? You’re getting out soon. If you want, I can put a word in with Command. Maybe they’d let you reenlist.”

But Greer shook his head. “I’m afraid those days are over for me, Peter. Don’t forget, I’m a deserter. Once you cross that line, there’s no going back.”

“What will you do?”

Greer smiled mysteriously. “I imagine something will come along. It always does.”

For a while they talked of the others, bits of news, stories from the past. Being with Greer, Peter felt a warm contentment, but accompanying that, a sense of loss. The major had entered his life just when Peter needed him; it was Greer’s steadfast presence that had given him the will to move forward in the days when his resolve had wavered. It was a debt that Peter could never fully repay: the debt of borrowed courage. Peter sensed that Greer’s incarceration had changed him. He was still the same man, although something inside him ran deeper, a river of inner calm. He seemed to have drawn strength from his isolation.

As the end of the ten minutes approached, Peter told the major about the cave, and the strange man, Ignacio, and Alicia’s theory about what he was. Even as he spoke the words, he realized how far-fetched the idea sounded; and yet he felt its rightness. If anything, his feeling that the information was important had grown over the days.

“There may be something to that,” Greer agreed. “He said, ‘He left us’?”

“Those were his words.”

Greer fell silent, stroking his long beard. “The question, of course, is where did Martínez go. Did Alicia have any ideas about that?”

“Not that she told me.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think finding the Twelve is going to be more complicated than we planned on.”

He waited, watching Greer’s face. When the major made no reply, he said, “My offer still stands. We could really use you.”

“You overestimate me, Peter. I was always just along for the ride.”

“Not to me. Alicia would say the same thing. All of us would.”

“And I accept the compliment. But it doesn’t change a thing. What’s done is done.”

“It still doesn’t seem right that you’re in here.”

Greer shrugged carelessly. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Believe me, I’ve brooded plenty on the subject. The Expeditionary was my whole life, and I miss it. But I did what I thought was right in the moment. In the end, that’s all a man has to measure his life, and it’s plenty.” His eyes narrowed on Peter. “Which isn’t something I need to tell you, is it?”

The major had him dead to rights. “I suppose not.”

“You’re a good soldier, Peter. You always have been, and I wasn’t lying about that uniform. It does suit you. The question is, do you suit it?”

The question wasn’t accusing—if anything, the opposite. “Some days I wonder,” Peter confessed.

“Everybody does. The military is what it is. You can hardly take a trip to the latrine without filling out a form in triplicate. But in your case, I’d say the question runs deeper. The man I met hanging upside down in that spinner—he wasn’t following anybody’s orders but his own. I don’t think he would have even known how. Now here you are, five years later, informing me that Command wants to give up the hunt. Tell me, are they right?”

“Of course not.”

“And can you make them understand that? Make them change their minds?”

“I’m just a junior officer. They’re not going to listen to me.”

Greer nodded. “And I agree. So there we are.”

A silence followed. Then Greer said, “Maybe this will help. Do you remember what I said to you that night in Arizona?”

“There were lots of nights, Lucius. A lot of things got said.”

“So there were. But this one in particular—I’m not sure where we were exactly. A couple of days out from the Farmstead, anyway. We were sheltering underneath a bridge. Crazy-looking rocks everywhere. I remember that part because of the way the light hit them at sunset, like they were lit from the inside. The two of us got to talking. It was the night I asked you what you intended to do with the vials Lacey gave you.”

It was all coming back. The red rocks, the deep silence of the landscape, the easy flow of conversation as the two of them sat by the fire. It was as if the memory had been floating in Peter’s mind for five years, never quite touching the surface until now. “I remember.”

Greer nodded. “I thought you might. And let me just say, when you volunteered to be injected with the virus, that was, hands down, the ballsiest thing I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some ballsy things. It was nothing I ever could have done myself. I had a lot of respect for you before that, but after …” He paused. “That night, I said something to you. ‘Everything that’s happened, it feels like more than chance.’ I was really just talking to myself at the time, trying to put something into words I couldn’t quite figure out, but I’ve given the matter a lot of thought. You finding Amy, me finding you, Lacey, Babcock, everything that happened on that mountain. Events can seem random while you’re living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more? I’ll tell you what I see, Peter. A clear path. More than that. A true path. What are the chances these things would have just happened on their own? Each piece falling into place exactly when we needed it? There’s a power at work here, something beyond our understanding. You can call it what you like. It doesn’t need a name, because it knows yours, my friend. So you wonder what it is I do all day in here, and the answer is very simple. I’m waiting to see what happens next. Trusting in God’s plan.” He gave Peter an enigmatic smile; the film of sweat that dampened his face and his bare, muscled chest sharpened the air of the room. “Does it seem strange to hear me say that?” His manner lightened. “Probably you’re thinking, That poor guy, all alone in this little box, he must have lost his mind. You wouldn’t be the first.”

It took Peter a moment to answer. “Actually, no. I was thinking how much you reminded me of someone.”

“Who was that?”

“Her name was Auntie.”

Now it was Greer’s turn to remember. “Of course. The woman we buried when we got back to the Colony. You never told me anything about her, and I wondered. But I didn’t want to pry.”

“You could have. You could say we were close, though with Auntie it was hard to tell. Half the time I think she thought I was somebody else. I used to go around to check up on her. She liked to talk about God, too.”

“Is that right?” Greer seemed pleased. “And what did she have to say?”

How strange, thought Peter, to find himself thinking of Auntie now. Like Greer’s story of their night in Arizona, his memory of the old woman, and the time they’d spent together, emerged in his mind as if it were yesterday. Her overheated kitchen, and the awful cups of tea; the precise, even reverential arrangement of objects in her cramped house, furniture and books and pictures and mementos; her gnarled old feet, always shoeless, and her puckered, toothless mouth and the vaporous tangle of white hair that seemed to hover in the air around her head, not even really attached to anything. As Auntie herself was unattached; alone in her shack at the edge of the glade, the woman seemed to exist in a wholly different realm, a pocket of accumulated human memory, outside of time. Now that Peter considered it, probably that was what had drawn him to her. In Auntie’s presence, the daily struggles of his life always felt lighter.

“More or less the same. She wasn’t the easiest woman to make sense of.” A specific recollection bubbled to the surface. “There is one thing. It was the same night Amy appeared outside the gate.”

“Oh?”

“She said, ‘The God I know about wouldn’t give us no chance.’ ”

Greer was watching him with studious intensity. “She said that to you.”

He was still a little surprised by the clarity of the memory. “At the time I just thought it was, you know, Auntie.”

Greer broke the mood with a sudden, flashing smile. “Well,” he said, “it sounds to me like the woman knew a thing or two. I’m sorry I never met her. I bet the two of us would have gotten on just fine.”

Peter laughed. “You know, I think you would have.”

“So maybe it’s time for you to trust a little more, Peter. That’s really all I’m saying. Let things come to you.”

“Like Martínez, you mean.”

“Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way to know until you know. I’ve never asked you what you believe, Peter, and I’m not going to. Every man gets to decide that for himself. And don’t get me wrong—I’m a soldier, too, or at least I was. The world needs its warriors, and the day will come when very little else is going to matter. You’ll be there for the fight, my friend, I have no doubt. But there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that much.”

“I wish I had your confidence.”

The major shrugged this away. “Oh, you’re just trying to work things out, same as the rest of us. When I was growing up in the orphanage, the sisters always taught us that a person of faith is someone who believes something he can’t prove. I don’t disagree, but that’s only half the story. It’s the end, not the means. A hundred years ago, humanity just about destroyed itself. It’d be easy to think that God doesn’t like us very much. Or that there is no God, there’s no rhyme or reason to anything and we might just as well hang it up and call it a day. Thanks, planet Earth, it was nice knowing you. But that’s not you, Peter. For you, hunting the Twelve isn’t an answer. It’s a question. Does anybody out there care? Are we worth saving? What would God want from me, if there is a God? The greatest faith is the willingness to ask in the first place, all evidence to the contrary. Faith not just in God, but in all of us. It’s a hard place you’re in, and my guess is you’ll be in it for a while. But it’s the right one, and it’s yours.”

It was then that Peter understood what he was seeing. Greer was free, a free man. The walls of his cage held no meaning for him at all; his life was entirely elsewhere, unbounded by physical things. How surprising, to envy a man whose whole life was conducted in a prison cell not much larger than a good-sized latrine.

The sound of turning tumblers; their time was at an end. As Sanders entered the cell, the two men rose.

“So,” Greer said, and clapped his hands conclusively. “A little downtime in Freeport, courtesy of Command. Not the best-smelling town, but the view is nice. A good place to get a little thinking done. You’ve certainly earned it.”

“That’s what Colonel Apgar said.”

“Smart fellow, Apgar.” Greer extended his hand. “It was good to see you, my friend.”

They shook. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

Greer grinned through the pocket of his beard. “You know what they say. Three hots and a cot. It’s not such a bad life when you get down to it. And as for the rest, I know you, Peter. You’ll figure things out when the time is right. That’s a lesson you taught me, actually.”

Sanders escorted him into the hall. Only then did it occur to Peter that he’d forgotten to ask Greer about his other visitor. And something else: the major had never asked about Amy.

“Listen,” Sanders said as they were passing through the second door, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could you sign this?”

He was holding out a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.

“It’s for my wife,” he explained. “To prove I met you.”

Peter accepted the paper, scrawled his name, and handed it back. For a moment Sanders just looked at it.

“Wow,” he said.

“Uncle Peter!”

Breaking away from the other children, Caleb flew toward him across the playground. At the last instant he took three bounding steps and catapulted into Peter’s arms, nearly knocking him over.

“Whoa now, easy.”

The boy’s face was lit with joy. “Amy said you were coming! You’re here! You’re here!”

Peter wondered how she had known. But he quickly corrected himself; Amy simply seemed to know things, as if her mind were linked to the world’s hidden rhythms. Holding Caleb in his arms, Peter was washed with his distinctive physical presence: his boyish weight and heat; the warmth of his breath; the milky smell of his hair and skin, moist with exertion, mixed with the lingering scent of the harsh lye soap the sisters used. Across the playground, the other children were watching. Peter caught a glimpse of Sister Peg eyeing him coolly from the monkey bars, his unannounced presence a disruption to her beloved routine.

“Let me have a look at you.”

He lowered Caleb to the ground. As always, Peter was struck by the boy’s uncanny resemblance to Theo. He felt a stab of regret at the time he’d carelessly allowed to pass.

“You’re getting so big. I can hardly believe it.”

The little boy’s chest puffed with pride. “Where have you been, what did you see?”

“Lots of stuff. I was in New Mexico.”

“New Mexico!” The look of wonder on his face was total; Peter might just as well have told him he’d visited the moon. Although the prevailing custom in Kerrville was not to shelter the children from knowledge of the virals, as had been done in the Colony, his child’s mind had yet to absorb the ramifications. To Caleb, the Expeditionary was a grand adventure, like pirates crossing the seas or tales of the knights of old that the sisters read to them from storybooks. “How long can you stay?” the boy pleaded.

“Not long, I’m afraid. But we have the rest of the afternoon. And I’ll be back soon, probably just a week or so. What would you like to do?”

Caleb’s answer was instantaneous: “Go to the dam.”

“Why there?”

“You can see everything!”

Peter smiled. At such moments he felt something of himself in his nephew, the same undeniable force of curiosity that had governed his life. “The dam it is.”

Sister Peg came up behind the boy. Possessing a birdlike slightness, Sister Peg was nonetheless an intimidating figure, her dark eyes capable of shrinking your insides with a single censorious glance. Peter’s comrades who had been raised in the orphanage—men who weathered horrible conditions and constant peril—spoke of her with an awe verging on terror. My God, they all said, that woman scared the living shit out of us.

“Hello, Sister.”

Her face, a weathered topography of deep crevices and arid planes, possessed the immobility of judgment withheld. She had taken a position just beyond a normal conversational distance, a small but significant alteration that magnified her commanding presence. Her teeth were stained a yellowish brown from puffing on corn silk—an incomprehensible habit, widespread in Kerrville, that Peter regarded with a combination of wonder and revulsion.

“Lieutenant Jaxon, I didn’t expect you.”

“Sorry, it was all pretty sudden. Do you mind if I take him for the rest of the day?”

“It would have been better if you could have sent word. Things here run a certain way.”

Caleb’s body was jangling with energy. “Please, Sister!”

Her imperious gaze flicked down toward the boy, taking accounts. Delta-like fans of wrinkles deepened at the corners of her mouth as she sucked in her cheeks. “I suppose under the circumstances it would be all right. An exception, you understand, and keep an ear to the horn, Lieutenant. I know you Expeditionary feel yourselves to be above the rules, but I can’t allow it.”

Peter let the barb pass; it did, after all, possess an element of truth. “I’ll have him back by six.” Under her withering gaze, he found himself, with the next question, attempting to sound curiously offhanded. “Is Amy around? I’d like to visit with her before we go.”

“She’s gone to the market. You’ve just missed her.” This declaration was followed by a tart sigh. “I suppose you’ll want to stay for dinner.”

“Thank you, Sister. That’s kind of you.”

Caleb, bored by these formalities, was tugging at his hand. “Please, Uncle Peter, I want to go.”

For a breadth of time no longer than half a second, the woman’s stern countenance appeared to crack. A look of almost maternal tenderness flickered in her eyes. But it just as quickly vanished, leaving Peter to wonder if he’d imagined it.

“Mind the clock, Lieutenant. I’ll be watching.”

The dam was, in many ways, the heart of the city and its mechanisms. Along with the oil that powered the generators, Kerrville’s mastery of the Guadalupe River, which provided both water for irrigation and a barrier to the north and west—nobody had ever seen a viral even attempt to swim; it was widely believed that they either had a phobia of water or simply could not stay afloat—accounted for its longevity. The river itself had been a feature of scant dimension in the early days, thin and inconsequential, falling to barely a trickle in summer. But a devastating flood in the spring of 22, a harbinger of a meteorological shift that would raise the river permanently by as much as ten feet, had necessitated its taming. It had been, by all accounts, a massive project, requiring the temporary diversion of the river’s currents and the movement of huge quantities of earth and limestone to dig the bowl-like depression that would form the impoundment, followed by the erection of the dam itself, a feat of engineering on a scale Peter had always associated with the Time Before, not the world he knew. The day of the water’s first release was regarded as a foundational occurrence in the history of the Republic; more than anything else in Kerrville, the dam’s corralling of natural forces had impressed upon him how flimsy the Colony had been in comparison. They were lucky to have made it as long as they had.

Grated steel stairs ascended to the top. Caleb took them at a dash over Peter’s shouted protests to slow down. By the time Peter made the final turn, Caleb was already gazing over the water, toward the undulating ridge of hills at the horizon. Thirty feet below, the face of the impoundment possessed a stunning transparency. Peter could even see fish down there, white shapes piloting lazily in the glassy waters.

“What’s out there?” the boy asked.

“Well, more Texas mostly. That ridge you’re looking at is only a few miles away.”

“Where’s New Mexico?”

Peter pointed due west. “But it’s really, really far. Three days on a transport, and that’s without stopping.”

The boy chewed on his lower lip. “I want to see it.”

“Maybe someday you will.”

They walked along the dam’s curving top to the spillway. A series of vents released water at regular intervals into a wide pool, from which gravity pumps piped it down to the agricultural complex. Looming in the distance, regularly spaced towers marked the Orange Zone. They paused again, absorbing the view. Peter was once again struck by the elaborateness of it all. It was as if in this one place, human history still flowed in an uninterrupted continuum, undisturbed by the stark separation of eras that the virals had brought down upon the world.

“You look like him.”

Peter turned to see Caleb squinting at him. “Who do you mean?”

“Theo. My father.”

The statement caught him short; how could the boy possibly know what Theo had looked like? Of course he couldn’t, but that wasn’t the point. Caleb’s assertion was a kind of wish, a way to keep his father alive.

“That’s what everyone said. I can see a lot of him in you, you know.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Every day.” A somber silence passed; then Peter said, “I’ll tell you something, though. As long as we remember a person, they’re not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us. And even if you think you don’t remember your parents, you do. They’re inside you, the same way they’re inside me.”

“But I was just a baby.”

“Babies most of all.” A thought occurred to him. “Do you know about the Farmstead?”

“Where I was born?”

Peter nodded. “That’s right. There was something special about it. It was like we would always be safe there, like something was looking after us.” He regarded the boy for a moment. “Your father thought it was a ghost, you know.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought a lot about it over the years. Maybe it was. Or at least a kind of ghost. Maybe places have memories, too.” He rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “All I know is that the world wanted you to be born, Caleb.”

The boy fell silent. Then, his face blooming with the mischievous grin of a plan unveiled: “You know what I want to do next?”

“Name it.”

“I want to go swimming.”

It was a little after four by the time they reached the base of the spillway. Standing by the edge of the pool, they stripped to their shorts. As Peter stepped out onto the rocks, he turned to find Caleb frozen at the edge.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know how.”

Somehow Peter had failed to foresee this. He offered the boy his hand. “Come on, I’ll teach you.”

The water was startlingly cold, with a distinct mineral taste. Caleb was fearful at first, but after thirty minutes of splashing around, his confidence grew. Another ten and he was moving freely on his own, dog-paddling across the surface.

“Look at me! Look at me!”

Peter had never seen the boy so happy. “Hold on to my back,” he said.

The boy climbed aboard, gripping Peter by the shoulders. “What are we going to do?”

“Just take a deep breath and hold it.”

Together they descended. Peter blew the air from his lungs, stretched out his arms, and with a whip kick sent them gliding along the stony bottom, the boy clutching him tightly, his body pulled like a cape. The water was as clear as glass. Memories of splashing in the grotto as a boy filled Peter’s mind. He had done the same thing with his father.

Three more kicks and they ascended, bursting into the light. “How was that?” Peter asked.

“I saw fish!”

“I told you.”

Again and again they dove this way, the boy’s pleasure inexhaustible. It was past five-thirty, the shadows lengthening, when Peter declared an end. They stepped gingerly onto the rocks and dressed.

“I can’t wait to tell Sister Peg we went outside,” Caleb said, beaming.

“It’s probably best if you don’t. Let’s keep that between us, okay?”

“A secret?” The boy spoke the word with illicit pleasure; they were part of a conspiracy now.

“Exactly.”

The boy slid his small, moist hand into Peter’s as they made their way to the hydro gate. In another few minutes, the horn would sound. The feeling came upon him in a rush of love: This is why I’m here.

He found her in the kitchen, standing before a massive stove covered with boiling pots. The room roared with heat and noise—the clatter of dishes, sisters racing to and fro, the accumulating racket of excited voices as the children gathered in the dining hall. Amy’s back was to him. Her hair, iridescent and dark, descended in a thick braid to her waist. He hesitated in the doorway, observing her. She appeared totally absorbed in her work, stirring the contents of the nearest pot with a long wooden spoon, tasting and correcting with salt, then nimbly stepping to one of the room’s several red-brick ovens to withdraw, on a long paddle, half a dozen loaves of freshly risen bread.

“Amy.”

She turned, breaking into a smile. They met in the middle of the busy room. A moment of uncertainty, then they embraced.

“Sister Peg told me you were here.”

He stepped back. He had sensed it in her touch: there was something new about her. Long departed was the voiceless, traumatized waif with the matted hair and scavenged clothes. The progress of her aging seemed to occur in fits and starts, not so much a matter of physical growth as a deepening self-possession, as if she were coming into ownership of her life. And always the paradox: the person standing before him, though to all appearances a young teenager, was in reality the oldest human being on earth. Peter’s long absence, an era to Caleb, was for Amy the blink of an eye.

“How long can you stay?” Her eyes did not move from his face.

“Just tonight. I ship out tomorrow.”

“Amy,” one of the sisters called from the stove, “is this soup ready? They’re getting loud out there.”

Amy spoke briskly over her shoulder: “Just a second.” Then, to Peter, her smile widening: “It turns out I’m not such a bad cook. Save me a place.” She quickly squeezed his hand. “It really is so good to see you.”

Peter made his way to the dining hall, where all the children had gathered at long tables, sorting themselves by age. The noise in the room was intense, a free-flowing energy of bodies and voices like the din of some immense engine. He took a place on the end of a bench beside Caleb just as Sister Peg appeared at the front of the room and clapped her hands.

The effect was like a lightning bolt: silence tensed the room. The children joined hands and bowed their heads. Peter found himself joined in the circle, Caleb on one side, on the other a little girl with brown hair who was seated across from him.

“Heavenly Father,” the woman intoned, her eyes closed, “we thank you for this meal and our togetherness and the blessing of your love and care, which you bestow upon us in your mercy. We thank you for the richness of the earth and the heavens above and your protection until we meet in the life to come. And lastly we thank you for the company of our special guest, one of your brave soldiers, who has traveled a perilous distance to be with us tonight. We pray that you will keep him, and his fellows, safe on their journeys. Amen.”

A chorus of voices: “Amen.”

Peter felt genuinely touched. So, perhaps Sister Peg didn’t mind his presence so much after all. The food appeared: vats of soup, bread cut into thick, steaming slices, pitchers of water and milk. At the head of each table, one of the sisters ladled the soup into bowls and passed them down the line as the pitchers made their way around. Amy slid onto the bench beside Peter.

“Let me know what you think of the soup,” she said.

It was delicious—the best thing he’d eaten in months. The bread, pillowy and warm in his mouth, nearly made him moan. He silenced the urge to ask for seconds, thinking it would be rude, but the moment his bowl was empty one of the sisters appeared with another, placing it before him.

“It’s not often we have company,” she explained, her face rosy with embarrassment, and scurried away.

They talked of the orphanage and Amy’s duties—the kitchen, but also teaching the youngest children to read and, in her words, “whatever else needs to be done”—and Peter’s news of the others, though they phrased this information in a general way; it wouldn’t be until after the children had gone to bed that the two of them would be able to talk in earnest. Beside him, Caleb was engaged with another boy in a vigorous conversation that Peter was only passingly able to follow, something about knights and queens and pawns. When his companion left the table, Peter asked Caleb what it was all about.

“It’s chess.”

“Chest?”

Caleb rolled his eyes. “No, chess. It’s a game. I can teach you if you want.”

Peter glanced at Amy, who laughed. “You’ll lose,” she said.

After dinner and dishes, the three of them went to the common room, where Caleb set up the board and explained the names of the various pieces and the moves they could make. By the time he got to the knights, Peter’s head was spinning.

“You really can keep all this straight in your mind? How long did it take you to learn to play?”

He shrugged innocently. “Not long. It’s pretty simple.”

“It doesn’t sound simple.” He turned to Amy, who was wearing a cagey smile.

“Don’t look at me,” she protested. “You’re on your own.”

Caleb waved over the board. “You can go first.”

The battle commenced. Peter had considered taking it easy on the boy—it was, after all, a children’s game, and no doubt he would quickly get the hang of it—but he instantly discovered how badly he had underestimated his young opponent. Caleb seemed to anticipate his every tactic, responding without hesitation, his moves crisp and assured. In growing desperation Peter decided to attack, using his knight to take one of Caleb’s bishops.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” the boy asked.

“Um, no?”

Caleb was studying the board with his chin resting on his hands. Peter could sense the complex movements of his thoughts: he was assembling a strategy, imagining a series of moves and countermoves projected forward in time. Five years old, Peter thought. Amazing.

Caleb advanced a rook three spaces, taking Peter’s other knight, which he had inadvertently left open. “Watch,” he said.

A quick exchange of pieces and Peter’s king was boxed in. “Checkmate,” the boy declared.

Peter stared hopelessly at the board. “How did you do that so fast?”

Beside him, Amy laughed—a warm, infectious sound. “I told you.”

Caleb’s grin stretched a mile wide. Peter understood what had happened; first the swimming, now this. His nephew had effortlessly turned the tables on him, showing Peter what he was capable of.

“You just have to think ahead,” Caleb said. “Try to see it like a story.”

“Tell me the truth. How good are you at this?”

Caleb gave a modest shrug. “A few of the older kids used to beat me. But not anymore.”

“Is that so? Well, set it up again, youngster. I want my revenge.”

Caleb had racked up his third straight victory, each more mercilessly decisive than the last, when the bell sounded, summoning him to the dormitory. The time had passed too quickly. Amy departed for the girls’ quarters, leaving Peter to escort the boy to bed. In the large room of cots, Caleb exchanged his clothing for a nightshirt, then knelt on the stone floor at the side of his bed, hands pressed together, to say his prayers, a long series of “God bless”es that began with “my parents in heaven” and concluded with Peter himself.

“I always save you for last,” the boy said, “to keep you safe.”

“Who’s Mouser?”

Mouser was their cat. Peter had seen the poor creature lounging on a windowsill in the common room—a pitiful rag of a thing, flesh drooping over his brittle old bones like laundry on a line. Peter drew the blanket up to Caleb’s chin and bent to kiss him on the forehead. Sisters were moving up and down the lines of cots, shushing the other children. The room’s lights had already been extinguished.

“When are you coming back, Uncle Peter?”

“I’m not sure. Soon, I hope.”

“Can we go swimming again?”

A warm feeling spread through his entire body. “Only if you promise we can play more chess. I don’t think I have the hang of it yet. I could use a few pointers.”

The boy beamed. “I promise.”

Amy was waiting for him in the empty common room, the cat nosing around her feet. He had to report to the barracks at 2100; he and Amy would have only a few minutes together.

“That poor thing,” Peter said. “Why doesn’t anybody put him down? It seems cruel.”

Amy ran a hand along the animal’s spine. A faint purr trembled from him as he arched his back to receive her touch. “It’s past time, I suppose. But the children adore him, and the sisters don’t believe in it. Only God can take a life.”

“They’ve obviously never been to New Mexico.”

A joke, but not entirely. Amy regarded him with concern. “You look troubled, Peter.”

“Things aren’t going very well. Do you want to know about it?”

She considered the question. She seemed a little pale; Peter wondered if she was feeling all right.

“Maybe some other time.” Her eyes searched his face. “He loves you, you know. He talks about you all the time.”

“You’re making me feel guilty. Probably I deserve it.”

She lifted Mouser to settle him on her lap. “He understands. I’m only telling you so you know how important you are to him.”

“What about you? Are you doing okay here?”

She nodded. “On the whole, it suits me. I like the company, the children, the sisters. And of course there’s Caleb. Maybe for the first time in my life I actually feel… I don’t know. Useful. It’s nice to be just an ordinary person.”

Peter was struck by the frank, easy flow of the conversation. Some barrier between them had dropped. “Do the other sisters know? Besides Sister Peg, I mean.”

“A few do, or maybe just suspect. I’ve been here for five years, and they’d have to notice I’m not aging. I think I’m a bit of a wrinkle to Sister Peg, something that doesn’t really fit her view of things. But she doesn’t say anything about it to me.” Amy smiled. “After all, I make a mean barley soup.”

Too quickly, the moment of his departure was at hand. Amy walked him to the entrance, where Peter pulled the wad of bills from his pocket and held it out to her.

“Give this to Sister Peg, all right?”

Amy nodded without comment and slid the scrip into the pocket of her skirt. Once again she pulled him into a hug, more forcefully this time. “I really have missed you.” Her voice was soft against his chest. “Be safe, all right? Promise you’ll do that.”

There was something fraught in her insistence, a feeling, almost, of finality, a graver parting. What wasn’t she saying? And something else: her body was giving off a feverish heat. He could actually feel it pulsing through the heavy fabric of his uniform.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“I mean it, Peter. If anything happened, I couldn’t …” Her voice trailed away, as if pulled to the currents of a hidden wind. “I just couldn’t is all.”

Now he was certain: there was something Amy wasn’t telling him. Peter searched her face for what it was. A faint glaze of perspiration shone on her brow.

“Are you okay?”

Taking his hand in her own, she lifted them in concert, pressing her palm against his so that the pads of their fingers were just touching. It seemed a gesture with equal measures of togetherness and parting, connection and separation.

“Do you remember when I kissed you?”

They had never spoken of this—her quick, birdlike peck at the mall, the virals streaming toward them. Much had happened, but Peter had not forgotten. How could he?

“I always wondered about that,” he confessed.

Their raised hands seemed to hover in the darkened space between them. Amy studied them with her eyes. It was as if she were attempting to divine a meaning she herself had made. “I’d been alone so long. It’s nothing I can even describe. But all of a sudden, there you were. I couldn’t believe it.” Then, as if jarred from a trance, she withdrew her hand, her face suddenly flustered. “That’s all. You better go—you’ll be late.”

He didn’t want to. Like the kiss, the feeling of her hand seemed to possess a unique power to linger in his senses, as if it had taken up a permanent residence in his fingertips. He wanted to say more but couldn’t find the words, and the moment slipped away.

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

Her face assembled a smile. “Never better.”

She really did look ill, he thought. “Well, I’ll be back in ten days.”

Amy said nothing.

“I’ll see you then, right?” He wondered why he was asking this.

“Of course, Peter. Where would I go?”

After Peter had left, Amy made her way to the sisters’ residence, a smaller version of the dormitories where the children slept. The other sisters were all asleep, a few of the older ones softly snoring. She stripped off her tunic and lowered herself onto her cot.

Sometime later she awoke with a start. A cold sweat glazed her body, drenching her nightshirt. The turbulence of uneasy dreams still roiled through her.

Amy, help him.

She froze.

He is waiting for you, Amy. In the ship.

—Father?

Go to him go to him go to him go to him …

She rose, seized with a sudden purposefulness. The moment had come.

Yet one duty remained, one final task to be performed in these last days of a life she had loved, if briefly. Through the silent hallways she padded her way to the common room. She found Mouser just where she had left him, resting on the couch. Exhaustion radiated from his eyes; his limbs were limp, he could barely raise his head.

Please, his eyes said. I’m in pain. It’s all gone on too long.

Gently she lifted him to her chest. Running a hand along his back, she turned so he could face the window, with its view of the starry night.

“See the pretty world, Mouser?” she murmured, close to his ear. “See the pretty stars?”

It’s… beautiful.

His neck broke with a snap, the body going limp in her arms. Amy stayed that way for a few minutes while his presence faded, stroking his fur, kissing his head and face. Goodbye, Mouser. Godspeed to you. The children love you; you will be with them again. Then she carried him outside to the garden shed to see about a shovel.

31

“Will you look what the wind blew in.”

A grease-stained man had directed Peter to the commissary, where he’d found Michael sitting with a group of a dozen men and women, using forks grasped in filthy hands to shovel plates of beans into their mouths. Michael leapt off the bench and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Peter Jaxon, as I live and breathe.”

“Flyers, Michael. You’re enormous.”

His friend’s chest seemed to have doubled in size, straining the fabric of his jumpsuit; his arms were roped with muscle. A robust growth of blond stubble roughened his cheeks.

“Tell you the truth, there’s not much else to do around here besides cook oil and lift weights. And word to the wise, nobody uses that word around here. It’s all ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’ ” He gestured toward the table. “This here’s my crew. Say hello to Peter, hombres.”

Introductions all around. Peter did his best to record the names but knew they’d be gone within minutes.

“Hungry?” Michael asked. “The chow’s not bad if you breathe through your mouth.”

“I should report to the head of DS first.”

“He can keep. Since it’s past twelve hundred, odds are good Stark is pie-eyed anyway. It’s Karlovic you really need to see, but he’s gone up to the reserve. Let me get you a plate.”

They shared their news over lunch, returned their trays to the kitchen, and stepped outside.

“Does it always smell this bad?” Peter inquired.

“Oh, this is a good day. When the wind switches around you’ll be crying. Blows all the crap down from the channel. Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

Their first stop was the barracks, a cinder-block box with a rusty tin roof. Curtained sleeping berths lined the walls. A huge, long-faced man was sitting at the table in the middle of the room, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards.

“This here is Juan Sweeting, my second,” Michael said. “Goes by Ceps.”

They shook, the man greeting him with a grunt.

“How’d you get the name Ceps?” Peter asked. “I haven’t heard that before.”

The man curled his arms, popping a pair of biceps like two large grapefruits.

“Ah,” said Peter. “I see.”

“Not to worry,” Michael said, “his manners aren’t the best and his lips move when he reads, but he pretty much behaves himself as long as you don’t forget to feed him.”

A woman had emerged from one of the berths, wearing only her underclothes. She yawned into her fist. “Jesus, Michael, I was trying to get some rack.” To Peter’s astonishment, she draped her arms around Michael’s neck, her face lighting with a greedy smile. “Unless, of course …”

“Not the time, mi amiga.” Michael gently freed himself. “In case you didn’t notice, we’ve got company. Lore, Peter. Peter, Lore.”

Her body was lean and strong, her hair, bleached by the sun, cut short. Attractive but in an unconventional, slightly masculine way, radiating a frank, even carnivorous sensuality.

“You’re the guy?”

“That’s right.”

She gave a knowing laugh. “Well, good luck to you, friend.”

“Lore’s fourth-generation oiler,” Michael said. “She practically drinks the stuff.”

“It’s a living,” Lore said. Then, to Peter: “So you guys go way back, I guess. Let a girl in on the secret. What was he like?”

“Pretty much the smartest guy around. Everybody called him the Circuit. It was sort of his nickname.”

“And a stupid one, too. Thanks a bunch, Peter.”

“The Circuit,” Lore repeated, seeming to taste the word in her mouth. “You know, I think I kind of like that.”

At the table, Ceps, who had said nothing, gave a feminine moan. “Oh Circuit, oh Circuit, make me feel like a woman …”

“Shut up, the both of you.” Michael was blushing to a degree at odds with his newfound muscularity, though Peter could also tell that part of him enjoyed the attention. “What are you, thirteen? Come on, Peter,” he said, steering him toward the door, “let’s leave these children.”

“See you later, Lieutenant,” Lore called merrily as they made their exit. “I’ll want to hear stories.”

In the intensifying heat of the afternoon, Michael gave Peter the lay of the land, taking him to one of the towers and explaining the refining process.

“It sounds pretty dangerous,” Peter said.

“Things happen, it’s true.”

“Where’s the reserve?” The oil, Peter knew, came from a holding tank deep underground.

“About five miles to the north of here. It’s actually a natural salt dome, part of the old Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Oil floats, so we pump in seawater and out it comes.”

His friend had acquired a bit of Texas in his voice, Peter noted. Not “oil” but “awhl.”

“How much is left down there?”

“Well, a shitload, basically. By our estimates, enough to fill the cookers for another fifty years.”

“And once it’s gone?”

“We go looking for more. There are plenty of tanks spread along the Houston ship channel. It’s a real toxic swamp up there, and the place is crawling with dopeys, but it could tide us over awhile. The next closest dome is Port Arthur. It wouldn’t be easy to move the operation up there, but with enough time we could do it.” He gave a fatalistic shrug. “Either way, I doubt I’ll be around to worry about it.”

Michael announced that he had a surprise to show Peter. They walked to the armory, where Michael retrieved a shotgun, then to the motor pool for a pickup. Michael clipped the shotgun into a stand on the floor of the cab and told Peter to get in.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

They drove out of the compound, then turned south on a cracked blacktop that ran parallel with the water. A salty wind gusted through the truck’s open windows, taking the edge off the heat. Peter had seen the Gulf only a couple of times; its ancient span, too huge to hold in his mind, unfailingly took his breath away. Most entrancing were the waves, long tubes gathering size and momentum as they approached, falling in a curl of brown foam at the water’s edge. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Peter knew he could sit on the sand for hours, just watching the waves.

Stretches of the beach were swept clean, while others still bore the evidence of catastrophe on a grand scale: mountains of rusting metal twisted into incomprehensible shapes; beached ships of every size, their hulls bleached and pitted or else stripped to the struts, tilted on the sand like exposed rib cages; ridges of undifferentiated debris, pushed inshore on the tide.

“You’d be surprised how much stuff still washes in,” Michael said, gesturing out the window. “A lot of it comes down the Mississippi, then curves along the coast. The heavy stuff’s mostly gone, but anything plastic seems to last.”

Michael had veered off the road and was now driving close to the water’s edge. Peter stared out the window. “Do you ever see anything bigger?”

“Once in a while. Last year, a barge still loaded with big containers washed in. The damn thing had been drifting for a century. We were all pretty excited.”

“What was in them?”

“Human skeletons.”

They came to an inlet and turned west, following the edge of a tranquil bay. Ahead was a small concrete structure perched on the water’s edge. As Michael brought the truck to a halt, Peter saw that the building was just a shell, although a sign in the window still read, in faded letters, “Art’s Crab Shack.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Peter said. “What’s the surprise?”

His friend smiled mischievously. “Leave that smoke poker here,” he said, gesturing to the Browning strapped to Peter’s thigh. “You’re not going to need it.”

Wondering what his friend had in mind, Peter deposited the gun in the glove compartment, then followed Michael to the rear of the building. A small dock on concrete piers, perhaps thirty feet long, jutted out over the water.

“What am I seeing?”

“A boat, obviously.”

A small sailboat was tied up at the end of the pier, gently bobbing in the swells.

“Where did you get it?”

Michael’s face shone with pride. “A lot of places, actually. The hull we found in a garage about ten miles inland. The rest we cobbled together or made ourselves.”

“We?”

“Lore and me.” He cleared his throat, his face suddenly flustered. “I guess it’s pretty obvious—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation, Michael.”

“I’m just saying it’s not quite what it looks like. Well, maybe it is. But I wouldn’t say we’re together, exactly. Lore’s just… well, she’s just like that.”

Peter found himself taking perverse pleasure in his friend’s embarrassment. “She seems nice enough. And she obviously likes you.”

“Yeah, well.” Michael shrugged. “ ‘Nice’ wouldn’t necessarily be the first word I’d choose, if you know what I mean. To tell you the truth, I can barely keep up with her.”

As Michael stepped aboard, Peter suddenly became aware how meager the boat looked.

“What’s the problem?” Michael asked.

“We’re actually going to sail that thing?”

Michael had started busily coiling lines and setting them in the bottom of the hull. “Why’d you think I brought you out here? Quit your worrying and get in.”

Peter cautiously lowered himself into the cockpit. The hull moved strangely under him, responding to his weight with a sluggish shift. He gripped the rail, willing the boat to stay still. “And you actually know how to do this.”

His friend laughed under his breath. “Don’t be such a baby. Help me raise the sail.”

Michael quickly ran through the basics: sail, rudder, tiller, mainsheet. He cast off the line, scrambled aft to the tiller, did something to make the sail abruptly fill with air, and suddenly they were off and running, streaming away from the dock with astonishing speed.

“So what do you think?”

Peter nervously eyed the receding shoreline. “I’m getting used to it.”

“Here’s a thought,” Michael offered. “For the first time in your life, you’re in a place where a viral can’t kill you.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“For the next couple of hours, you, my friend, are out of a job.”

They tacked across the bay. As they moved into deeper water, the color changed from a mossy green to a rich blue-black, the sunlight ricocheting off the irregularities of its surface. Under the tightness of the sail, the boat possessed a more solid feel, and Peter began to relax, though not completely. Michael seemed to know what he was doing, but the ocean was still the ocean.

“How far out have you taken this thing?”

Michael looked ahead, squinting into the light. “Hard to say. Five miles anyway.”

“What about the barrier?”

It was generally held that in the early days of the epidemic, the nations of the world had banded together to enforce a quarantine of the North American continent, laying mines all along the coastlines and bombing any vessels that attempted to leave shore.

“If it’s out there, I haven’t found it yet.” Michael shrugged. “Part of me thinks it’s all bullshit, you want to know the truth.”

Peter eyed his friend cautiously. “You’re not looking for it, are you?”

Michael didn’t answer, his face telling Peter that he had hit the mark.

“That’s insane.”

“So is doing what you do. And even if the barrier exists, how many mines could still be floating around out there? A hundred years in the ocean would eat just about anything. And all the debris would have set them off by now, anyway.”

“It’s still reckless. You could blow yourself to bits.”

“Maybe. And maybe tomorrow one of those cooking towers will launch me into outer space. The standards for personal safety around these parts are pretty low.” He shrugged. “But that’s beside the point. I don’t think the damn thing was ever there to begin with. The whole coast? If you include Mexico and Canada, that’s almost two hundred and fifty thousand miles. Impossible.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then someday I may, as you say, blow myself to bits.”

Peter let the matter drop. A lot had changed, but Michael was still Michael, a man of insatiable curiosity. They were moving through the inlet into open water; the breeze had picked up, casting jeweled waves over the bow. Something in his stomach dropped. It wasn’t just the lurching of the boat. So much water, everywhere.

“Maybe just this once you could keep us close to land.”

Michael adjusted the sail, stiffening his grip on the tiller. “I’m telling you, it’s a whole other deal out there, Peter. I can’t even explain it. It’s like all the bad stuff just drops away. You really should see it for yourself.”

“I should be getting back. Let’s save it for another time.”

Michael glanced at him and laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Another time.”

32

Alicia made her way northward, into the wide-open countryside. The Texas Panhandle: a landscape of limitless flatness like a great becalmed sea, wind drifting over the tips of the prairie grasses, the sky immense above her in its autumnal blueness, the encircling horizon broken only by the occasional creekside stand of cottonwoods or pecans or long-armed willows, their melancholy fronds bowing in submission as she passed. The days were warm but at night the temperature plunged, weighing the grass with dew. Using fuel from caches spread along her route, she’d complete the journey in four days.

She arrived at the Kearney garrison on the morning of November 6. It was as Command had feared when the resupply convoy had failed to return: not a living soul remained to greet her. The garrison was an open grave. The echoes of the soldiers’ dying cries seemed to hover on the air, locked into the windswept stillness. Alicia spent two days loading the desiccated remains of her fellows into the bed of a truck and carrying them to the place she had selected, a clearing on the banks of the Platte. There she lay them in a long row, so they could be together, doused them with fuel, and set them alight.

It was the following morning that she saw the horse.

He was standing just beyond the barricades. A blue-roan stallion, his long, masculine neck bent to graze upon the heavy grasses at the edge of the parade ground—his presence unaccountable, like a single house left untouched by a tornado. He stood eighteen hands at least. Cautiously Alicia approached him, palms upturned. The animal seemed prepared to spook, nostrils flaring, ears pinned back, one great eye roving toward her. Who is this strange being, it was saying, what does she intend? Alicia advanced another step; still he did not move. She could feel the wildness that coursed in his blood, his explosive animal power.

“Good boy,” she murmured. “See? I’m not so bad. Let’s be friends, the two of us, what do you say?”

When an arm’s length separated them, she eased her open palm beneath his nose. His lips pulled back, revealing the yellow wall of his teeth. His eye was like a great black marble taking in the sight of her. A moment of decision, his body tense and alert; then he lowered his head, filling her open hand with the warm moistness of his breath.

“Well, I think I just found my ride.” The animal was nuzzling her hand now, bobbing his head. Flecks of foam stood at the edges of his mouth. She stroked his neck, his glossy, sweat-dampened coat. His body was like something chiseled, hard and pure, yet it was his eyes that radiated the full measure of his strength. “You need a name,” Alicia said. “What shall I call you?”

She named him Soldier. From the moment she swung up onto his back, they belonged to each other. It was as if they were old friends, long separated, who had found each other again; lifelong companions who could tell each other the truest stories of themselves but who could also, if they chose, say nothing at all. In the empty garrison she lingered three more days, taking stock, planning the journey ahead. She sharpened her blades to their finest point. Her orders were in her pouch. To: Alicia Donadio, Captain of the Expeditionary. Signed: Victoria Sanchez, President, Texas Republic.

On the morning of November 12 they rode out, headed east.

One bridge over the Missouri still stood, fifty miles north of Omaha, at the town of Decatur. They reached it on the sixth day. The mornings were glazed with frost, winter in the air. The trees had given up their bashfulness, showing their bare limbs. As they made their approach Alicia sensed in Soldier’s gait a notch of hesitation: The river, really? They came to the bluffs; below them, the water churned in its broad course. Eddies swirled upon its face, dark as stone. A quarter mile north, the bridge traversed its width on massive concrete pilings, as if bestriding the river on giant legs. Yes, Alicia said. Really.

There were moments when it seemed that this decision had been hasty. In places the concrete surface had fallen away, revealing the churning waters below. She dismounted and took Soldier by the reins. Painstakingly, every step fraught with the possibility that the bridge would collapse under them, they threaded their way across. Whose stupid idea was this? Soldier seemed to ask. Oh, yours.

On the far side they halted. It was just evening; the sun had begun its descent behind the bluffs. Alicia’s rhythms had reversed: on foot, she would have been free to sleep during the day and travel at night, her habit. But not on horseback. Alicia lit a fire on the bank of the river, filled her pan, and set it to boil. She took the last of her stores from her saddlebag: a fistful of dried beans, paste in a can, a wedge of hardtack dense as a rock. She was in the mood to hunt but did not want to leave Soldier alone. She ate her meager supper, washed her pot in the river, and lay down on her bedroll to watch the sky. She had discovered that if she looked long enough, she would see a shooting star. As if responding to her thoughts, a bright streak blazed across the heavens, then two more in quick succession. Michael had told her once, many years ago, that some were leftover creations of mankind from the Time Before, called satellites. He had attempted to explain their function—something to do with the weather—but Alicia had either forgotten what he’d said or else tuned it out as yet another instance of know-it-all Michael lording his intelligence over other people. What had stuck in her mind was an abstract sense of them, their marriage of light and force: unaccountable objects of unknowable purpose that swung around the earth like stones in a sling, locked in their trajectories by counterbalancing influences of will and gravity until they gave up their trials and plunged to earth in a blaze of glory. More stars fell; Alicia began to count. The more she looked, the more she saw. Ten, fifteen, twenty. She was still counting when she fell asleep.

The day broke fresh and clear. Alicia slipped on her glasses and stretched, the pleasurable energy of a night’s rest flowing through her limbs. The sound of the river seemed louder in the morning air. She had saved some hardtack for breakfast. She polished off half and fed the rest to Soldier and rode on.

They were in Iowa now; their journey was halfway done. The landscape changed, rising and falling in loamy hills with a slumped appearance and, between them, flat-bottomed valleys of rich black soil. Low clouds had moved in from the west, tamping the light. It was late afternoon when Alicia detected movement from the ridgeline. On the wind, a scent of animals; Soldier could sense it, too. Willing herself into stillness, Alicia waited for the source to reveal itself.

There. A herd of deer appeared in silhouette at the top of the ridge, twenty head in all, and, among them, a single large buck. His rack was massive, like a tree stripped for winter. She would have to make her approach from the downwind side; it was a wonder they hadn’t detected her already. She placed her rifle in its holder, took up her crossbow and a sling of bolts, and dismounted. Soldier eyed her warily.

“Now, don’t give me that look. A girl’s got to eat.” She patted his neck in assurance. “No wandering off, all right?”

She circled the ridge to the south. The deer still appeared oblivious to her presence. On knees and elbows she inched her way up the incline. She was fast, but they were faster; one shot of the cross, maybe two, would be all she had. After long minutes of patient climbing, she reached the top. The deer had fanned out into a V shape along the ridge. The buck stood forty feet away. Alicia, still pressed to the ground, pulled a bolt into her cross.

A puff of wind, perhaps. A moment of deep animal perception. The deer exploded into movement. By the time Alicia had risen to her feet, they were bounding down the ridge, away.

“Shit.”

She flung the cross to the ground, drew a blade, and took off after them. Her mind was firmly locked onto the task now; nothing would deny her. Fifty feet down the ridge the ground abruptly fell away, and Alicia saw her chance: a convergence of lines that her mind beheld with absolute precision. As the buck darted below the drop-off, she raised her blade and launched herself into the air.

She fell upon him like a hawk, swinging the blade forward in a long-armed arc to drive it upward into the base of his throat. A spurt of blood and his front legs folded under him. Too late Alicia realized what was about to happen. As she pitched over his neck, her body was snatched by gravity, and the next thing Alicia knew she was tumbling head over heels down the hillside.

She came to rest at the base of the ridge. Her glasses had been stripped away. She rolled quickly onto her stomach, burying her face in her arms. Fuck! Would she be forced to lie here, utterly helpless, until dark? She eased one arm free and began to pat the ground around her. Nothing.

The only thing to do was open her eyes and look. Her face still nestled in the crook of her arm, Alicia rose to her knees. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. Well, she thought, here goes nothing.

At first she perceived only whiteness—an obliterating whiteness, as if she were staring into the heart of the sun. The shock was like a needle in her skull. But then, with unexpected swiftness, something began to change. Her vision was resolving. Colors and shapes emerged like figures from a fog. She was peering through the barest slits; she allowed her eyes to open just a little more. Bit by bit, the brightness receded to unveil more of her surroundings.

After five long years in shadow, Alicia Donadio, captain of the Expeditionary, beheld the daylit world.

Only then did she realize where she was.

She called it the Field of Bones. Though neither was it a field, in the strictest sense, nor were they bones, exactly. Rather, the crumbling, sun-blasted remains of a viral multitude, covering the tableland to a far horizon. How many was she seeing? A hundred thousand? A million? More? Alicia stepped forward, taking her place among them. From each footfall rose a cloud of ash. The taste was in her nose and throat, painting the walls of her mouth like a paste. Tears rose to her eyes. Of sadness? Of relief? Or simple amazement at this unaccountable event? It was not their fault what they were. It had never been their fault. Dropping to one knee, she drew a blade from her bandolier and touched it to herself, head and heart. Eyes closed, she bowed her head and cast her mind outward in prayer. I send you home, my brothers and sisters, I release you from the prison of your existence. You have departed the earth to unlock the truth of what lies beyond this life. May your strength pass into me that I may face the days ahead. Godspeed to you.

Soldier was just where she’d left him. His eyes flashed with irritation at her approach. I thought we had a deal, they said. Where the hell have you been? But as she neared, his gaze deepened knowingly. Alicia stroked his withers, kissed his long, wise face. His muscular tongue licked the tears from her bare eyes. You are my good boy, she said. My good, good boy.

She would have liked to press on, but her prize wouldn’t wait. She pitched her tarp between the trees, sat on the ground, and removed her pack. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay the quivering, bloody lump of the buck’s liver. She pressed it to her nose and inhaled deeply, drawing in its delicious, earthen, blood-tinged smell. There would be no cooking fire tonight; it was perfect as it was.

Something was changing; the world was changing. Alicia could feel it, deep in the bone. A profound shift—seismic, seasonal—like the earth tipping on its axis. But there would be time to worry over this later.

Now, on this night, she would eat.

33

Peter saw little of Michael for the next three days. The deadline of departure loomed; all the cooking crews were running double shifts. With no scrip to spend at the card table, Peter passed his time sleeping, taking restless walks around the compound, and milling about the commissary. Karlovic he liked, but Stark was a different matter. Peter’s arrival had elicited all the resentment Greer had predicted. The man would barely speak to him. Fine, Peter thought, let him stew. It’s not like I wanted this duty, anyway.

His most interesting time was spent with Lore. Her appetite for information about the Colony, and Michael in particular, was as robust as everything else about her. Between shifts she would seek him out in the commissary, taking him to an empty table where they could speak out of earshot. No matter what Michael had said, it was plain that beneath her bawdy exterior her attachment to him was serious. Her inquiries possessed a probing quality, as if Michael were a lock she couldn’t quite open. What had he been like back in those days? Smart, yes—that was obvious to anyone who knew him—but what else? What could Peter tell her about Sara? And their parents, what was the story? Of their journey from California, the woman knew only the public account: with the Colony’s power source failing, they had made their way east in search of others, stumbling by sheer chance on the Colorado garrison. Of Amy, and what had occurred on the mountain in Telluride, she knew nothing at all, and Peter left it that way.

The most surprising turn in the conversation was Lore’s interest in Alicia. Evidently Michael had spoken of her a good deal. Beneath the surface of Lore’s questions, Peter detected an undercurrent of rivalry, even jealousy, and in hindsight he suspected that much of the discussion had been circling toward this subject. Peter even went so far as to assure Lore that she had nothing to worry about. Michael and Alicia were like oil and water, he said. Two more different people you’d never meet in your life. Lore responded with a confident laugh. What gave you the idea I was worried? Some crazy woman in the Exped, way the hell and gone? Believe me, she said, waving the notion away, that’s the last thing on my mind.

Peter spent his last day conferring with Karlovic and Stark, going over the details of the trip. Ten tankers full of fuel, evenly mixed between diesel and high-octane, were parked by the gate. Before morning there would be two more. The convoy would travel with an escort of six security vehicles, Humvees and 4×4s with fifty-cals mounted in the beds. The distance was three hundred miles: north from Freeport on Route 36, west on Highway 10 at Sealy, a straight shot to the outskirts of San Antonio, where they would circumnavigate the city on a mix of rural highways, then back on I-10 for the final fifty miles. Hardboxes were dispersed at regular intervals along the route, but the practice was to drive without stopping. Traveling at an average speed of twenty miles an hour, they would pull into Kerrville a little after midnight.

Peter’s attention was drawn to five major chokepoints on the route: a bridge over the San Bernard River west of Sealy; another at Columbus, where they would cross the Colorado; the San Marcos bridge at Luling; and a pair spanning the Guadalupe, the first just west of Seguin, the second at the town of Comfort. The first three were a small concern—the convoy would be crossing in daylight—but they wouldn’t reach Seguin until after sunset. Virals had been seen moving up and down the rivers as they hunted, and the sound of idling diesel engines was a known attractor. To make matters worse, the San Marcos bridge was in such poor repair that only one tanker would be permitted to cross it at a time. Flaring the area would provide a measure of protection, but the convoy would be broken up for nearly an hour.

Everyone gathered at the tankers in the predawn darkness. The air was damp and cold. For nearly all of them, the trip was old hat. They had become inured to it, even a little bored. Cups of chicory coffee were passed. As ranking oiler, Michael would ride in the lead Humvee, with Peter. Ceps would drive the first tanker, Lore the second. Peter had planned for Stark to ride up front, as a gesture of goodwill, but to Peter’s relief the man had declined, choosing instead to remain at the refinery with the remaining DS detachment.

With the first rays of light, the gates were opened. A dozen big diesels roared to life, clouds of dense black exhaust chuffing from their smokestacks. Michael moved up the line from the rear, distributing the walkies and conferring with each of the drivers a final time. He took his place at the wheel of the Humvee and radioed each of the drivers in turn.

“Tanker One.”

“Good to go.”

“Tanker Two.”

“Good to go.”

“Tanker Three …” And so on. Michael handed Peter the radio and put the Humvee in gear.

“You’ll see,” he said. “The whole thing is a big yawn. One time, I slept most of the way.”

They moved out, into the breaking day.

By late morning they had moved through the Rosenberg bypass and were angling west toward I-10. The state highways were a series of potholes, forcing the tankers to move at a creep, but once they picked up the interstate their speed would improve.

Ceps’s voice came over the radio: “Michael, I’ve got a problem back here.”

Peter swiveled in his seat. The convoy had come to a halt behind them. Michael braked the Humvee and backed up. Ceps had exited the cab of the truck and was standing on the front bumper, jimmying the hood.

“What’s the problem?” Michael called.

Ceps slapped at the engine with a rag, pushing the steam away. “I think it’s the coolant pump. It could take a while to fix. A couple of hours, anyway.”

Two options: wait for the repair to be completed or leave the tanker behind. To complicate matters, the land on either side was an impenetrable thicket. The closest turnout was six miles back. They would have to back the convoy up all the way to Wallis.

“Can he do it?” Peter asked.

“We’ve got the parts. I don’t see why not.”

Peter gave the go-ahead. Michael took up the walkie again. “Okay, everybody, let’s power down.”

“Are you serious?” Lore came back. “Tell Ceps to move that hunk of junk out of the way.”

“Yes, I’m serious. Kill your engines, people.”

Peter positioned the security teams on either side of the convoy, their guns trained on the walls of trees and scrub. It was highly unlikely anything would happen in the middle of the day, but a tangle like that was perfect viral cover. Ceps and Lore got to work on the engine. Most of the drivers had climbed from their cabs. The cards came out as the minutes ticked away.

By the time Ceps declared the cooling system fixed, it was past three o’clock. The repair had taken nearly four hours. Kerrville was still twelve hours away—more, since they’d be doing more of the trip in the dark.

“It’s not too late to go back,” Michael said. “We can use the Columbus exit on the interstate to turn around. The ramps are in good shape.”

“What’s your call?”

They were standing by the Humvee, away from the others. “If you ask me, I think we should go. A few more hours in the dark, what’s the difference? It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. These old junkers break down all the time. And we’ve got wide lanes all the way to Seguin.” Michael shrugged. “It’s really your decision.”

Peter took a moment to think. It was a risk, but what wasn’t? And Michael’s logic seemed sound.

He nodded. “We go.”

“That’s the spirit. All eyes, brother.”

The exit markers, pitted and rusting, leaning like drunks; the ancient highway with its tipping guardrails, calling them forward; the cratered roadside restaurants and filling stations and motels, some with their signs still standing against the wind, declaring incomprehensible names. McDonald’s. Exxon. Whataburger. Holiday Inn Express. Peter watched the scenery flow past. They were making better time, but that wouldn’t last. Darkness was coming on.

The light gave out at Flatonia. They were thirty miles east of the third bridge, moving at a steady twenty-five. The radio, which had crackled all day with banter between the vehicles, fell silent. As they approached the town of Luling there appeared, in the cones of light from the Humvee’s headlamps, an exit sign marked with a red X. A hardbox. Peter glanced at Michael, looking for any change in his face, but detected none. They were moving on.

They were approaching the bridge when Michael suddenly leaned forward in his seat, peering intently over the wheel.

“What in the hell …?”

Peter braced himself against the dash as Michael slammed on the brakes. The cab filled with light as the second Humvee nearly careened into them from behind, braking just in time. They skidded to a halt.

Michael was staring out the windshield. “Am I seeing things?”

Lore’s voice crackled on the radio. “What’s going on? Why did we stop?”

Peter snatched the radio off the dash. “DS three and four, up front on the double. One and two, hold position. Everybody else stay in your cabs.”

A figure was standing in the road. Not viral: human. It appeared to be a woman, head bowed, wearing a kind of cloak.

“What’s she doing?” said Michael. “She’s just standing there.”

“Wait here.”

Peter climbed from the cab. The woman had yet to move or otherwise acknowledge their existence. The two floater DS vehicles, 4×4s, had pulled into position alongside the Humvees. Drawing his sidearm, Peter stepped cautiously forward.

“Identify yourself.”

The woman was standing at the front edge of the bridge. Its iron struts carved lines of darkness against the sky. Peter raised his weapon, inching closer. She was clutching something in her hand. “Hey,” he said, “I’m talking to you.”

The woman raised her head. Her face filled with the light of the trucks’ headlamps. Peter couldn’t tell what he was seeing. Woman? Girl? Crone? The image of her face seemed to flutter in his mind, forming and reforming like something seen through fast-moving water. He felt a jostle of nausea.

“We know where you are.” Her voice was as ethereal as tissue. “It’s just a matter of time.”

Peter cocked his weapon, aiming at her head. “Answer me.”

Her eyes shone an intense, twinkling blue. As they locked onto his own, Peter realized that what he was seeing was a beautiful woman, maybe the most beautiful of his life. The plump, pillowy lips. The delicately upswept nose. The proportionate arrangement of the facial bones and the glowing skin of her cheeks. To look at her was to be swept into a current of almost unbearable sensuality. His mouth was suddenly dry.

“You’re tired,” she said.

The statement, utterly baffling, jarred him from his stupor. He was what?

“I said,” the woman repeated, “you’re tired.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her face fell with puzzlement; it appeared he had disappointed her. Peter’s eyes fell to the object clutched in her hand. A metal box. With her free hand she withdrew a long, metal rod from its side.

Peter knew what it was.

He leapt toward her as her finger found the switch. A sheen of light and a crack of sound like the slamming of an enormous door: a wall of scalding heat blew him backward, off his feet. The bridge, Peter thought. Whoever she is, this woman has blown the bridge. Peter was on his back, blinking at the sky. Time had briefly slipped its moorings. Something large, on fire, was descending toward him from the heavens in a languid arc.

The burning road tie crashed to the ground a few feet from his head. As Peter rolled away he felt someone’s hands upon him, and suddenly he was on his feet again; Michael was pulling him toward the Humvee.

“Back up!” One arm wrapping Peter’s waist, Michael was yelling into the walkie. “Everybody back up now!”

Lights were blazing at them from all directions. Before Peter could fully process the information, a pickup barreled out of the brush, its great mud-choked tires bounding over the ditch. It swerved to a halt before them, angled sideways. Four figures rose like dark apparitions from the truck’s bed, simultaneously raising long, cylindrical objects to their shoulders.

“Oh, shit,” said Michael.

They flung themselves to the ground as the rockets, in a white burst, jetted from their tubes. Behind them, the sound of gunfire was instantly swallowed by the DS vehicles’ detonation. Flaming debris whizzed over their heads.

“Ceps,” Michael barked into the walkie, “get out of there!”

The figures in the truck had paused to reload. Ceps’s tanker would be next. Peter reached for his sidearm, but it was gone; he’d lost it in the first explosion. From the rear of the convoy came another tremendous bang. The oilers were leaping from their trucks, running, shouting. The attack was coming from both ends of the convoy now. They were trapped between the river and whatever was approaching from the rear, presumably more pickups with RPGs. Their fuel was forfeit, the only thing to do was run. Peter and Michael broke for the first tanker just as Ceps leapt down from the cab, tossing Peter a rifle. He snatched it from the air, swung around, took aim at the pickup, and released a barrage of strafing fire, sending the figures diving for cover. He’d bought them a moment, but that was all. Michael grabbed Lore by the wrist as she emerged from her cab and swung her to the ground. He was shouting, waving toward the rear of the convoy. “Get away from the trucks!”

The apparitional figures rose again. One clean shot at the first tanker and it would all be over. Three thousand gallons per truck, thirty-six thousand gallons in all. The entire convoy would go up, detonating like sticks of dynamite in a line. Peter realized that one of the figures was the cloaked woman. He lifted his rifle again and squeezed the trigger, only to hear the click of an empty chamber.

The woman raised her arms and spread them wide.

At the tail end of the convoy, an altogether different sort of vehicle had appeared. It swooped upon them at high speed, engine roaring, banks of sodium vapor lights blazing from the roof of its cab. A six-wheeled semi-tractor: daisy-chained behind it were two large cargo boxes constructed of galvanized metal buffed to a highly reflective finish. In the weeks to come, this curious aspect—it resembled nothing so much as two mirrored boxes rolling down the highway—would emerge as a matter of significance, a clue in a sequence of clues; but at the moment of the truck’s air-braking descent upon the scene, no one paid that much attention. Some of the fleeing oilers, their panicked brains washed clean of logic, and failing to notice that the smaller vehicles that had taken out the rear guard had conveniently vanished into the undergrowth, even permitted themselves the hope of rescue. They were under attack. The attack, mercilessly discombobulating, had come from nowhere. The containers, in their fortified appearance and shining bulk, resembled portables.

Which they were. Though toting a cargo of an altogether different kind.

One to see this was OFC Juan Sweeting. Despite his off-putting manner and intimidating muscularity, Ceps was a man with the soul of a poet. Alone in his rack at the end of each day, he privately put pen to paper, rendering his deepest thoughts in lines of uncommon sensitivity and verbal music. Despite the trials of his life, he steadfastly believed the world to be a beautiful, God-touched place worthy of human hopefulness; he wrote a great deal about the sea, whose companionship he treasured. Though he had never shown anyone these poems, they formed the heart of his life, like a secret lover. Sometimes, scraping oily gunk from a cooker or hurling a bulk of iron above his head in the weight cages, Ceps was so inflamed by the desire to write a poem that it was all he could do not to abandon his task and race back to his rack to celebrate the magnificence of creation.

The arrival of the gleamingly reflective semitruck coincided with his blossoming suspicion, like Peter’s, that not all was as it appeared. Indeed, nothing about the attack made sense. Why would human beings prey upon one another in this manner? Did they not possess a common foe? Why destroy an energy source that maintained the very existence of their species? The idea taking shape in his mind was the correct one, that their attackers were not in league with their own kind, and as the first of the two shining compartments released its cargo, his suspicions became certainty. But by then it was too late; it had always been too late.

The virals swarmed over the convoy. There were hundreds. But in the moment that followed, Ceps realized that the virals were not, in fact, killing everyone. Some were set upon with merciless, blood-splashing swiftness, but others were snatched bodily, flailing and screaming as the virals seized them around their waists and leapt away.

A far worse fate, to be taken. To be taken up.

He made a quick decision.

The semi had come to a halt less than twenty yards from the last tanker in the line. Ceps had seen a tanker blow before. The destruction was instant and total, a great fiery wallop, but in the preceding tenth of a second something interesting occurred. Seeking the weakest point in the structure, the expanding fuel sent the tanker’s end plates shooting horizontally like corks from a bottle. In essence, an exploding tanker truck was a gun before it was a bomb. Ceps had reached the last tanker now. The silver truck was parked twenty yards straight behind him, well within range. With his massive arms, Ceps unscrewed the cap of the offload port and opened the valve. Gasoline spouted from the pipe in a glistening gush. He stood in this current, soaking his clothes. He filled his hands and splashed his hair. This ravishing world, he thought, his senses filling with the smell of fuel, like bottled fire. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world. Perhaps someone would find his sheaf of poems tucked beneath his mattress and read in its pages the hidden truths of his heart. The words of a poem he loved came back to him. Emily Dickinson: a boy of eight, he had found a book of her poems in the Kerrville Library, in a room nobody ever went to. Because it seemed no one had any use for it, and in a state of anthropomorphic sympathy for its loneliness on the shelf, Ceps had tucked it into his coat and stolen off to an alleyway, where, sitting on an ash can, he’d discovered a voice long gone from the earth, that seemed to strike straight to his most secret self. Now, standing in the path of the gushing port, he closed his eyes to let its words, etched in memory, pass through him one last time:

Beauty crowds me till I die

Beauty, mercy have on me

But if I expire today

Let it be in sight of thee—

He removed his lighter from his pocket and flicked it open to balance his thumb upon its flinted wheel.

A hundred yards away, in the cab of the third tanker, Peter was attempting to put the thing in gear. The knob, its markings long since worn off, told him nothing. Each attempt was met with a grinding sound.

“Move over.”

The door swung open and Lore scrambled in, Michael following. Peter slid across the bench to let him take the wheel.

“Our plan is?” Michael asked.

“We don’t have one.”

Michael glanced into the side-view. His eyes widened. “Now we do.”

He jammed the gearshift into first, swung the wheel all the way to the left, and hit the gas, clipping the second tanker. Instead of reversing, Michael pressed the accelerator again. A screech of metal and suddenly they were free, a fifteen-ton wheeled missile bounding into the undergrowth.

Behind them, the world exploded.

The truck shot forward like a rocket; Peter was thrust back in his seat. The rear of the truck lifted, swerved, then somehow found traction again. The cab was bouncing so fiercely it seemed certain they would shake apart. Michael worked through the gearbox, still accelerating. Brush swept over the windshield; they were flying blind as bats. He turned the wheel left again, guiding them in a long arc across the tangled field, and then with a second toss they were on the highway again, racing east.

Their flight had not escaped attention. In the side-view, Peter saw a bank of pale green light gathering behind them.

“We can’t outrun them in this thing,” Michael said. “The only chance is the hardbox.”

Peter jammed a magazine into his rifle. “What have you got?” he asked Lore, and she showed him a pistol.

“That’s not the only problem,” Michael said. “We’ve lost our brake coupler.”

“Meaning what?”

“I can’t slow down or she’ll jackknife. We’ll have to jump.”

The virals were closing. Peter guessed two hundred yards, maybe less.

“Can you get us up the exit ramp?”

“At this speed, there’s no way I’ll make the turn at the overpass. It’s ninety degrees.”

“How far’s the box from the top of the ramp?”

“A hundred yards straight south.”

There was no way they would make it if they jumped at the base of the ramp. A hundred yards would be cutting it close as it was, and that was assuming they escaped the fall uninjured.

The hardbox marker appeared in Michael’s headlights. Lore climbed over the bench and took a place by the door as Michael downshifted, cutting their speed to thirty, and veered to the right, guiding them up the ramp. They flung the doors wide, filling the cab with swirling wind.

“Here we go.”

As they hit the top of the ramp, Michael and Lore leapt from the cab, Peter just behind them. He hit the ground on his feet, knees flexed to absorb the impact, then rolled end over end on the pavement. The air poured from his chest. He came to a stop just in time to see the taillights of the tanker barreling through the guardrail. For the thinnest instant, the vehicle, all thirty thousand pounds of it, seemed on the verge of taking flight. But then it sank from sight, its disappearance followed by one more titanic explosion on a night of them, a roiling cloud with a white-hot center that blazed like an enormous flare.

From his left, the sound of Lore’s voice: “Peter, help me!”

Michael was unconscious. His hair was slick with blood, his arm twisted in a way that seemed broken. The first virals were at the foot of the ramp now. The light of the burning truck had bought them a moment, but that was all. Peter hoisted Michael over his shoulder. Christ, he thought, his knees buckling under the weight, this would have been easier a few years ago. The hardbox flag stood in dark silhouette against the stars.

They ran.

34

She appeared in the doorway as Lucius was concluding his evening devotions. From her hand dangled a chiming ring of keys. Her plain gray tunic and tranquil demeanor did nothing to communicate the impression of someone in the midst of a jailbreak, though Lucius noted a glaze of perspiration on her face, despite the evening chill.

“Major. It’s good to see you.”

His heart was full of a feeling of events set in motion, circles closing, a destiny unveiled. All his life, it seemed, he had been anticipating this moment.

“Something’s happening, isn’t it?”

Amy nodded evenly. “I believe it is.”

“I’ve prayed on it. I’ve prayed on you.”

Amy nodded. “We will have to move quickly.”

They stepped from the cell and continued down the dark hallway. Sanders was asleep at his desk in the outer room, his face turned sideways over neatly folded arms. The second guard, Coolidge, was snoring on the floor.

“They won’t awaken for a while,” Amy explained, “and when they do, they’ll have no memory of this. You will simply be gone.”

Lucius reached down to withdraw Sanders’s pistol from its holster, then glanced up to see Amy regarding him with a look of caution.

“Just remember,” she warned. “Carter’s one of us.”

Lucius chambered a round and set the safety and tucked the gun into his waistband. “Understood.”

Outside, they walked with measured briskness toward the pedestrian tunnel, keeping to the shadows. At the portal, three domestics were idly standing around a fire burning in an ash can, warming their hands.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Amy.

They melted to their knees, looks of mild surprise stamped on their faces. Lucius and Amy eased their bodies to the ground.

“That’s some trick,” said Lucius. “You’ll have to teach me sometime.”

On the far side of the tunnel, a pair of saddled horses waited. Lucius gave Amy a leg up, then climbed aboard the second horse, taking the reins loosely in his hand.

“One thing I need to ask,” he said. “Why me?”

Amy thought a moment. “Each of us has one, Lucius.”

“And Carter? Who does he have?”

An inscrutable look came into her eyes, as if her thoughts were carrying her far away. “He is different from the rest. He carries his familiar inside him.”

“The woman in the water.”

Amy smiled. “You’ve done your homework, Lucius.”

“Things have a way of coming.”

“Yes, they do. He loved her more than life but could not save her. She is the heart of him.”

“And the dopeys?”

“They are his Many, his viral line. They kill only because they must. It goes hard with them. As he thinks, they think. As he dreams, they dream. They dream of her.”

The horses were tamping the dust. It was just past midnight, a moonless sky the only witness to their departure.

“As I of you,” said Lucius Greer. “As I of you.”

They rode into the darkness.

35

Brothers, brothers.

And away, into the night. Julio Martínez, Tenth of Twelve, his legions discarded, cast to the wind. Julio Martínez, answering the call of Zero.

It is time. The moment of rebuilding has come. You will remake the world again; you will become the true masters of the earth, commanders not only of death but of life. You are the seasons. You are the turning earth. You are the circle within the circle within the circle. You are time itself, my brothers in blood.

In life Martínez had been an attorney, a man of law. He had stood before judges, defended the accused before juries of their peers. Death row cases were his specialty, his professional forté. He had acquired a particular brand of fame. The calls had come from everywhere: Would the great Julio Martínez, Esq., come to the aid of such-and-such? Could he be persuaded to swoop into action? The rock star who had bashed his girlfriend’s brains out with a lamp. The state senator with the dead whore’s blood on his hands. The suburban mother who had drowned her newborn triplets in the tub. Martínez took them all. They were insane or they were not; they pled or they didn’t; they went to the needle, or the tiny cell, or scot-free. The outcome was irrelevant to Julio Martínez, Esq.; it was the drama he loved. To know one was going to die and yet struggle against its inevitability—that was the fascination. Once, as a boy, in the field behind his house, he had come upon a rabbit in a trap, the kind with a spring and teeth. Its iron jaws had clamped onto the animal’s hind legs, flaying flesh to bone. The creature’s small, dark eyes, like beads of oil, were full of death’s wisdom. Life ebbed from it in a series of spasmodic scuffles. The boy Martínez could have watched for hours, and did just that; and when the rabbit failed to perish by nightfall, he carried it to the barn and returned to the house and ate his supper and went to bed in his room of toys and trophies, waiting for morning, when he could watch the rabbit die some more.

It had taken three days. Three glorious days.

Thus, his life and its dark investigations. Martínez had his reasons. He had his rationale. He had his particular method—the rag of spirits, the loyal cord and infinitely pliable duct tape, the dank, unseen compartments of dispatch. He chose low women, those lacking learning or culture, not because he despised them or secretly wanted them but because they were easy to ensnare. They were no match for his beautiful suits and movie-star hair and silken courtroom tongue. They were bodies without name or history or personality, and when the moment of transport approached, they offered no distraction. The timing was all, the orchestrated, simultaneous release. The old choir of sex and death singing.

A certain amount of practice had been required. There had been misfires. There had been, he was forced to admit, a certain amount of accidental comedy. The first one had died well but too soon, the second had kicked up such a ruckus that the whole thing had dissolved into farce, the third had wept so pitiably that he could hardly pay attention. But then: Louise. Louise, with her corny waitress uniform and sensible waitress shoes and unsexily supportive waitress hose. How beautifully she’d left her life! With what exquisite rapture in the taking! She was like a door opening into the great unknowable beyond, a portal into the infinite blackness of unbeing. He had been eradicated, pulverized; the winds of eternity had blown through him, beating him clean. It was everything he’d imagined and then some.

After that, frankly, he couldn’t get enough of it.

As for the highway patrolman, the universe was not without its ironies. It gave and took away. To wit: the Jag with a broken taillight, and Martínez with the woman’s bagged body in the trunk; the cop’s slow saunter toward the car, his hand resting manfully on the butt of his pistol, and the downward glide of the driver’s window; the patrolman’s face pressed close, sneering with bored righteousness, his lips saying the customary words—Sir, could I see …?—and never finishing. In the harried aftermath, Martínez had managed to dispose of the body in the trunk, his nighttime practices thus to remain forever unknown, unconnected to his fate. But a dead policeman by the side of the highway, everything recorded by his dashboard video camera, well. In the end, the only thing to do, as the saying went, was for the great Julio Martínez, Esq., champion of the unchampionable, defender of the loathsomely defenseless, to pour himself a glass of thirty-year-old single-malt and toss it over his tongue while the windows of the house twirled with the lights of justice and come out with his hands dutifully up.

Which, given the way things had worked out, hadn’t turned out to be such an unlucky turn of events, actually.

Martínez couldn’t say he cared much for his fellows. With the exception of Carter, who struck him as purely pitiable—the man didn’t even seem to know what he was or what he’d done; Martínez hadn’t heard so much as a squeak from the man in years—they were nothing more than common criminals, their deeds random and banal. Vehicular homicide. Armed robbery gone bad. Barroom shenanigans with a body on the floor. A century marinating in their own psychological waste had done nothing to improve them. Martínez’s existence was not without its irritating aspects. The never quite being alone. The endless hunger always needing to be filled. The ceaseless talk-talk-talk inside his head, not just his brothers but Zero, too. And Ignacio: there was a piece of work. The man was a litany of self-pitying excuses. I didn’t mean to do half those things. It’s just the way I was built. After a hundred years listening to the man’s whining, Martínez wouldn’t miss him one bit.

There had been something attractively berserk about Babcock, though. You had to hand it to the man for metaphor. Carving out his mother’s larynx with a kitchen knife; in another life, he surely would have been a poet. Over the decades, Martínez had mentally sat in that foul kitchen about a million times, and it was true: the woman would not shut up. There was a kind of person in this world who needed you to paint a picture, and Babcock’s mother was that kind.

And then one day Babcock was simply gone, his signal silenced, like a television station suddenly off the air. The corner of Martínez’s mind where Babcock stood, endlessly gouging out the gristly nubbin of his mother’s voice box, was empty. All of them knew what had happened; their collective, blood-borne existence ordained it. One of their brothers had fallen.

God bless and keep you, Giles Babcock. May you find in death the peace that eluded you in life, and what came after.

And so from Twelve, Eleven. A loss, a chink in the armor, but ultimately a matter of lesser concern in the vital period to come. It had been a good century, on the whole, for Julio Martínez. He recalled the early days with poignant fondness. The days of blood and mayhem and the great unleashing of his kind upon the earth. To kill was one thing, one glorious thing; to take was another. A banquet richer still in its satisfactions. From each one Martínez had taken a flavorful bite of soul, drawing them into the fold, expanding his dominion. His Many were not merely part of him, an extension of him; they were him. As he, Julio Martínez, was one of Twelve and the Zero also, concomitant and coextensive, united with one another and with the darkness in which they permanently dwelled.

Brothers, brothers, it is time. Brothers, brothers, the hour is at hand.

For it was inevitable; they had built a race of pure rapaciousness. Their Many, created to protect them, had devoured the earth like locusts, leaving nothing in their wake. Feast had yielded to famine, summer’s bounty to winter’s scarcity; they would need a home, a zone of protection, of rest. To dream their dreams. To dream of Louise.

My brothers, your new home is waiting. They will bow before you; you will live as kings.

Martínez liked the sound of that.

He discarded them without ceremony. His Many, millions-fold. He called them together from all the hidden places and said to them: Die. Dawn was reaching its red-fingered hand over the horizon. They pointed their faces blindly toward it. They showed no hesitation; all that he commanded, so did they. The sun was moving toward them like a blade of light over the earth. Lie down, my sons and daughters; lie down in the sun and die.

There followed a certain amount of screaming.

Night by night he made his way east, across the exhausted land. His instincts were acute. The world rippled with sensuousness, caressing him with its sounds and smells. The grass. The wind. The subtlest movements of trees. He lingered, tasting all. He had been away too long. He called to his fellows, their voices threading with darkness as they made their way from every corner to the place of their renewal.

—We are Morrison-Chávez-Baffes-Turrell-Winston-Sosa-Echols-Lambright-Martínez-Reinhardt-Carter. Eleven of Twelve, one brother lost.

And Zero replied in kind:

Oh, my brothers, my pain is as great as your own. But you will be Twelve again. For I have made another, one to watch and keep you in your place of rest.

—Who? they asked, each as one and then together. —Who is the other you have made?

And Zero spoke from out of the darkness:

Our sister.