Pete stared at this baby, now awake in its padded bucket and peering curiously around. Was it a girl? How hard would Julie fight for it?

She said, “Take us with you.”

He gaped at her. She didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“You can, I know you can. You’ve taken twelve children, starting—”

“Thirteen,” he corrected, without thinking.

“—with Tommy Candless over a year ago, and you can take us. Don’t you understand, Pete? Everything here is dying, the Earth itself is dying! Tsunamis, earthquakes, a mutated bacteria that is killing every plant above tide level. Governments will collapse, and as they collapse they’ll fight back, there will be nuclear retaliation with radiation that will—”

“Radiation, yes.” She had used a word he knew. “It damages babies. It damaged me. But it’s mostly gone now.”

“Is it? Then take—”

“Everything you said, the destroying of the whole Earth—the Tesslies did that. But McAllister is leading us to restart humanity. And Ravi and I will kill the fucking alien Tesslies!”

“The—”

Suddenly all the DIGIAL FOTO FRAMES went black at once. The silence somehow felt loud. Into it Julie said, “No aliens wrecked the Earth. We did. Humans.”

“That’s a lie!”

“No, Pete, it’s not. We poisoned the Earth and raped her and denuded her. We ruined the oceans and air and forests, and now she is fighting back.”

“The Tesslies destroyed the world!”

“I don’t think so. Tell me this: Are there any plants where you live? Growing wild outside the Shell, I mean?”

“There are now. Grasses and bushes and red flowers.”

Julie closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. When she opened her eyes again, they were wet. “Thank God. Or Gaia. The microbial mutation reversed.”

“What?”

“Take us with you, Pete. I can help your McAllister start over. I’m strong and a good worker and I know a lot of different things. I can be really useful to… to the Shell.”

She took a step forward and looked at him with such beseeching eyes that all at once Pete saw her. She was a real person, as real as McAllister or Petra or Ravi, a person who was going to die in McAllister’s tsunami. The first person in Before who had ever been real to him.

“Take us with you!”

He choked out, “I can’t!”

“Yes, you can! You’ve done it twelve times already!”

“Only kids,” Pete said. “If adults go through a Grab, they die.” Robert, Seth, the thing that had come back with him and Kara and Petra. The thing that had been their father. “The Tesslies made the Grab that way. They didn’t want the Survivors to just get everybody on the platform and lead them all back to Before.”

Julie went so still and so sick-looking that for a crazy moment Pete thought she had turned into the “yellow stone” the wall had been screaming about. Robert, Seth, the thing that had been Petra’s father… He started to babble. “But I can take that baby, yes I can, kids can go through a Grab so I can take the baby! Give it to me!”

Julie didn’t move.

“Give me the baby! I’ve only got—” a quick glance at his wrister “—another two and a half minutes!”

The number brought her alive. She shoved the baby bucket into his arms. “Her name is Alicia. Tell her—oh, tell her about me!”

“Okay.” He couldn’t do that; it was important that the Grab kids belong to the Shell, not to Before. McAllister insisted on it. But he didn’t have to tell Julie that.

She began to cry. Pete hated it when people cried. But she had a good reason, and anyway there were only three or four sobs before she got hold of herself and began to talk. “Listen, Pete, it was us, not any aliens. Have you ever heard of Gaia?”

“No.”

“Is your McAllister an educated man?”

“She knows everything.”

“Then tell her this: We did it. We wrecked the Earth, and now the Earth is fighting back. The planet is full of self-regulating mechanisms—remember those exact words!—to keep life intact. We’ve violated them, and Gaia—remember that word!—is cleansing herself of us. It’s not mysticism, it’s Darwinian self-preservation. Maybe Gaia will start over. Maybe you in the Shell are part of that! But tell McAllister that, tell everyone! Say it!”

She was hysterical, the way Petra’s mother had got hysterical when Pete Grabbed Petra. But she was also real. So Pete repeated the words after her, and then repeated them again, all the while hurling more things into shopping carts. “Gaia. Darwinian self-preservation.” Blankets, socks, a tableful of flimsy books. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” Three folding chairs, all he had room for. “Identical deadly plant mutations in widely separated places. Gaia.” Now he’d reached the start of the food section. Loaves of bread! Boxes of something else!

The ground shook again. The baby started to whimper. Pete tied the huge shopping carts together with towels. He clutched one of the handles in one hand, the baby bucket in the other. Fifteen seconds.

“Bye, Julie. I’m sorry about the tsunami.”

“Alicia!” Julie cried. Then, stopping herself in mid-lunge: “It was us.”

“It was the Tesslies.”

“No, no—don’t you see? We humans always blame the wrong ones! The—”

Pete never heard the rest. He was Grabbed.

2035

“I’m back!” Pete cried from the platform. “Look! Look!” No one was in the Grab room.

That made no sense. McAllister had seen him go. She knew he would be back in twenty-two minutes, and his wrister said that he was. She, at least, should be waiting here. Disappointment lurched through him—he had a baby girl to show her! And all this great stuff! And all those words to tell her that Julie had said… If he could remember them.

He found he remembered them perfectly.

Pete’s belly churned. The excitement of the Grab, the disappointment at no one seeing his triumphant return, his deep disturbance at Julie’s statements, going deeper every moment. Where was McAllister? Where was everybody?

“Hello?” he said, but not loud. No answer.

He hopped off the platform, leaving his Grabbed prizes, still carrying Alicia in her baby-bucket. Cautiously he peered into the corridor.

No one. But through the wide arched entrance to the farm, he glimpsed a movement behind the wide white bulk of the fertilizer machine. A second later Ravi appeared, gestured wildly for Pete to come, then ducked again out of sight. Was it a game of some sort?

He knew it wasn’t. He set the baby-bucket down in the middle of the corridor and sprinted toward Ravi.

“We don’t have much time,” Ravi gasped. “They’ll find out it’s missing. My knife doesn’t work at all on its bucket-case. But you have the laser on your wrister. Quick, kill it!”

Lying on the ground at Ravi’s feet was a Tesslie.

JULY 2014

Julie walked calmly to a deep faux-leather chair in the Costco furniture display. Calmly she sat down. The calm, she knew with the part of her brain that was still rational, would not last. It was shock. Also several other things, including a preternaturally heightened ability to simultaneously comprehend everything around her, instead of in the linear shards that the human mind was usually stuck with.

Alicia was gone.

The megatsunami was on its way.

Washington D.C., including her life there, would soon no longer exist.

Her country would not allow that to go by without a military reaction.

Pete had left behind a pile of objects that must have slid off one of his shopping carts before he… left.

Jake was dead in whatever was happening at the Yellowstone Caldera.

The TVs on the wall had stopped broadcasting.

The Tokyo earthquake and tsunami had been a rehearsal for what would come, once the biologists had detected and contained the plant mutations. Or, alternatively, once Gaia had changed its tactics.