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“No. We’ll watch Sanchez carefully, but get him on it right now.”

“But Margaret, he—”

“That’s a f.u.c.king order, Dan,” Margaret said. “Now start the G.o.dd.a.m.n drip.”

Dan looked at her for a second, then snapped a smart salute and walked out of the autopsy room.

Were his little feelings hurt? Margaret didn’t care. She finally had a potential weapon, and she was going to use it.

MOVEMENT

Margaret sat down at the computer desk, utterly relieved to finally be out of the hazmat suit she’d worn for fifteen hours straight. She typed commands to call up the new Sanchez samples.

What was that smell? Had someone left food in here? She looked under the desktop, then under the chair before she realized what it was.

The smell was her.

d.a.m.n, she needed a shower something fierce. Nothing she could do about that now, though.

She looked at the readout. The latrunculin was working—Sanchez’s crawler counts had fallen. The chemical’s side effects were taking their toll, but he wasn’t in any serious danger. Not yet. She called up a feed from one of the latest samples. It showed three crawlers, still motionless, just as they had been since Murray’s people shot down the satellite. As she watched, one of the crawlers slowly dissolved into little bits, courtesy of the latrunculin.

The second crawler started to disintegrate. Margaret had never seen anything so beautiful in her entire life.

And then . . .

. . . then the last crawler twitched.

She stared, wondering if she’d imagined it, hoping she had. It twitched again, kept twitching. It reached out, looking for something to grab. A dendrite arm locked onto the surrounding muscle tissue and pulled.

The crawler was crawling again.

The intercom buzzed.

“Margaret, you there?” Dan’s voice, urgent.

“I’m here.”

“Something’s up,” he said. “I’m looking at the side-by-side samples. Everything that wasn’t already dead is moving again. They just woke up, all of them.”

THE REBOOT

So many thoughts. So many voices. No organization. No cohesion. Did she know what that word meant? Yes, she did.

Chelsea blinked and opened her eyes. Slivers of early-morning light poured through cracks in the roof and the boarded-up windows. She felt sleepy. She felt sad.

Her special friend was gone.

She needed Chauncey’s wisdom, needed to know what G.o.d wanted her to do. She sensed the minds of the soldiers, the hatchlings, the converted. They were all very still. Random thoughts . . . they were dreaming. No one there to tie them all together.

That’s what Chauncey had provided. He’d made them one.

A sneaking suspicion grew in her mind. What if she could connect everyone? She could replace Chauncey.

He had been G.o.d, but he was gone.

Now Chelsea was G.o.d.

She sensed all the soldiers, Mommy, Mr. Burkle, the Postman, General Ogden . . . she sensed the two hatchlings back in g.a.y.l.o.r.d . . . and she sensed one more voice, a new voice, very faint, very weak, but also very close.

The two hatchlings in g.a.y.l.o.r.d remained prisoners.

Prisoners of the boogeyman.