The others had crowded around. “What is it?” Michael asked.

Peter passed it to Sara, who showed it to the others.

“Some kind of model, I think.” Amy’s face was still wearing a look of glowing happiness. “Why did you want us to see this?”

But it was Alicia who provided the answer.

“Peter,” she said, “I think you better look at this.”

She had turned the globe upside down, revealing the words that were printed on its base.

Milagro Hotel and Casino

Las Vegas

The smell had nothing to do with the slims, Michael explained. It was sewer gas. Mostly methane, which was why the place smelled like an outhouse. Somewhere beneath the hotel was a sea of one-hundred-year-old effluent, the pooled waste of an entire city, trapped like a giant fermentation tank.

“We don’t want to be here when that lets go,” he warned. “It’ll be the biggest fart in history. The place will go up like a torch.”

They were on the fifteenth floor of the hotel, watching the night come on. For a few, panicked minutes it had begun to look as if they’d have to take refuge on the hotel’s lower levels. The only stairwell they’d found, on the far side of the casino, was clogged with debris-chairs, tables, mattresses, suitcases, all of it bent and smashed, as if hurled from a great height. It was Hollis who had suggested jimmying open one of the elevators. Assuming the cable was intact, he explained, they could climb a couple of floors, enough to get around the barricade, and take the stairs the rest of the way.

It worked. Then, at the sixteenth floor, they encountered a second barricade. The floor of the stairwell was littered with shell casings. They exited to find themselves in a darkened hallway. Alicia cracked another light stick. The hall was lined with doors; a sign on the wall said AMBASSADOR SUITE LEVEL.

Peter gestured with his rifle to the first door. “Caleb, do your thing.”

The room had two bodies in it, a man and a woman, lying on the bed. They were both wearing bathrobes and slippers; on the table by the bed was an open whiskey bottle, its contents long evaporated to a brown stain, and a plastic syringe. Caleb, voicing the words everyone was thinking, said he wasn’t going to spend the night with a couple of slims, especially slims that had killed themselves. It wasn’t until they had tried five doors that they found one without bodies behind it. Three rooms, two with a pair of beds in each and a third, larger room facing a wall of windows that gazed over the city. Peter stepped to the glass. The last daylight was going, bathing the scene in an orange glow. He wished they were higher, even on the roof, but this would have to do.

“What’s that down there?” Mausami asked. She was pointing across the street, where a massive structure of ribbed steel, four legs that tapered to a narrow tip, rose between the buildings.

“I think it’s the Eiffel Tower,” said Caleb. “I saw a picture of it in a book once.”

Mausami frowned. “Isn’t that in Europe?”

“It’s in Paris.” Michael was kneeling on the floor, unpacking their gear. “Paris, France.”

“So what’s it doing here?”

“How should I know?” Michael shrugged. “Maybe they moved it.”

They watched together as night fell-first the street, then the buildings, then the mountains beyond, all sinking into darkness as if into the waters of a filling tub. The stars were coming out. No one was in the mood to talk; the precariousness of their situation was obvious. Sitting on the sofa, Sara rebandaged Hollis’s wounded arm. Peter could discern, not from anything she said but from what she didn’t, going about her work with tight-lipped efficiency, that she was worried about him.

They divvied up the MREs and lay down to rest. Alicia and Sara volunteered to take first watch. Peter was too exhausted to object. Wake me up when you’re ready, he said. Probably I won’t even sleep.

He didn’t. In the bedroom he lay on the floor, his head propped on his pack, staring at the ceiling. Milagro, he thought. This was Milagro. Amy was sitting in a corner with her back to the wall, holding the glass globe. Every few minutes she would lift it from her lap and give it a shake, holding it close to her face as she watched the snow whirl and settle inside it. At such moments, Peter wondered what he was to her, what all of them were. He had explained to her where they were going and why. But if she knew what was in Colorado, and who had sent the signal, she had made no indication.

At last he gave up trying to sleep and returned to the main room. A wedge of moon had risen over the buildings. Alicia was standing at the window, scanning the street below; Sara was sitting at the small table, playing a hand of solo, her rifle resting across her lap.

“Any sign out there?”

Sara frowned. “Would I be playing cards?”

He took a chair. For a while he said nothing, watching her play.

“Where’d you get the cards?” On the backs was that name, Milagro.

“Lish found them in a drawer.”

“You should rest, Sara,” Peter offered. “I can take over.”

“I’m fine.” Frowning again, she swept the cards into a pile and redealt. “Go back to bed.”

Peter said nothing more. He had the feeling he’d done something wrong, but he didn’t know what.

Alicia turned from the window. “You know, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll take you up on your offer. Put my head down for a few minutes. If it’s okay with you, Sara.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Alicia left them alone. Peter rose and stepped to the window, using the nightscope on his rifle to scan the street: abandoned cars, heaps of rubble and trash, the empty buildings. A world frozen in time, caught at the moment of its abandonment in the last, violent hours of the Time Before.

“You don’t have to pretend, you know.”

He turned. Sara was looking at him coolly, her face bathed in moonlight. “Pretend what?”

“Peter, please. Not now.” Peter could feel her resolve; she had decided something. “You did your best. I know that.” She gave a quiet laugh, looking away. “I’d say I was grateful but I’d sound like an idiot, so I won’t. If we’re all going to die out here, I just wanted you to know it’s all right.”

“No one’s going to die.” It was all he could think to say.

“Well. I hope that’s true.” She paused. “Still, that one night-”

“Look, I’m sorry, Sara.” He took a deep breath. “I should have told you that before. It was my fault.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Peter. Like I said, you tried. It was a good try, too. But the two of you are meant for each other. I think I’ve always known that. It was stupid of me not to accept it.”

He was completely confounded. “Sara, who are you talking about?”

Sara didn’t answer. Her eyes grew suddenly wide. She was looking past him, out the window.

He turned sharply. Sara rose and came to stand beside him.

“What did you see?”

She pointed. “Across the street, up on the tower.”

He pressed the nightscope to his eye. “I don’t see anything.”

“It was there, I know it.”

Then Amy was in the room. She was clutching the globe to her chest. With her other hand she gripped Peter by the arm and began to pull him away from the window.

“Amy, what’s wrong?”

The glass behind them didn’t so much shatter as explode, detonating in a hail of glinting shards. The air blew from his body as he was knocked across the room. It was only later that Peter would realize that the viral had come in right on top of them. He heard Sara scream-not even words, just a cry of terror. He hit the floor, rolling, his limbs tangled with Amy’s, in time to see the creature vaulting back out the window.

Sara was gone.

Alicia and Hollis were in the room now, everyone was there, Hollis was ripping off the sling and taking up his rifle, he was standing at the window, aiming below, sweeping the scene with his barrel. But no shots came.