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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE

77 HOURS, 37 MINUTES

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

She was a very hungry girl. A growing monster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaia hesitated, stared at Diana, then blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lovely,” Diana said through gritted teeth.

“Food?” Gaia prompted.

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

Gaia looked. “I see nothing.”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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