But as he lay beside Diana in the big bed, the same one where they had conceived Gaia, he knew he had, finally, no alternative. He was trapped between pains: the pain that Gaia could bring, and the pain that would come if he lost Diana.
Why had she forced him to admit his feelings? Women. Didn’t they know that emotions were meant to be suppressed?
“Love sucks,” Caine muttered.
Diana nuzzled against him, her lips on his neck, sending chills all through his body.
A line of night-blue between separated curtains became a line of gray. Dawn, and time to go.
He slid carefully, silently, out of the bed. Where were his clothes? He’d left them right here, right on the floor, knowing he would have to dress silently to escape undiscovered.
“I hid them,” Diana said.
He turned to face her. “And why would you do that?”
“So you couldn’t sneak away. Really, Caine: how long have I known you? Also . . .”
“Uh-huh?”
“Also I like you like this.”
He swallowed hard, feeling strangely vulnerable and a little silly. “You said we couldn’t . . .”
“Mmmm. True. But I still like looking at you. It’s a good thing you’re so rotten,” she said with a long sigh. “Scares off most girls. I never would have had a chance with you if you’d been a decent human being.”
“I wasn’t running away,” he said.
“I know. I know what you were doing, Caine. And thanks for the thought. But I want to be there to see the end. I want to see you stop her.”
“Yeah,” he said, straining to put some slight shred of optimism into the word. “If you’re coming, then we have to go.”
“Or the reverse of that . . . We have a few minutes,” she said. “Come here. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
Connie Temple had given up waiting for Astrid to arrive at the rendezvous Dahra had arranged. She had spent the night at a motel, then come back in the morning, just in case. She wrote a note and stuck it on the end of a stick where the northeastern shoreline of the lake met the barrier. The note said, Sorry I missed you. Connie Temple. There was a PS. Just the single word “Sam,” followed by a question mark.
It seemed somehow ludicrous. Like putting a Post-it on the refrigerator door for Sam, back in the old days.
As she was leaving, she noticed a body on the beach that she had not seen before. Maybe someone sleeping, maybe some survivor, most likely a body washed ashore. She watched until she was sure it was not Sam.
Boats were heading out from the outside marina, more lookers drawn by rumors of a slaughter at the lake. She couldn’t bear to think of mothers like herself possibly seeing the bloated body of a child floating just inches away, unreachable. A TV truck had come in the night. She saw cameras with long-distance lenses.
She climbed into the borrowed SUV and drove back down south. She tuned the satellite radio to a news station.
“The fire is clearly now spreading beyond the Stefano Rey. California fire officials are rushing firefighting teams to the perimeter of the anomaly. They are concerned that should the containment fail, the fire would spread immediately to the large forest outside the so-called FAYZ.”
Connie switched stations.
“. . . monstrous and evil children, and the idea that they should be allowed to walk out of that satanic place and infect decent God-fearing people with—”
On the third try she got a calmer voice. NPR. But the subject was still the same. The anomaly. The FAYZ. It was all anyone was paying attention to.
“. . . physics. As has been long theorized, especially by Dr. Jacobs at the University of California, Berkeley, these phenomena demonstrate that in some way we do not begin yet to understand, the laws that define our universe have been altered. What’s troubling, of course, is that if it can happen once, it can happen again. We can never again be entirely confident—”
Enough. She’d had her fill of clever people with impressive degrees trying to explain what was happening. People like that had convinced the government to try and implode the sphere with a bomb.
Finally she found the nineties-rock station and let that play the rest of the way while she tried to think. She was sleepy and nearly running off the road, so it wasn’t easy.
If the dome fell, if Sam and Caine walked freely out into the world, there was a better-than-even chance that they would be arrested shortly thereafter.