Nine.

The second one had time to yell, however, before Gaia knocked her head cleanly off her shoulders and set it flying to land between cabbages.

Eight.

The shout, cut short, alerted the rest of the workers, who spun and died, died, died as she easily killed three with blasts of green light.

Seven. Six. Five.

BLAM! BLAM!

One of them had a weapon. He fired fast and panicky. Gaia swept her beam and cut him in two.

Four.

No, there was a second gun. Too late!

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Gaia spun around, not so much knocked by the impact as by the spasm of pain. She fell on her back.

“Get her! Get her! Get her!”

BLAM! BLAM!

“I’m out of bullets!”

Gaia tried to sit up, but something inside her was badly damaged, and the pain was extraordinary.

In one ear Social Distortion sang “Story of My Life.” It was a song both upbeat and melancholy.

A girl with a knife rose up beside her. Gaia threw an invisible punch that sent the knife wielder flying.

Sudden noise behind her, feet on soft dirt: Gaia twisted to see and was hit in the chest with a spiked baseball bat.

She grabbed the bat with lightning reflexes, held it, and with her other hand burned a hole through her assailant.

Three.

Gaia pushed herself up and shook her head. She was woozy. Her head was pounding; her eyes didn’t want to focus; her chest hurt. Blood was leaking from her in too many ways.

Unable to see clearly, she swept a beam of light three hundred sixty degrees. Again. Again. A scream cut short.

Two.

She had to prioritize. What should she heal first? What was killing her?

She lifted her new shirt and saw that the nail wound in her chest was small compared to the bullet hole. And worse still, far worse, was the exploded exit wound where the bullet had come out of her side. She pressed her hand on that and focused.

She blinked tears from her eyes and saw two people running away, already back at the highway, racing toward Perdido Beach. She aimed a beam after them, but there was no aiming now: they were fuzzy in the distance, and she hit nothing.

Killing everyone in the FAYZ was proving more difficult than she’d expected.

Staying alive was proving more difficult.

Why did everything have to be difficult? It was unfair. It was wrong. She was the gaiaphage, and what were they? Weak things made of meat and blood and bone.

Like you, Darkness, just like you.

Gaia gasped. The voice was in her head. His voice. Nemesis. He was seeing. He was learning from her mistake in taking on a body.

That’s right, Nemesis. See how weak a body makes you?

That would confuse him, she hoped. That would delay him. But at any moment Nemesis could make his move, and things would go from difficult to very hard indeed. She didn’t have time to lie here and recover. And Sam and Caine . . .

It began to occur to her then that the outside world might also be difficult to conquer, especially if they were ready for her. Stealth would be demanded. She must escape from this place without the humans outside realizing who and what she was. Once outside she would gain in power. She was, after all, a sort of virus that would propagate. She would attract followers. She would take control of other humans. She would . . .

Conquer.

Gaia, the gaiaphage-made-flesh, lay on her back and stared up at the blue sky.

“Story of My Life” was just ending.

Somewhere, way out there, past the thin shell of atmosphere, past this tiny solar system, somewhere out there in the unimaginable distances of the galaxy, was the place where the gaiaphage had first been conceived.

All that way, all that time, millions of years, to arrive here. To feel blood leaking from a human body into the dirt beneath her.

It could not end like this. The gaiaphage was destined for more, meant to transform. Its mere existence had begun to alter the laws of physics that ruled this planet.

Today the FAYZ, tomorrow the planet.

But right now she . . . it—whatever—was very tired.

“You’re back,” Astrid said to Albert. “I heard you were.”

“Yes. And we’re getting a trickle of food in from the fields already. Some teams have come back in, but I’ve pushed some others back out.”

Astrid nodded. “Probably a good thing.”

“Just probably?” Albert demanded.

“Gaia will come after us. It could be in a day; it could be in ten seconds. Having some of the people in different locations might make it harder for her to kill us all.”

She had called a hasty meeting in what had once been the mayor’s office. It struck her that if the barrier really came down there would once again be a real mayor in Perdido Beach. A week from now, or a month, or whenever, some responsible adult would be sitting here deciding important issues of trash collection and water and curfews and assorted other things that would not be life and death.

Albert was there; so were Edilio, Dekka, Quinn, and Diana. She’d have liked to have Jack there as well: he was not especially useful, but he was smart. Lana, too, might have been helpful, but she was busy, to put it mildly.

More, much more, Astrid wished Sam was there. Even Caine would have been welcome. They were facing what was probably the final battle, and she had no soldiers except Dekka and Orc. Dekka was strong and brave, as was Orc, but they were nothing to Gaia.

Astrid had begun to believe that the time had come to plan for after. And now she was afraid there would be no after. The barrier would come down, and the only person walking out into the world would be Gaia.