Behind her, she heard the steps coming up with a mechanical whine, then the door closing. Immediately, the tone of the engines changed and they pulled out onto the runway. For a moment, she could see to the east and noticed lightning flickering below the horizon. To be visible from here, the storm must have grown past even the most dire predictions.

Nobody approached her, including the guard, who remained sitting silently at the rear of the cabin. They had their orders to take her to Travis AFB in California, and that’s what they would do.

Her mind kept returning to the possibility that another escalation had taken place. What was the caller on the radio talking about.

As the scream of the jets rose and the plane took off, they combined in her mind with the screams of what she feared would shortly be a great number of innocent people.

Outside, the sky glowed deep orange, the blood of dawn. The plane seemed stopped in the sky, a maddening illusion. In that dawn, she thought perhaps she could see the end of one world and the beginning of another.

They knew too little, and it was too late. Too little too late—some insight. She snapped the shade down.

*   *   *

After the ambulances had come and taken the survivors and the dead, the night had passed in what to Mark seemed an increasingly ominous silence. You’d think that the hybrids would attack en masse and simply overwhelm him with numbers. But it had not happened. He thought of that disk. Maybe they were still hoping to use it on him.

There had been a lot more trouble than he had expected with the medical personnel, who were outraged that they would not be told more about the nature of their patients’ injuries, or why they could not see the dead perpetrators, or why the civil authorities could not be involved.

Once Mark had finished concealing the hybrid remains in body bags, the medics had finally been allowed into the Glade, where the evidence of extreme agony—the human ruins, the things like scratches gouged into the walls by people trying to escape, the blood sprayed even on the ceiling—had reduced them to horrified silence.

As Mark had bagged the hybrids, he had noted that they were already beginning to deteriorate, the glassy eyeballs sinking into the heads, the scales becoming slack and gray. When he lifted the bodies, they had been like sacks filled with hard, bulging shapes, not skeletons as we understood them. There was nothing human about the way they looked now, except for those exquisite, frighteningly innocent faces of theirs, carefully designed to hide the danger they actually represented. They had the faces of angels with the eyes of demons.