He closed his eyes and pulled her tightly against him.

• • •

Lacey turned; Babcock was perched above her, at the top of the tunnel’s mouth. As great and terrible a thing as God had ever made. Lacey felt no fear, only wonder at the magnificent workings of God. That He should make a being so perfect in his design, fit to devour a world. And as she gazed upon him glowing with his great and terrible radiance-a hallowed light, like the light of angels-Lacey’s heart swelled with the knowledge that she had not been wrong, that the long night of her vigil would end as she’d forseen. A vigil begun so many years ago on a damp spring morning when she had opened the door of the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Memphis, Tennessee, and beheld a little girl.

Jonas, she thought, do you see that I was right? All is forgiven; all that has been lost can be found again. Jonas, I am coming to tell you. I am practically with you now.

She darted back into the tunnel.

Come to me. Come to me come to me come to me.

She ran. She was in that place but also another; she was running down the tunnel, drawing Babcock inside; but she was also a little girl again, in the field. She could smell the sweetness of the earth, feel the cool night air on her cheeks; she could hear her sisters and her mother’s voice, calling from the doorway: Run, children, run as fast as you can.

She hit the door and kept on going, down the hall with its buzzing lights, into the room with its gurney and beakers and batteries, all the little things of the old world and its terrible dreams of blood.

She stopped, pivoting to face the doorway. And there he was.

I am Babcock. One of Twelve.

As am I, thought Sister Lacey, as, behind her, the bomb’s timer reached 0:00, the atoms of its core collapsed into themselves, and her mind filled up forever with the pure white light of heaven.

SIXTY-NINE

She was Amy, and she was forever. She was one of Twelve and also the other, the one above and behind, the Zero. She was the Girl from Nowhere, the One Who Walked In, who lived a thousand years; Amy of Multitudes, the Girl with the Souls Inside Her.

She was Amy. She was Amy. She was Amy.

She was the first to rise. After the thunder and the shaking, the trembling and the roaring. Lacey’s little house bucking and rocking like a horse, like a tiny boat at sea. Everyone yelling and screaming, huddled against the wall and holding on.

But then it was over. The earth below them came to rest. The air was full of dust. Everyone coughing and choking, amazed to be alive.

They were alive.

She led Peter and the others out, past the bodies of the dead ones, into the light of dawn where the Many waited. The Many of Babcock no more.

They were everywhere and all around. A sea of faces, eyes. They moved toward her in the vastness of their number, into the dawning sunlight. She could feel the empty space inside them where the dream had been, the dream of Babcock, and in its place the question, fierce and burning:

Who am I who am I who am I?

And she knew. Amy knew. She knew them all, each to a one; she knew them all at last. She was the ship, just as Lacey had said; she carried their souls inside her. She had kept these all along, waiting for this day, when she would return what was rightfully theirs-the stories of who they were. The day when they would make their passage.

Come to me, she thought. Come to me come to me come to me.

They came. From out of the trees, from across the snowy fields, from all the hidden places. She moved among them, touching and caressing, and told them what they longed to know.

You are… Smith.

You are… Tate.

You are… Duprey.

You are Erie you are Ramos you are Ward you are Cho you are Singh Atkinson Johnson Montefusco Cohen Murrey Nguyen Elberson Lazaro Torres Wright Winborne Pratt Scalamonti Mendoza Ford Chung Frost Vandyne Carlin Park Diego Murphy Parsons Richini O’Neil Myers Zapata Young Scheer Tanaka Lee White Gupta Solnik Jessup Rile Nichols Maharana Rayburn Kennedy Mueller Doerr Goldman Pooley Price Kahn Cordell Ivanov Simpson Wong Palumbo Kim Rao Montgomery Busse Mitchell Walsh McEvoy Bodine Olson Jaworksi Ferguson Zachos Spenser Ruscher…

The sun was lifting over the mountain, a blinding brightness. Come, thought Amy. Come into the light and remember.

You are Cross you are Flores you are Haskell Vasquez Andrews McCall Barbash Sullivan Shapiro Jablonski Choi Zeidner Clark Huston Rossi Culhane Baxter Nunez Athanasian King Higbee Jensen Lombardo Anderson James Sasso Lindquist Masters Hakeemzedah Levander Tsujimoto Michie Osther Doody Bell Morales Lenzi Andriyakhova Watkins Bonilla Fitzgerald Tinti Asmundson Aiello Daley Harper Brewer Klein Weatherall Griffin Petrova Kates Hadad Riley MacLeod Wood Patterson…

Amy felt their sorrow, but it was different now. It was a holy soaring. A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand thousand stories-of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief. Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in its body’s keeping always longing to be known. She moved among them where they lay in the snow, the Many no more, each in the place of their choosing.

The snow angels.

Remember, she told them. Remember.

I am Flynn I am Gonzalez I am Young Wentzell Armstrong O’Brien Reeves Farajian Watanabe Mulroney Chernesky Logan Braverman Livingston Martin Campana Cox Torrey Swartz Tobin Hecht Stuart Lewis Redwine Pho Markovich Todd Mascucci Kostin Laseter Salib Hennesey Kasteley Merriweather Leone Barkley Kiernan Campbell Lamos Marion Quang Kagan Glazner Dubois Egan Chandler Sharpe Browning Ellenzweig Nakamura Giacomo Jones I am I am I am…

The sun would do its work. Soon they would be dead, then ashes, then nothing. Their bodies would scatter to the winds. They were leaving her at last. She felt their spirits rising, sailing away.

“Amy.”

Peter was beside her now. She had no words for the look upon his face. She would tell him soon, she thought. She would tell him all she knew, all she believed. What lay ahead, the long journey they would take together. But now was not a time for talk.

“Go inside,” she said, and took his empty pistol from him, dropping it into the snow. “Go inside and save her.”

“Can I save her?”

And Amy nodded.

“You have to,” she said.

Sara and Michael had lifted Alicia onto the bed and stripped off her blood-soaked vest. Her eyes were closed, fluttering.

“I need bandages!” Sara yelled. More blood was on her hands, her hair. “Someone get me something to stanch this bleeding!”

Hollis used his blade to cut a length of cloth from the sheets. They weren’t clean, nothing was, but they would have to do.

“We have to tie her down,” Peter said.

“Peter, the wound is too deep,” Sara said. She shook her head hopelessly. “It’s not going to matter.”

“Hollis, give me your blade.”

He told the others what to do, cutting Lacey’s bed linens into long strips, then twisting them together. They bound Alicia’s hands and feet to the posts of the bed. Sara said the bleeding seemed to be slowing-an ominous sign. Her pulse was high and thready.

“If she survives,” Greer warned from the foot of the bed, “these sheets will never hold her.”

But Peter wasn’t listening. He moved to the main room, where among the wreckage he found his pack. The metal box was still inside, with the syringes. He removed one of the vials and returned to the bedroom, where he passed it to Sara.

“Give her this.”

She took it in her hand, examining it. “Peter, I don’t know what this is.”