"You've lost your mind. If you think we're gonna-" Rich began before Old-timer stepped in.

"No, he's right."

"You have to be kidding me!" Rich replied, after sharing the shock with Djanet in exchanged expressions of dismay.

"They saved James. They saved us too. We owe them. It's time to earn our keep."

"Oh, man," Rich sighed as he turned away, kicking the dust up from the concrete floor on his way back to his cot.

"Okay. I'm ready," Old-timer announced to the lieutenant before exiting with Alejandra.

Old-timer took a moment to survey the sludgy moonscape in the wake of the end of civilization. He turned his head 180 degrees to absorb the miserable panorama. The colossal cloud of black destruction still hung heavily like a rotting body over the region and gave no sign of abating. The sun bled orange somewhere behind the black curtain, but its rays couldn't penetrate. "What is our objective?" Old-timer asked Alejandra.

"We're here to report if we see anything-anything at all."

"That sounds like it might be a little boring."

"It wasn't last night," Alejandra replied with a slight smile. She hoisted her rifle over her shoulder and set out to climb a nearby hill.

Old-timer trudged over the unnatural surface, following close behind her for a few minutes in silence, before stopping altogether. "This air...is hard to breathe," he commented.

"Just take it easy, or you might get sick. Let me know if you get tired." Alejandra turned and began deftly stepping up the hill again.

Old-timer watched her as she walked, deer-like, and thought to himself, Should I? "Oh what the h.e.l.l?" he said under his breath before lifting off and flying to catch up to Alejandra. "I've got a better idea," Old-timer said as he expanded his magnetic field so it caught Alejandra like a web and carried her off the ground.

"Oh my G.o.d!" She gasped as he gained alt.i.tude and let her float under him.

He didn't physically touch her; rather, he allowed her to glide by herself over the grayish terrain.

"It's like I'm flying."

"Not quite. It's too bad you can't control it. The feeling of freedom is incredible," Old-timer said gently.

"What do you mean?" Alejandra rolled onto her back, wearing a smile, relaxing on her cushion of magnetic energy. "I can just point!" She rolled back onto her stomach and pointed to the left.

Old-timer veered to the left until she retracted her finger. She pointed to the right, and he steered to her whim over a rocky stretch at the foot of a large embankment. Alejandra guided him towards it, finding a fissure that opened into a small cavern. "I could never have seen this any other way-a new perspective," she said.

Old-timer smiled for a moment, but then he remembered. He should not be feeling so-electric. She was an empath-she would feel it too.

"No, no, please don't do that, Craig. Don't let your doubts get in the way."

"I can't help it," he replied. Before he knew what was happening, he saw Alejandra gesticulating wildly; he had taken his eye off of her for a moment, perhaps out of shame, and missed her directions.

"Craig!" she finally shouted before they bounced off the far wall of the cavern and ricocheted down to the ground. Alejandra was thrown against Old-timer, and he held her in his arms as he disengaged his coc.o.o.n.

"You're a terrible driver," she said to him.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she replied. "Are you going to let me go?" she asked, smiling again. It was as if the smile controlled him. He shook his head slightly and released her from his arms. Alejandra turned to another fissure in the cavern and looked at the obscured sun as it tried to burn through the blackness. "It's an amazing color, isn't it?"

"It is," Old-timer agreed. He looked at the bloodied orb and watched the black smoke as it rolled and wafted with a putrid thickness. For a moment, the smoke seemed to form a mask across the eyes of the sun, as though the orb were a thief.

"You're still feeling guilty," Alejandra whispered.

"Yes," Old-timer replied, nodding slightly.

"Guilty because you lived. We all feel that."

"Guilty about more than that," Old-timer admitted. "You know that."

"I would never have said it," Alejandra replied.

"I know, but you would have known it. I'm not an idiot. I know you know."

Alejandra took a moment to digest this as she stepped to the ledge of the fissure, displaying her impressive agility, and looked down into the dead earth below. "It won't always be this way. Life will have to go on."

"What do you mean?" Old-timer queried.

Alejandra ignored his question and continued, "You have an extraordinary power, Craig. So do I. Just now, while we were flying, I felt my own exhilaration as we skimmed the Earth, but that wasn't the feeling on which I was concentrating." She turned and fixed her deep blue discs on him, eyes filled with so much depth. Little lines caught the light and shone like waves on the horizon. "I was soaking in your feelings for me...and I loved it."

"I-I..." Old-timer stammered but couldn't find the words to reply.

"You'll never know what it is like to actually feel someone else's attraction, someone else's love. Not what you imagine or what you hope might be real, but actual love. It's intoxicating. But if you could feel it..." She walked toward him and placed her hand on his face. "If you could feel it, you'd feel it now."

A picture of his wife suddenly flashed across his eyes. He turned away quickly. "No! This is insane! You're just a child!"

"I'm far from being a child," she replied.

"I'm sorry. I just mean...to me, you are so young. So, so young. Please understand. I'm nearly 100 years older than you. I'm from a completely different world."

Alejandra paused for a moment, her eyes fixed on the poisoned sun and the corpse-like Earth. "We're from the same world now," Alejandra replied.

Her words suddenly made the nightmare around him tangible. Old-timer's eyes fell on the death surrounding him, and he shook his head slowly at the thought of all that had been lost. "How can you people let yourselves die? What is it about death that you can possibly find appealing?"

"We don't find death appealing," Alejandra replied, turning quickly to face Old-timer but remaining patient.

"You're surrounded by it now. This is the reality of it. It's terrible. Our species evolved and stopped death. Why do you choose to die?"

"We don't choose to die. We choose to live."

"That makes no sense."

"We choose the honor of living life as purely human."

"Is that to suggest I'm not human?"

"You aren't."

"That's absurd."

"Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, you are something else. When you stopped death, disease, when you connected yourself to your machine-collective, you gained a great many things. You also lost a great many things." She stepped towards Old-timer and touched his cheek with her fingers. "You became something else. Your people took control of evolution and you became...post-human."

Old-timer was left at a temporary loss for words. Her point of view, amazingly, seemed almost logical. He began to shake his head again, as though he were trying to shake out her voice and the seeming reasonability of her ideas. "And what about the end? You live your lives naturally, and then you let yourself die? You see seventy-five years of experiences, of love, of life, and then you let it all go? You must realize there is no G.o.d. The concept is absurd."

"There are things we can't explain."

"Absurd."

"Why? I can feel your emotions. Can you explain that?"

"No, but that doesn't mean it can't be explained."

"Perhaps one day it will. And perhaps when I die, I will learn a great many things."

"Alejandra, you won't learn a d.a.m.n thing. Tell me something. Can you remember what it was like before you were born?"

"No, Craig."

"So you concede it is possible to simply not exist?" Alejandra remained silent. "If there is a soul, if there is an afterlife, science can find it. Why not stick around long enough to find the answers instead of just taking a leap of blind faith?"

For a moment, she was silenced. She stepped away from him and looked back at the b.l.o.o.d.y sun and the Earth's corpse. "It was your way of doing things that led to this, Craig, not ours."

Old-timer sighed and nodded his head regretfully. "I can't deny that, but as you said, we're from the same world now. We have to make that world. There has to be a happy medium."

10.

WAKING UP had become almost impossible. James blinked his eyes, and the darkness flashed away for the briefest glimpse of his surroundings. He saw a black and orange blur sliding and swirling like the image of a kaleidoscope. The light was coming from overhead. He blinked a handful of times, but his heavy eyes shut and sealed, his eyelids sore like the legs of a marathon runner in the last quarter-mile.

Someone's cool hand touched the back of his head, and he awakened again. A woman's chilled fingers were on the back of his neck. She was putting something behind his head. Was it a pillow? Of course-he's in a hospital. Thel had found the Purists. He tried to speak to the woman, but his voice failed him. His throat felt like the barrel of a flamethrower.

"Don't try to speak," the woman whispered. "You had a tube down your throat. Rest."

A tube down his throat? Surgery. He has required surgery. James held his head up and tried to communicate, but again, every move caused exhaustion. One move of his neck felt like the thousandth time he had made the motion. The woman put her cool hand against his burning forehead and lightly pressed him back against the welcoming pillow, seemingly willing him back to sleep.

He couldn't sleep-there was too much at stake. But he couldn't fight her. She was too strong. He closed his eyes to wait for her to leave, but the blackness came again before the cool hand left his skin.

Light again.

Someone was moving across the room, an elderly man holding a contraption with a bag of clear liquid attached to it, slowly making his way out of the room. He had made some sort of noise and given James the toehold he needed to escape the blackness.

Awake again, James could not let himself sleep. How much time had he already lost? Where was he? Suddenly, he remembered: a hospital. He needed to reason his way through his predicament. It was clear that he was being prevented from waking up. He looked down and saw the bandages across his torso. The punctured lung. He must have required some sort of surgery. That meant his body had undergone ma.s.sive trauma. Without his nans, his body would have to heal from the trauma on its own. That would require an enormous amount of rest. The Purists must have administered painkillers and a sedative to keep him unconscious. How were they getting it into his system? A pained move of his neck from side to side revealed the answer. Like the man who had woken him, James had one of the poles with a bag filled with clear liquid attached to him. A wire went from the bag down to his arm, and a needle was puncturing his skin. He a.s.sumed this was how they administered the drugs and nutrients. He would have to disconnect it in order to stay awake. He took as deep a breath as he could. His throat was still coated with liquid flame. He swung his left arm across his body and grasped the needle that was sticking into his right forearm. This movement sent a terrible stab of pain through the right side of his body, where his incision was located. The painkillers were not strong enough. James did not want to imagine what it would have felt like had he no painkillers to dull the full brunt of it. He wrapped his fingers around the needle but then suddenly stopped.

Thel.

James's eyes were adjusting to the dim light, and the blur was clearing as he kept them open. Thel was lying on a cot against the wall only a few feet to his right. He tried to call out to her for help, but only a hoa.r.s.e and cruelly painful whisper left his lips. She was sound asleep. Death's Counterfeit, he thought. Of course.

He broke from this train of thought and focused on the task at hand-he would have to do this himself. He began to pull with what little strength he had. Again, even with the painkillers running through his system, slowly pulling the needle out of his skin caused exceptional discomfort. He grimaced as he tried to work the metal object out of his arm. Since it had to have entered a vein, he knew it was deep. James wished for more strength, but he had none. He focused on the pain, hoping it would keep him awake long enough to work the needle out. It was an agonizing five-minute process, but finally, he worked the needle free. His arm began to bleed, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He needed to rest for a moment.

Without the painkillers or the sedatives going into his system, he knew he only needed a few minutes to go by before things would become easier. The pain would quickly increase, making him more alert. He concentrated on generating saliva and swallowing so he could tame the searing dragon in his throat. He looked at Thel and tried to call out to her again. His whisper was louder, but it still wasn't enough to wake her out of her sleep. He knew she must have been exhausted. He looked at her dark hair and the exposed nape of her white neck. Everyone else had lost everything, but James still had Thel. She was alive, and he had to keep it that way.

When a few minutes had pa.s.sed, James began to attempt the impossible. He rolled to his left. The pain was almost unbearable. He remembered trying to get to his feet after falling, following the mishap with the Zeus. That had only been the beginning. He squeezed his eyes tight and swore in his whispery voice. He remained on his left side for a few minutes more, before he attempted to move his left leg out from under him. He searched for the edge of the bed and let the leg guide him toward the cold floor.

When both his feet reached the ground, he held on to the side of the bed with both hands for a few minutes before trying to put all his weight on his legs; he could not afford to fall. To fall would undo everything and cost him and the rest of the survivors their future. It all depended on his first few steps. He very cautiously stepped forward and, with great trepidation, let go of his stranglehold on the bedsheets. He slowly took the dozen or so steps to the door of the room and exited.

Outside, a soldier was standing guard. His mouth fell open when he saw James. "Oh dear Lord!" he exclaimed.

"I need to see your commanding officer," James began in a faint, sandpapery whisper. "Our survival depends on it."

11.

When Thel opened her eyes and remembered the nightmare she inhabited, she immediately turned her head to check on James. The bed was empty. Her heart jumped and seemed to stop momentarily, and her breath was ripped from her as she leapt to her feet in terror. "What!?" She began to race out of the room.

"Whoa! Hold on!" Rich exclaimed, his hands waving in the air as he stood to his feet from his position next to the wall at the side of the room. "I fell asleep. I was supposed to be watching you."

"Watching me?"

"Yeah, but I just got in from three hours of recon duty with that psycho, Gernot. I'm a little drained after that. Imagine flying around for three hours with a guy who eats flesh because he likes it more than he likes you. Not a safe feeling."

"What happened? Where is he?" Thel demanded impatiently.

"He's okay," Rich answered, waving his hands in front of himself instinctively for protection in case Thel tried to throttle him. "They told me to stay here and watch you to make sure you didn't go running through the complex shocking people unconscious again!"

"Where is he? Where did they take him?" Thel repeated earnestly.

"They didn't take him anywhere. He took himself."

"What? How is that possible?"

"He's awake. He's already met with General Wong, and he's set up in a lab on the other side of the complex."

Thel blinked as she tried to digest this information. "They said he would be incapacitated for days."

"Yeah, well, he gave himself a different prognosis."

"Take me to him."