Diana shrugged. “It has to do with the shape of your eyeball, I think. Bodies are like that: all kinds of imperfections. Also, you’re growing at an amazing, unnatural rate. So who knows what’s going on with your body?”

It occurred to Diana to wonder whether Gaia could control the aging process. She had assumed that the gaiaphage caused it, but was it just some bizarre effect of the FAYZ?

And she was still trying to figure out what Gaia knew and did not know. Gaia—the gaiaphage—had spent her life, if you could call it that, in a mine shaft. She could use language, but it always seemed forced. She knew many things, but there were also lots of holes in her knowledge. She was like a foreigner just coming to grips with a new society.

Diana’s best theory—and she had not asked Gaia—was that Gaia knew what she had picked up from minds she had controlled or at least touched at different times. Minds like Diana’s. Like Lana’s. Like Caine’s, too, once upon a time.

She flashed back to the time after Caine had come crawling away from the gaiaphage. He’d been raving, paranoid, sick almost to death. She had nursed him through it. Was that why, despite everything, he had never betrayed her?

Gratitude? Caine?

“You’ll need bigger clothing soon,” Diana said. “At this rate you’ll be healed and less, sorry, gross, soon. And you’ll be . . . developing.”

“Developing?” Gaia seemed unsure whether this was an opportunity or a threat.

“Never mind; I am so not ready for that conversation,” Diana said. “Anyway, there’s food on one of those islands out there.”

“How do we get to this island?”

“Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” Diana said.

“On what?”

“On what you can do, Gaia. On what powers you have. I saw you attack your fa—Caine. You moved him with your mind. Is that all you have? Telekinesis? What Caine has?”

“I have access to all powers, Diana. The speed, the ability to move things with my mind, strength. I can switch gravity on and off. I have the killing light. I can heal.”

“Then you can bounce like Taylor. You could teleport yourself to the island, get us both some food, and be back in a flash.”

Gaia looked curious. “I don’t know Taylor.”

Diana frowned. “Don’t you?” Interesting, she thought. “She’s got the power to teleport. She thinks, and then, click, she’s there.”

Something that might almost have been embarrassment made a fleeting appearance on Gaia’s face. She didn’t like revealing her limits.

Maybe I can use that.

Use it for what? Are you her mother or her enemy?

All of the above?

Gaia closed her eyes and stood very still. Her expression was focused, questing for something, almost like she was praying. Finally she said, “That one, the one you called Taylor, she no longer exists as what she was. I cannot . . . reach . . . her power.”

It took Diana a few seconds to figure out what she was hearing. Then it dawned. “You don’t really have many powers of your own; you can only use theirs, the moofs’, the mutants’. So you can’t do what Penny could do, because she’s dead. And Taylor?”

“The mutations that enable powers are physical, but the power exists beyond their bodies as well. I can reach into that space and use those powers.” She spoke with acid condescension, like she was talking to a child, which was particularly strange coming from what looked like a child. “You wouldn’t understand.”

But Diana’s breath caught, because she did understand one thing. “That’s why you didn’t let Drake kill Caine. It’s why we ran away. You can’t start by killing Caine or Sam or Brianna; if you do, you lose their powers.”

Gaia looked smug. “All things are connected to me, stupid . . . Diana. My father’s power exists because he mutated and formed a field with me. When he dies, one end of that field will fail. The power that stretches between us will fail. Eventually, though, I will cause others to mutate. It’s my . . . my nature. It’s what I am. What I may lose today, I can gain back later. Over time.”

Diana wondered if she dared to risk a question. They started walking along again, almost like friends, if you could get past the fact that they were a fifteen-year-old half broken in body and spirit and a pretty child filled with the mind and will of a terrible monster.

Kind of a lot to get past there.

Gaia could kill her at any time. Gaia could torture her at any time. Gaia had done the second but not the first. Why? Did she feel something for Diana? Or was Diana useful? If so, for what? Certainly not for her own power, which was simply the ability to gauge others’.

“How do you know all this?” Diana asked, trying to make it sound admiring. In her mind she suddenly had an image of Astrid. Astrid would be furiously jealous if Diana understood the great mystery of the gaiaphage before she did.

“I was created knowing some things. And I have learned other things in the course of my life. I use this body, but this is not me,” Gaia said. Her voice was still a child’s voice. “I am greater than any form I may take.”

The tiny part of Diana that still fantasized about this beautiful girl being her actual daughter noted that Gaia had a healthy ego. That was the kind of thing a parent should notice, wasn’t it? She should beam with pride and say something like, Yes, Gaia is quite self-assured.

Gaia is advanced for her age.