Elizabeth Han was thumbing frantically into her iPhone, taking notes, even as she said, “Why would this scare the government any more than—” She frowned and looked up. “They think the dome is the cause of the mutations.”
Connie nodded. “If that’s the way it is, then when the dome comes down the mutations will stop. But if it’s the other way around, if the mutations came before the barrier, then maybe they caused the barrier. Which means this isn’t all just some freak of nature, some quantum flux or whatever, or even an intrusion from a parallel universe, all those theories. This means there’s something or someone inside that dome with unbelievable power.”
Elizabeth Han looked grim as she went back to taking notes. “You have to give me the name of the person who told you about the nuke. I need to source this.”
Out of the corner of her eye Connie saw Abana pull back. A cold distance opened between them for the first time since the anomaly had begun. Connie had lied to her. All this time, as they had suffered together, Connie Temple had been holding something back.
And now, Connie knew, Abana was wondering if somehow her friend could have kept this from happening.
“I can’t give you his name,” Connie said.
“Then I can’t run the story.”
Abana stood up abruptly. She banged the table hard and rattled the cups. “I’m stopping this. I’m calling the parents, the families. I’m going to get around that roadblock, and if they want to blow up my child, they’ll have to blow me up, too.”
Connie watched her go.
“What do you want me to do?” the reporter asked Connie, angry and frustrated. “You won’t tell me who gave you this information; what am I supposed to do?”
“I promised.”
“Your son—”
“Darius Ashton!” Connie said through gritted teeth. Then, quieter, more calmly, but hating herself, she repeated, “Sergeant Darius Ashton. I have his number. But if you leak his name he’ll end up in prison.”
“If I don’t get this out, and right now, it sounds like all those kids inside may die. What’s your choice?”
“Sergeant Ashton? Sergeant Darius Ashton?”
He froze. The voice, coming from behind him, was unfamiliar. But the tone, the repetition of his name, that told him all he needed to know.
He forced a pleasant smile and turned to see a man and a woman, neither smiling, both holding badges so he could read them.
His cell phone rang.
“I’m Ashton,” he said. Then, “Excuse me.” He held the phone to his ear.
The FBI agents seemed momentarily uncertain as to whether they should or could stop him taking the call.
Darius held up a finger to signal just a minute. He listened for a while.
He was, he knew, destroying himself. With two FBI agents watching he was going to commit what might as well be suicide.
“Yes,” he said into the phone. “What she told you is one hundred percent true.”
The FBI agents took his phone then.
THIRTY-TWO
7 HOURS, 1 MINUTE
DIANA CRAWLED AND fell. She was cut and bruised in so many places she couldn’t even begin to keep track. Her palms, her knees, her shins, her ankles, the soles of her feet, all ripped and torn. And the cuts from Drake’s whip were on her back, shoulders, the back of her thighs, her bottom.
But she felt little of the pain now. That pain was something far away. Something that happened to a real person who was not her. Some shell she’d once inhabited, maybe, but not her, not this person, because this person, this Diana, felt something so much more awful.
It was inside her.
The baby. It was inside her and pushing and kicking.
And it was growing. She felt her belly grow each time she reached to hold it. Bigger and bigger, like someone was filling a water balloon from a hose and didn’t have the sense to stop, didn’t know that it would burst if you just kept making it—
A spasm went through her, seizing her insides, drawing on every ounce of her strength and concentrating it in that one spasm.
Contraction.
The word came to her from the depths of memory.
Contraction.
Was her stomach really growing? Was the impatience of the baby inside her real, or was it Penny playing some game with her reality?
She felt the gaiaphage’s dark mind. She felt the fear that squeezed the air from her lungs. And more horrible still, she felt that evil mind’s eagerness. It strained to hurry her on. It reached for her from the depths. Like a little kid impatient for the ice cream. Give me, give me!
But worse by far was the echo that came from the baby.
The baby felt the force of the gaiaphage’s will. She knew it. It would be his.
How long had she crawled like this? How many times had Drake grabbed her roughly with his whip hand and lowered her down some sheer drop to cling with torn fingernails to the rock wall?
And blind. Always blind. A darkness so total it reached into her memory and blotted the sun from the pictures there.
Then, at long last, a glow. At first it seemed like it must be a hallucination. She had accepted that light was gone forever, and now here was a faint, sickly glow.
“Go!” Drake urged her. “It’s straight and level now. Go!”
She stumbled forward. Her belly was impossibly big, the flesh stretched like a drum. And the next contraction now racked her, a vise inside her that tightened so hard it seemed it must break her very bones.
It was hot and airless. She was bathed in sweat, her hair sticking to her neck.