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Shade had watched it all, heard the cries of grief, seen the tear-streaked faces. It was sickening but fascinating, and impossible to look away from.
Inside the dome, frightened children huddled close to their side of the transparent force field. Two very different worlds stared at each other, like monkeys in a cage, though which side were the monkeys was not at all clear.
Outside the dome, parents held up signs to be read by six-year-olds armed with butcher’s cleavers and gnawing on raw fish. Ten-year-olds sat sullen and listless, drinking from whiskey bottles. And nothing could be done. The atmosphere outside was thick with sadness and despair. But beneath all that sadness and despair, at a discreet distance where it could be hypocritically denied, were excitement and anticipation.
It was the greatest show on earth.
Shade sat cross-legged on the folded blanket she’d brought, arm’s length from the dome wall. Just beyond, right where she could have shook their hands if the barrier were gone, sat half a dozen kids, ranging from toddler to teen. More behind them, and more still, stretching north and south. Refugees unable to cross the invisible border. Dying while the world watched with morbid fascination.
It was strange and disturbing, being so near, seeing everything yet hearing nothing. A few days earlier, Shade had been in this same spot eating a cereal bar, and the kids on the other side had watched her every bite with a predatory intensity. They had salivated like dogs. Shade had not made that mistake again.
Then had come rumors of a terror to dwarf all others in the dome. A terror called Gaia, though the signs held up inside the dome used half a dozen different spellings. Guyuh. Gayu.
#Gaia.
Dozens of fake Gaia Twitter and Facebook and Instagram accounts under that name, all finding the notion terribly amusing. Until the tape.
Not long after the moment the nuke had detonated, the dome’s force field had failed for just a split second; for reasons no one understood then or later, a young man named Alex, an adult of sorts, had been attempting to climb the dome. The dome had flickered for just a split second and he had fallen through, becoming the only adult inside. His bad luck.
It had been his arm that Gaia had torn from his body. She had then cooked the flesh with a blast of searing light from her hands and ripped the medium-rare flesh, chewing and swallowing as the man named Alex lay traumatized and weeping at her feet. This event had been caught on video. The video practically burned down the internet, as everyone on planet Earth not living in a cave or a coma watched it in appalled fascination.
That had taken a lot of the fun out of #GaiaForPresident.
It was that girl, that monster Gaia, who now appeared at the south end of the dome, covered in blood and burns, her clothing rags.
Shade Darby’s phone rang, making her jump. Her mother, of course. She knew why her mother was calling. Dr. Heather Darby was making sure her daughter was safe in the barracks, because Heather Darby, at that moment just a hundred feet away in a tent crammed with scientific equipment, knew her daughter did not always listen to her.
Shade let the call go to voice mail. No way was she leaving. No way was she going to miss this. The show was approaching its climax; Shade could sense it. Something big was coming.
There came the chime of a text. Shade did not even look at it.
And then, as Gaia stared balefully down at the huddled mass of frightened children pressed against the dome wall, she raised her bloody hands.
“Shade! Shade Darby!” Her mother’s voice was barely audible above the rising swell of voices as people cried out and pointed.
Gaia raised her hands, and beams of light so bright that Shade could scarcely look at them stabbed from Gaia’s upraised palms into the crowd of children pressed desperately, hopelessly inside the dome.
For what felt like slow-ticking minutes, Shade stared in disbelief. Children were sliced through by the beam of light. Children burned. A boy no more than seven years old melted like a candle in a microwave, burned and melted, and from Shade’s throat came a rising wail, a scream, and all around her screams and bellows of horror, and then it had all risen in pitch, because sound did not escape the dome . . . but light did!
“Shade!”
Gaia’s killing beams scythed through the children in the dome but stabbed as well through the transparent barrier. Laser light burned cops, tourists, and media. It burned the Families. It burned the tacky souvenir stands with their plastic dome key chains.
People became herd animals, a mass of wildebeest spotting a lioness springing from the tall grass. People recoiled, backed away, saw the person standing beside them decapitated, and ran in sheer panic, all reason gone, shoving and climbing over one another as those deadly beams swept left and right, and people were cut down as they ran. Arms and heads dropped away like macabre litter, torsos ran two steps before toppling over. Seared human meat smoked and sent up a nauseating barbecue smell.
Shade felt her body tingling, felt her heart seem to stop then speed up, felt the echo of her own screams inside her head as she lay facedown, hugging the ground, but never looking away. She never once looked away as trapped children, their mouths open in unheard cries of despair, died before her eyes, died so close she would have felt their last breath.
Then behind Gaia came a creature that seemed almost to be made of gravel. It barreled down the hill, heavy and awkward, a boulder with thick legs and windmilling arms. It slammed into Gaia and sent the blood-drenched monster-child flying. There came a ragged cheer from the onlookers crawling on the ground like Shade, or cowering at what they hoped was a safe distance behind emergency vehicles and National Guard Humvees.
Inside the dome a handsome boy with dark hair and a commanding air appeared. He was improbably armed with a shoulder-held missile, like something from a news report of distant war. He leveled the missile and fired it at Gaia. The missile flew leaving a trail of smoke and sparks, traveling a short distance, and missing its intended target. It exploded silently against the inside of the barrier, a dozen feet above Shade’s head. She recoiled in reaction, pressing her face into the dirt, hands over her ears though there was no shock wave.
The explosion inside the dome shattered the stone creature, stripped the outer covering away, leaving, for just a moment, an almost-human shape. A boy. But a dead boy. He fell alongside dozens of others, and bloody Gaia howled silent rage and brutish laughter.
She was, Shade thought, the most amazing creature she had ever seen or imagined: fearless, insane, evil, and powerful. A demented young goddess. Fascinating.
Beyond Gaia, the boy who fired the missile seemed to shrug. They were speaking, Gaia and the dark-haired boy, an almost normal-seeming conversation. Others on the inside looked on, tense, but keeping their distanc
e. The boy was a teenager not that much older than Shade herself, but he did not have youthful eyes.
