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“Damn,” Caine breathed. “That is one tough monster Diana and I made.”

The rest of the missiles were off to the side of the road in their crates. He kind of didn’t think he’d get a chance to reload.

Edilio was there, unpacking a second missile, but nope, Caine thought, Edilio isn’t going to get the shot, either.

Gaia saw him.

“You,” she said.

“Yeah, me,” Caine said, disappointed. “Well, I thought it was worth a try. Better than my backup plan.”

“Your backup plan?” Gaia asked.

Caine nodded. And for a moment he hesitated, seeing Diana in his mind.

Diana.

A good final thought, that.

“Now, Little Pete,” Caine said. “Right now.”

Little Pete was ready, but he was still worried. Living inside a body had not been good for him. His brain had been his enemy all his life. And the only peace he had ever known was in this fading twilight unreality he had shared with the Darkness that called itself the gaiaphage.

But the gaiaphage had attacked him. The gaiaphage had hurt him, even while crooning softly to Pete to just fade away.

Little Pete didn’t remember much that his parents and sister had taught him back before. But he remembered that it is not okay to hit.

It is definitely not okay to hit.

Then he had seen the ghostly shapes of all the people starting to flicker and disappear. All those game pieces, all those avatars, just disappearing, and they were being destroyed by the Darkness, weren’t they?

The gaiaphage wasn’t just hitting Little Pete.

Which was wrong.

It was hitting other people, too.

He had tried to fight back using Taylor, but he’d been too weak to make her whole, and too weak to stop the slaughter.

And then he’d heard his sister calling to him.
Little Pete, take me and fight it
.

But he didn’t really trust her very much.

Other voices had drifted to him, calling him through the emptiness, even as the Darkness tried to tell him no, no, Nemesis, just fade, fade into nothingness and be happy.

A girl he didn’t know had called to him.
Take me. I deserve to die
.

But then had come the voice that said,
Come on, you little freak, wherever the hell you are, whatever the hell you are, let’s get this done with
.

Pete had seen the scars on him, the fresh marks of the gaiaphage.

You and me. Blaze of glory, Little Pete. Blaze of glory
.

Pete didn’t know what a blaze of glory was, but it sounded good.

Now, Little Pete. Right now
.

The Darkness was wrong. It was not time for Peter Ellison to fade away. It was time to hit back.

Caine had not wanted to feel it happening. He’d wanted it just to be over quick. Bam, over. But he did feel it.

He felt like maybe he’d stepped into a hot shower and was having that lovely sense of relaxation as the water warms the back of your neck, and you close your eyes, and you sigh away the night’s bad dreams.

It was warm: that was the surprise. It was warm and it made him sigh. It was like . . . well, not exactly like anything he’d felt, but maybe closest to the way he’d felt after he made love to Diana, and lay beside her, and smelled her, and felt her breath on his cheek, and she would put a hand on his cheek and . . .

You’re giving me a good memory to go out on, aren’t you, Pete?

Well, good choice, Caine thought.

Huh. I can’t feel my body, Caine thought.

Huh.

I . . .

Diana was wet and cold. She had finally jumped into the water and swum to the dock and pulled her battered self out of the water.

She had run as well as she could through smoke, through the streets toward the sounds of panic and death. She’d run into Sam. He was in the plaza calling for Astrid.

“Astrid! Astrid!”

He spotted Diana.

“Have you seen her? Have you seen Astrid?”

“No, Sam. Have you seen—”

They had heard the swoosh of the missile. And they had listened hopefully for the explosion.

For a second’s time they had held on to hope. And then had come the sound of screams.

Sam looked half dead, but he took her hand, and she took his, and they ran toward the sound. Whether he was her protector or she was his, it didn’t really matter. They were two scared kids, running the wrong way, running toward the sound of death, while fire chased them through the streets.

Gaia still stood. She still lived.

A million years in the blackness of space.

Fourteen years in a hole in the ground, growing, mutating, becoming the gaiaphage.

Not dead yet. The body it inhabited was beyond agony, but the gaiaphage lived, and it could still kill.

And there before her was Caine, somehow smiling. Not a cynical smirk: a genuine, happy smile.

And there, rushing up the road, Diana yelling, “No, Caine. No!”

Even Sam, still alive, excellent: her powers would be undiminished.

“Hello, Darkness,” Caine said.

Gaia’s face fell. Her bloody, feral grin faded to be replaced by lips drawn tight in fear. Her killer blue eyes widened as she looked at Caine who was no longer Caine.

“Nemesis,” Gaia said.

A MILLION
YEARS
ago, and a bit more, a lifeless moon had been infected with a carefully structured virus. That moon had then been exploded, sending out countless fragments, seedlings, like the seeds of a dandelion, blowing across the billions of miles of space.

It was to bring life where no life existed. It was an optimistic gesture. But in one place, that hopeful experiment went terribly wrong. One seedling hit a nuclear pile on the planet Earth, and dragged shattered bits of human DNA into the crater.

Slowly the virus and the chromosomes and the radiation cooked up a monster. The virus spread, but instead of creating life it began to infect the very fabric of reality. It spawned mutations. It created its own unhinged version of evolution.

Some living things were affected, and others were spared.

One was especially vulnerable: a strange little boy whose own brain made him a prisoner, whose own mind made life painful and terrifying. Unbearable.

It would be a while before the gaiaphage began to suspect that it had unwittingly created its own nemesis. When the warping of physical laws sent the nuclear plant spiraling into a meltdown, that little boy, overwhelmed by sensory input he could not understand, sirens blaring and screens flashing warnings, created the barrier. In a flash of inconceivable power Peter Ellison simply removed all the noisy, troublesome grown-ups, silenced all that overload, and protected himself as best he could.

The gaiaphage’s malignant effect was contained. The world had found its defense against alien infection. The antibody was a then-four-year-old boy with powers made possible by the gaiaphage virus.

Nature had found the way to defend itself.

And now, at last, gaiaphage and Nemesis stood facing each other.

“Why didn’t you just . . . fade?” Gaia demanded plaintively.

“You hit me,” Nemesis said. It was a little boy’s voice coming from Caine’s mouth. “And that’s not okay.”

Sam let go of Diana’s hand, seeing Astrid ahead. He saw her blond hair from the back and almost wept with relief. But then he saw that she had been hurt.

“Astrid!” he cried.

But she held up her hand, silencing him. He looked past her then and saw Caine and Gaia, no more than a hundred feet apart.

Diana stepped closer.

“Diana, move back.” Edilio, trying to get her to a safe distance.

Diana shook her head. “I don’t think so, Edilio. He wanted a blaze of glory. He deserves an audience.”

Gaia raised her hands, fury and fear on her blood-red face. Blistering green light blazed from them.

At the same moment, Nemesis returned fire, but his light came from every direction at once. It was a white light that shifted into blue and purple and red. It came down as lightning from the sky, a thousand thunderstorms.

The entire FAYZ burned as bright as a star.

Gaia’s light hit Nemesis as she herself absorbed the awesome fire.

The girl and the boy burned bright and yet still fired.

And burned and still fired.

Their hair and clothing were gone.

Their flesh crisped.

Their eyes boiled out of their skulls.

And still the terrible light.

Their legs melted beneath them like candles. Holes appeared in their torsos. And only when they fell, each into a heap of glowing ash, did the light die.

“Well,” Diana said, with tears running down her cheeks. “That was a blaze of glory.”

There was a moment, a frozen, eternal moment, when no one breathed, and no one spoke.

Then: a sudden rush of wind. Wind! There had been no wind since—

“RUN!”
Sam cried. “The fire! Run!”

Wind blew in like the leading edge of a hurricane, rushed into the disturbance created by the sudden disappearance of the barrier. The wind fed the flames, set small fires roaring to new heights, turned bigger fires into pillars of flame that shot high into the sky.

The population of the FAYZ, choked, terrorized, and battered, rushed in a wild panic down the highway. It was a stampede, and Sam was nearly swept along. But he held on to Astrid, held on to her and looked at her face and saw the bruises.

“Who?” he demanded.

“Sam, it doesn’t matter; it’s over,” Astrid shouted to be heard above the roar of wind and fire.

“Who?” he demanded again.

“Drake. He wasn’t dead. He may still not be dead. But Sam, there are police now, and—”

But Sam had broken free. He walked into the swirling smoke.

Astrid could barely breathe, but she would not let him walk away. Not when the end was this close. It was Edilio who left her no choice. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her bodily down the highway until she stopped struggling.

“He told me to take care of you,” Edilio said.

Those were the last words they could speak, as the smoke thickened, choking them, blinding them. They staggered on together, seeing nothing but glimpses of people rushing by, just following the ribbon of concrete beneath their feet.

Then the smoke lessened. The wind was blowing itself out, and a countervailing breeze now flowed from the south.

And then, there they were, Astrid and Edilio, standing at the edge, at the very end of the FAYZ wall.

And then through.

Out.

One hundred and seventy-one people—babies in arms, toddlers, kids—ran and stumbled into the arms of waiting parents. They ran to be scooped up by waiting paramedics.

Some kids ran, ran down the road, down the highway, screaming past the TV trucks, past the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, pushing and shoving through the well-meaning and the ill-intentioned alike because there was no safe distance for them, not until they could no longer hear or see any part of the place.

SAM FELT
THE
heaviness in his lungs lessen. His eyes were still on fire, but he was able to open them.

He didn’t know where to look, only the person he was looking for.

“Drake!” he yelled. “Come out and fight me, Drake!”

The person who appeared was not Drake. Lana and Patrick stepped out of the smoke.

“The barrier is down,” Sam said. “Fire’s coming fast. Have you seen Drake?”

“Last I heard he was dead. But in this place . . .” She shook her head and looked somewhere between amused and resigned. “Sam, if the barrier’s down, you don’t have to do this.”

“He hurt Astrid,” Sam said. “She’s alive. But he took her. He hurt her.”

“And here you are the tragic hero, after all,” Lana said dryly. She was unusually droll for Lana. The world was ending and she was being witty. “You may find you need this. And you know what? I think I’m done with it.”

She slipped something heavy into the waist of his jeans, and then walked away with her dog.

Sam felt the butt of Lana’s automatic pistol. Was it true? True that he didn’t have to do this? True that he needed the gun?

“Drake!” he yelled.

He heard the town burning. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The heat was intense, right on the line between barely tolerable and not. It was like standing too close to a fireplace, feeling it dry your skin, and knowing that another five degrees and you’d no longer be dry: you’d be burned. There were sparks everywhere in the air. The whole town would burn.

“Drake!”

The whip slashed his back, a pain like being branded by a hot iron.

He spun, and Drake’s fist smashed him in the face.

Sam went down on one knee, aimed his hands, and fired.

Nothing happened.

Drake seemed as shocked as Sam. He made a single, sudden laugh. “Not so dangerous now, are you, Sam?”

Drake struck again, and the whip burned across Sam’s shoulders. Sam lurched forward.

“I had fun with your girlfriend, Sam,” Drake said.

Sam tried again. But the light did not come. He was powerless. He drew the pistol.

“Come on, you know better than that, Sam, Sam, the hero man. You know bullets don’t kill me.”

“Gaia’s dead. The FAYZ is ended,” Sam said, and leveled the pistol at Drake’s face. “So I don’t know what will work and what won’t. Why don’t we find out?”

But a line had appeared around Drake’s neck. It was blood red, like a gruesome smile. Like the mark a hanged man might bear. It was widening, a gap forming between what had been Drake’s neck and Alex’s neck.

Drake hadn’t noticed yet. He grinned and slashed Sam hard, landing the whip’s blow again across his shoulder, curling around to tear at his back.

But when he retracted his whip arm, it was shorter. A foot-long segment had broken off. It lay like some nightmare worm on the sidewalk.

“No,” Drake said, but the sound of his voice was weakened by air sucking in through his neck.

Drake tried to strike again, to bring Sam down, but his whip arm was limp; it barely moved. It was curling from the end, seeming to crisp like parchment held too close to the fire.