“So I’m giving you a new start. By shrinking the world’s population, I’m allowing you to think about what’s truly important. How, and to whom, your time and energy and love should be allocated. I’m providing you with the opportunity, as you rebuild your lives, to avoid the mistakes of the past.”

Tears fall onto my cheeks. For all the people who died. For the fathers and babies and spouses and best friends. For the dreams that have been cut short, for the lives that were never lived. For all the love that’s been snuffed out, mercilessly, from this world.

Raising a shaky hand, I swipe at my face. I don’t deserve to cry. Not when it was my brother who caused this wholesale destruction. Not when I should’ve, could’ve stopped him. Some way, somehow.

“I am the Maker,” Archie shouts. “The Virus Maker but also the maker of the new world. If you have any doubt, witness my resistance to the sun. I—and I alone—ingested the antidote to the virus. I—and I alone—am immune to the effects of these rays.”

He looks directly at us, which means he’s located the security camera. “Make no mistake. This is not a cure. The antidote was created during the earliest days of the virus by a freak mutation that I haven’t been able to replicate. And thus, I am the only one in the world of my kind.” He lowers his arms. “I always was, you know. You made me this way. You made me different; you made me alone. And now, I literally am.”

He laughs, wretched and miserable. The sound echoes in the empty space around him, in the oceans of crumbling dirt, in the waves of rippling fields.

My insides twist and fold, becoming a grotesque origami of their original selves. I reach my hand toward the holo-screen. This man…has lost all his humanity. He has killed millions and condemned the rest of us to live in a cramped, dark facsimile of our normal world.

This person is not Archie. Not anymore. He bears no resemblance to the brother I used to know. The one I’ve always loved.

And yet, I long to comfort him, like I’ve tried to do all my life. I want to reach the desperate, lonely boy inside. His pain started when our mother left. It grew with the taunting of our classmates. And then it exploded when, one by one, he lost us all. His best friend, Zeke, to a new research passion and other colleagues. The woman he secretly and then not so secretly loved, Lalana, when she couldn’t return his feelings. And then me, when I married Bandit.

I feel his pain like a stake in my heart. And I need to make it better.