Kalico’s hearing was coming back, the insane ringing beginning to fade. She sat, curled in a seat in the cabin, staring at the darkness behind her window as Dek’s airplane spirited them east, driven by a tailwind. The Gulf was down there, dark, menacing in a way it had never been.

They had enough charge to make it back to the beach charger. They’d have to spend the night there, recharge, and fly back to PA in the morning. But they were off the Pod with its dead and creeping algae.

Donovan was a dangerous world. Didn’t matter if it was in the Number Three or out at the Maritime Unit.

Kalico glanced across at Vik Lawrence. In the dim glow of the cabin lights, the microbiologist and geneticist had a shocked look on her face, her eyes distant with nightmare and disbelief.

Vik had shot the little green boy at the last minute. The bullet blowing through his chest had spoiled his aim. Caused his shot to blast a divot out of the sialon beside Kalico’s head. Saved all of their lives.

Kalico tried not to think about how close she’d come to dying. Or the kid’s corpse, rolled tightly in a tarp and stored back in the cargo hold along with Dr. Lawrence’s crate, notes, and specimens. The little shit might have been ready to blow them away, but he’d end up surrendering a goldmine of biological information on what Vik called “the slime.”

That is, assuming the good doctor wasn’t a psychological basket case.

God knew, she had a right to be. Kalico would live with the memory of the dead where they lay mangled on the floor. Two little girls, their green bodies torn by bullets. Kevina Schwantz, her forehead split with an ax. Kalico had gagged at Anna Gabarron’s putrefying corpse in the smashed Pod clinic. And then there was that single glance she’d cast down the stairway to level one. She’d been fascinated and repulsed by the slime, humped up, twisting around on the stairs, and engulfing Michaela Hailwood’s corpse down on the level one landing. There had been no sign of the little girl called Breez. Maybe she’d been completely devoured.

Vik had been shaking, verging on throwing up, as she told how Felix had split his mother’s head, how Breez had somehow torn Michaela’s trachea from her throat, how it had all spiraled out of control. She’d broken down before she could tell the whole tale, but that would come. Later, when and if the woman could pull herself together.

How the hell could this have happened? Vik Lawrence was the only survivor? A bunch of kids and algae had destroyed the Maritime Unit?