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.

THIRTY-ONE

11 MINUTES

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.