They arched their backs, lifted their arms and strove to slow their descent, but both slammed immediately into the upper ring of the thing.

He saw her bomb rip from her hands and heard a series of echoing thuds as it fell spinning away.

“Gina!”

Silence. Whipping wind. Lying on the surface of the drone, they were now rising fast. His body was still wrapped around the faintly warm casing of his bomb.

For the first time in his life, he uttered a true scream, a great, tearing roar of rage and disappointment. The most important of all his missions was a failure, and because of his failure, vast suffering and madness would now envelop the world.

Black creatures—not the insects, but things blacker than darkness itself—were riding the drone, and with the grace of soaring birds but none of their beauty, they launched themselves toward him. As the first one hit, its claws digging into his uniform, he lifted his arm against what proved to be a great but invisible weight. More of the things leaped on him, then more yet, and he began to feel their claws ripping deep, and hot agony as his skin was sliced.

Even as they were tearing him apart, he heard Gina’s growl of rage and felt her ripping at them, dragging them off him. Slowly, painfully, he turned his bomb until he was facing the trigger.

He butted his head against it.

The creatures swarmed him, screaming wildly.

Again, he struck it, this time so hard he heard his own skull crack.

Still nothing.

He pushed at it, got it to the edge of the great ring, and dove off again, clutching it as the great forms fluttered around him, then fell back, unable to descend as fast.

He went down and down, toward a distant point of light that gradually grew into a busy factory floor that was racing up at him.

He saw a hybrid look up. He saw it start to run.

There came yet another form of light as pure as silver and somehow alive, a whole universe of light.

For less than the millionth of a second, he was aware of ferocious chaos.

Then dark.

Chapter Twenty-Five

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

HEREAFTER

A dream of thunder became thunder, dense and powerful, as if the heights of the world were coming undone. Wind sighed, and Mark saw leaves spinning high in a gray sky, and angry clouds rushing above the tops of a forest.

His body was cold, but when he willed it to warmth, as he had done all of his life, nothing happened.

The leaves spun on their stems, the wind made a sound like memory. How old is it, the wind, he wondered. He thought that it came even before the sea. Next came a realization, quite calm but also surprising: He was alive.