Light (Gone 6)

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.