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I covered the distance between us, Jesse at my side.

“Mama,” Annie trumpeted through a stifled yawn. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Jesse smiling at her.

“The day is over,” she said. “We have to go nighty-night.”

A sharp stab burned in my chest. It was an innocent comment. Still, her tone held finality. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”

She shrugged. “We have to go, but Dada says we’ll see you again someday.”

Their forms faded and solidified again. Then they vanished.

Gone. I waved my arms around me and strained my eyes, searching the air, aching to feel, to see a remnant of their presence. There were no dissolving bones, no animated inferno, no blustering vortex. They were just…gone. I dropped to my knees and screwed my eyes shut. Air pushed from my lungs in heavy rasps. They were dead, I reminded myself. I watched them die.

I curled my nails in the loose dirt. Directed my thoughts to the earth. Away from the need to scream their names. I wanted to hold them and never let them go.

When I opened my eyes, a solid frame blocked my view. Jesse pulled me to his chest. He held me as the air crackled around us, as the synergy of their memories dissipated into the surrounding realm of living things.

I sucked in a deep breath. It was warm, lively, as if their energy had melded with the oxygen I inhaled. “They’re gone,” I whispered.

“We all have a responsibility to the earth.” Jesse held me tighter. “What we take from it in life, we give back in death. When you feel a snowflake on your cheek, when you hear the whisper of the wind at your back, when you see the ribbons of mist hovering a pond, you’ll know it’s them. Their energy. One blood.”

I released a choppy breath. When the wind blew back, I wondered.

Jesse turned me to face the western horizon where the afterglow of the sun’s departure lit up the mountains. His lips moved at my ear. “Just like day and night, we heed the seasons of birth, life and rebirth.”

Unearthing the mysteries of life and death was an unobtainable wish. I walked so many roads in two years. Left behind so many dead. Made so many mistakes, beginning with Joel’s death. Then the young sailor, Ian. And Frida. Oh God, she was so close to happiness.

The music player powered on beneath my restless fingers and I queued up Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind. Jesse’s palm tapped my hip as if he could hear the croon from my ear buds.

A shadow fell over my lap. “It worked,” Michio mouthed, eyes glittering. He sat at my side, Roark at the other. Their hands settling on my knees.

Jesse’s heart beat against my back. Near the cabin, Tallis cradled the woman’s head in his lap. A faint smile creased her face in sleep. One cured woman gave me no illusions of salvation, but for one day, it was enough. The sun would return and when it did, we’d begin again. Humanity might be dependent on the most unlikely of heroes, but I had the Yang to my Yin, the Adam to my Eve. Three guardians. Three reasons to care, to fight, to live.

Together we watched the sun bow below the horizon in veneration for the eve that followed.

The eve of the beginning.

5000 miles away…

A symphony of unearthly cries blanketed the island, l’Isola del Vescovo. At the center of the Mediterranean, there was nowhere for them go, nothing for them to eat. But their resilient bodies wouldn’t starve. The aphids would roam the confines of the water’s edge in an endless haze of hunger. And across the ocean, when the last mammal on Earth released its last breath, aphid cries would consume every island, every continent. But there was little concern for that.

Labored breaths sawed in and out of ruined lungs. The voice was an abrasion, scratching the raw tissue of an unhealed esophagus. “Forgive me, brother. I failed us.”

The Drone fingered the silken webbing that covered the wall of his lab. “But I will fix this. My messengers will find her again, and when they do—”

Agony ripped through his midsection where the boils festered and wheezed. More velvet threads spun forth and wove around the hanging cocoon.

Nerve endings throbbed beneath charred skin as he willed his feet to slide toward the wall.

“When they find her,” he rasped, stroking what was left of his brother’s moldering scalp, “she will offer herself like Allah Almighty willed it, and finally we will live in perfect harmony.”

Gossamer threads suspended his brother’s disembodied head at eye level. The zigzag scar was the only recognizable feature in his decomposed face.

Red clouded his vision. He slowed his rising heart rate with measured breaths and side-stepped to the web-wrapped husk swaying beside the head. The effort ripped pangs through his dermis and into underlying muscle and bones.