Astrid had laid out a large chef’s knife, a meat cleaver—borrowed from a seven-year-old who carried it for protection—and an X-Acto knife with a less-than-perfect blade.

“It’s beyond creepy,” Sam said.

“You don’t have to be here, Sam,” she said.

“No, I love watching autopsies of disgusting mutant monsters,” Sam said. He felt like throwing up and she hadn’t even started.

Solution. Solution. Solution.

Astrid was wearing pink Playtex gloves. She rolled the creature onto its back. “You can see the line where the human face stops and the fur starts. There’s no human hair, just coyote. And look at the legs. There’s no blurring. It’s a clean line. But the bones inside? Those are coyote bones. It’s articulated like a coyote leg covered with human skin and probably muscle, too.”

Sam had run out of useful things to say or energy to say them. He was fighting the surge of bile into his throat, hoping not to puke. A sudden gust of wind bringing the smell of the Pit did not help. Plus the creature itself smelled. Like wet dog and urine and sticky-sweet decay.

And throughout it all: solution. Where was the solution? Where was the answer?

Astrid took the cleaver and slammed it into the creature’s exposed belly. It made a six-inch cut. There was no bleeding; dead things didn’t bleed.

Sam braced himself to burn anything that suddenly emerged, Alien-like, from the cut. But nothing popped or squirmed out. He had terrible memories of what he’d had to do with Dekka. He’d burned her open to get the bugs out of her. It had been the most gruesome thing he’d ever done. And now as Astrid used the big knife to saw away and widen the cut, it was all coming back.

Astrid turned away from the smell to compose herself. She pulled out a rag and tied it over her mouth and nose. Like that would help. She looked like a very pretty bandit.

Incredibly a second line of thinking was forcing its way into his consciousness. He wanted her. Not here, not now, but soon. Soon. The endless, hopeless brain merry-go-round that sang the solution song sang a much nicer tune, too. Why couldn’t he just crawl into his bunk with Astrid and let someone else break his soul searching for a nonexistent solution?

Astrid now cut vertically, opening the animal up along its length. “Look at this.”

“Do I have to?”

“You can see organs attached to each other that just don’t fit. It’s bizarre. The stomach is the wrong size for the large intestine. It’s like a really bad plumber tried to attach different-size pipes together. I can’t believe this thing lived as long as it did.”

“So it’s a mutant?” Sam asked, anxious to reach some kind of conclusion and then bury the carcass and do his best to forget about it and get back to the twin thought streams of “solution” and “sex.”

Astrid didn’t answer. Her silent staring went on and on. At last she said, “Every mutant so far has been survivable. You shoot light out of your hands and never get burned. Brianna runs at a hundred miles an hour but her knees don’t break. The mutations haven’t harmed anyone yet. In fact, the mutations have been survival tools, really. Like the goal was to build a stronger, more capable human being. No. No, this is something different.”

“Okay. What?”

She shrugged, pulled off her gloves, and tossed them onto the open wound. “This is bits of human—probably the missing girl—and coyote. Mix and match. Like someone just randomly took parts from one and swapped them for parts from the other.”

“Why would—” Sam began.

But Astrid was still talking, to herself more than to him. “Like someone tossed two different DNAs into a hat and drew out this and that and tried to fit them together. It’s … it’s stupid, really.”

“Stupid?”

“Yeah. Stupid.” She looked at him as if she was surprised to be talking to him now. “I mean, it’s something that makes no sense. It serves no purpose. It’s obvious it wouldn’t work. Only an idiot would think you could just randomly plug pieces of human into a coyote.”

“Wait a minute. You’re acting like this is someone doing it. A person. How do you know it isn’t just something natural?” He thought about that for a moment, sighed, and added, “Or at least what passes for natural in the FAYZ.”

Astrid shrugged. “What’s happened so far? Coyotes evolved limited powers of speech. Worms developed teeth and became aggressive and territorial. Snakes grew wings and developed a new form of metamorphosis. Some of us developed powers. So far there’s been a lot of strange, but not a lot of stupid. This, though, this”—she aimed her finger at the carcass of the monstrosity—“is just stupid.”

“The gaiaphage?” Sam asked, feeling in his gut it was the wrong answer.

Astrid held his gaze for a moment but her brain was somewhere else. “Not stupid,” she said.

“You just said it was—”

“I was wrong. It’s not about stupid. It’s ignorant. Clueless.”

“Is there—” He wasn’t surprised when she interrupted him as if he hadn’t even been talking.

“Unbelievable power,” Astrid said. “And absolute ignorance.”

“What does that mean?” Sam asked.

Astrid wasn’t listening. She was slowly turning her head, eyes aimed all the way to the right, as if she thought someone was sneaking up on her.