has always bothered me, because everything else about them is so organized.”
“I’m not sure I’m following,” Tifty said. “Are you saying they’re dying out?”
“Obviously something’s happening. The fact that it’s occurring all at once implies that it’s a natural process, built into the system. Here’s another analogy. When the human body goes into shock, it draws blood away from the periphery and redirects it to the major organs. It’s a defense mechanism. Protect what’s important, forget the rest. Now imagine that each of the viral tribes is one animal, and that it’s going into shock from starvation. The logical thing would be to radically reduce the numbers and let the food supply come back.”
“And then what?” Peter asked.
“Then you start the cycle over.”
For a moment, nobody spoke.
“Anyway,” Michael continued, “it’s just an idea I had. I could be full of shit.”
Peter knew different. “So why is it happening here?”
“That,” said Michael, “is what worries me.”
The time for leaving was at hand; they’d stayed too long as it was. They gathered their gear and zipped up their parkas, bracing themselves for the blast of frigid air that would assail them the second they stepped through the door.
“Six days if the weather holds,” said Tifty, hitching up his pack. “Seven at the most.”
“Why do I wish it were more?” said Lore.
Grey. Grey.
His eyes popped open.
Can you feel them, Grey?
“Who’s there? Guilder, is that you?”
I’m sorry I have been away. You are still my favorite, Grey. Since the very first day we met. Do you remember?
His stomach clenched: the voice of Zero.
“Stop it.” His wrists yanked reflexively at the chains. He was lying in his own filth, his body stank, his mouth tasted permanently of blood. “Go away. Leave me alone.”
You told me everything about yourself. You didn’t even know you were doing it. Did you feel me in your mind even then?
—Get out, he thought. Get out get out get out. Wake up, Grey.
Oh, you’re not sleeping. I’ve always been here. Even as you have lain in chains a hundred years, I have lain with you. Like the story of Job, who lay in the ashes, cursing his fate. God tested him, as I have tested you.
—I don’t know you. I don’t know what you are.
You don’t, Grey? How can you not know? I am the God who abides with you. The one true God of Grey. Can you not feel my love? Can you not feel my wings of love spreading over you, forever and ever?
He had begun to weep.
—Let me die. Please. All I want to do is die.
You love her, don’t you, Grey?
He swallowed, tasting the foulness of his mouth. His body was a cave of filth and rottenness.
—Yes.
The woman. Lila. She means everything to you.
—Yes.
Yours is the blood that flows in her veins, as mine flows in yours. Do you see? Do you understand? We are all of a piece, Grey. You lie in chains, but you are not alone. The God of Grey abides with you. The God of all that is, and all that is to come. The God of the next new world. There will be a special place for you in that world, Grey.
—The next new world.
They are coming, Grey.
—Who? Who is coming?
But even as he asked the question, he knew.
Our brothers.
57
And suddenly, she was free. Alicia Donadio, Last of the First, the New Thing and captain of the Expeditionary, was bounding over the wires, into the night, away.
She ran. She ran and kept on running.
She’d killed a few men along the way. Some women, too. Alicia had never killed a human woman before; it seemed not so very different, on the whole. Because in the end, everybody left their life in the same manner. The same surprise upon their faces, their fingers touching the wound with exploratory tenderness, the identical ethereal gaze, aimed into eternity. There was a certain grace to it.
Maybe that’s why Alicia liked it as much as she did.
She found her gear where she’d left it hidden in the brush. A pike and cross. The RDF. Her bandoliers of blades. A change of clothes, a blanket, shoes. A hundred rounds of ammo but no gun to fire it. She’d left Sod’s knife behind, embedded in the left kidney of a man who had commanded her to stop, as if she might actually do this. Racing from the detention center, she hadn’t even known if it would be day or night. Time had been annihilated. The world she found was a