The words made no sense to Pete but he didn’t interrupt her.

“Mom and Dad had taken our only car—we didn’t have much money and I was at university on a merit scholarship. They were so proud of that. I ran out of the house and climbed the hill behind the barns. The hill wasn’t very high, not in coastal Virginia, but it was high enough to see the water coming. A huge wall of it, smashing everything, trees and houses and tobacco barns. Our house. I knew it was going to smash me.”

Pete blurted, despite himself, “What did you do?”

To his surprise, she chuckled. “I prayed. For the first time in a decade—I was a smart-ass college kid who thought she had outgrown all that hooey—I prayed to a god, any god, to save me. And then a Tesslie did. It materialized out of the air beside me in what looked like a shower of golden sparks—that’s why we called them Tesslies, you know. Ted Mgambe came up with the name. He said when they materialized through whatever unthinkable machinery they had, it looked just like the shower of sparks from Tesla’s famous experiments.”

She had gone beyond Pete again. He didn’t interrupt.

“The materializing was quite a trick, but the Tesslie was solid enough, a hard-shelled space suit, or perhaps a robot, with flexible long tentacles. It wrapped one around me but it really didn’t have to. The tsunami was almost on me, a wall of dirty raging water with trees and boards and pieces of cars and even a dead cow in it. I saw that cow and I clutched the Tesslie with every ounce of strength I had.”

Silence. Pete said, “And then what? What?”

McAllister shrugged. “I woke up in the Shell, along with twenty-five other people. All about my age, all intelligent, all healthy. You know their names. Everything was here except the Grab machinery, which just appeared twenty years later when it became evident that we were not going to be able to produce enough children to restart the human race. Too much genetic damage, Xiaobo thought, although nobody knew from what. All of us Survivors came from Maryland and Virginia, although we represented genetic diversity. Xiaobo was a Chinese exchange student, Eduardo was Hispanic, Ted was black, Darlene was plucked from up-country Piedmont. The diversity was probably deliberate. And we all happened to be in the open, high up, and alone when the tsunami hit.

“When each of us regained consciousness, we explored the Shell, and we saw what Earth had become through the clear patch of wall in the unused maze—no, Pete, you weren’t the first to go there. And after the initial grief and rage, we made a pact that we would do whatever it took to restart humanity. Anything, anything at all, putting the good of the whole first and our individual selves second, if at all.”

“Didn’t you hate them? The Tesslies, I mean?”

“Of course we did. They wrecked the world. Even the brief hysterical newscast I saw that last day said that the tsunami wasn’t natural. It came from something—a quake, a volcano, I don’t remember exactly—that couldn’t have happened in that way by itself. And then the Tesslies saved us, like lab rats. We expected biological experimentation on us, those first years. It didn’t happen. The Tesslies left us alone until they gave us the Grab machinery, although no one saw them do it. Until you went Outside, I thought they’d probably left Earth for good. But they hadn’t, and I think now that they’re here for whatever happens next. Because something is happening, Pete. The grass is growing Outside. You breathed the air, even if it isn’t completely right yet. The Grabs have accelerated enormously. It’s possible more Tesslies will return soon.”

“Before, did you—”

She held out her hand. “Give me the knife, Pete. Or the gun, or whatever you’ve got.”

He jerked his head to face her. His body shifted away. “No.”

“Please. You can’t do any good with it.”

All at once fury swamped him in a big wave, like the tsunami she had spoken about but evidently didn’t understand. None of them understood anything, the wimpy Survivors! He shouted, “What’s wrong with you, McAllister? What? The Tesslies wrecked my future! Everybody’s future! And you want to just welcome them back because they gave us the Shell and the Grabs and—when the Grab machinery appeared it didn’t even have any learning circle to teach you that adults can’t go through and so we lost Robert and Seth until that day Ravi jumped on it during a game and it happened to brighten and he came back whole! And still you never blame the Tesslies, you never blame anybody for anything, you just talk about the good of the whole but to not blame the Tesslies—Fuck, fuck, fuck! Do you hear me? Fuck! We’re not…not gerbils!”

“No. But you’re not thinking clearly, either. Survival—”

“Blame the fucking Tesslies! Hate them! Kill them if you can!”

“Pete—”

The platform brightened.

Pete pulled his knife, glared at the pregnant woman on the floor, and jumped into the Grab.

JULY 2014

The Yellowstone Caldera lifted upwards.

For several years the surface land had been rising as much as three inches a year, but a few years ago the uplift had slowed and stopped. Now the ground inched upward again. A swarm of minor earthquakes followed, barely detectable at the surface. Tourists went on admiring the geysers and the bubbling, mud-laden hot springs. Rumbling at low sonic frequencies set off alarms at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and the White Lake GPS station.

Jacob Kahn rushed to his monitor. “Oh my God,” he said. It was not a prayer.

JULY 2014

Two more nights in cheap motels, one without AC in a sweltering July. Two more days on library Internet connections. On her own laptop Julie had run and rerun algorithms as new data became available. Her driving had taken her steadily north, along the coast. Now she was in Massachusetts, north of Salem. She knew where she was going. She had accumulated enough data points to be sure.

The Eve’s Garden break-in in Connecticut.

The baby snatched on the Massachusetts coast while her teenage sister slept in the same room.

The Loving Pets burglary in New Hampshire.

Thefts at REI in southern Maine and Whole Foods in Vermont.

She was running out of money, and not all her news-watching had turned up the slightest hint that anyone was looking for her. On the other hand, neither had she turned up any more information on Dr. Fanshaw or mutated plant-killing bacteria. Both the glory hound and the deadly mutation seemed to have vanished, which was in itself scary. Still, she would have to go home soon. Or go somewhere.

Alicia had a cold, probably from exposure to all the germs in all the libraries. Julie had a massive headache. Was she just being stupid, imagining herself some dramatic fugitive from a third-rate action movie? Maybe she was just as narcissistic as Geoffrey Fanshaw. The sensible thing was to make the observation, alert Gordon, and go home.

At a Kmart she bought a camcorder. Alicia sneezed and fussed. Julie got them both back in the hot car and drove north on Route 1. The algorithm pinpointed a Maine town, Port Allington, for the next incident. Also a time: between 5:30 and 5:45 tomorrow afternoon. Which was odd, since all the other incidents had occurred in the middle of the night or in early morning. Google Earth showed the location to be in a retail area centered on a large Costco.

She spent nearly the last of her money at a Ramada Inn, several steps up from the places she’d been staying. “You’re lucky to get a room at all,” the desk clerk told her. “It’s high season for tourists, you know. But we had a cancellation.”

“Oh,” Julie said. She was tired, headachy, frightened. Alicia fussed in her car seat.

“Tomorrow the Azalea Festival begins over in Cochranton. You here for the festival?”