A person appeared. A young woman. Dark skin, huge white smile. She was standing up through the strange car’s sunroof.

It was one of the three Zeds who’d gotten away on the banks of the Potomac. Jordan Hennessy.

“Oh, shit!” Bellos swiped for the radio before he realized that the arm he’d swiped with wasn’t there anymore.

Ramsay grabbed the radio instead, smashed the button on the side. “There’s a Zed. It’s—”

Hennessy gave them the finger before throwing something at their windshield.

The two men in the truck’s cab had just enough time to see that the projectile was a small, silvery orb before it exploded across the windshield. A metallic cloud burst around the truck.

The cloud was getting inside the cab. The radio was talking, Lock was talking. None of it seemed important. All that was important was looking at the cloud, watching the little glimmering motes hovering in the air, feeling each sparkly moment invade their nostrils, coat their sinuses, live in their minds. They were the cloud.

The truck hurtled off the highway, just missing the Airstream trailer. It churned several dozen yards into the dead wheat before coming to a lumpy halt.

“What’s going on?” shouted the radio.

No one answered.

Now the back of the truck was opening. The other Moderators were coming out, guns bristling.

To this point, guns had always won. Well, aside from the last time. And the time before that. And the one before that. And before that. But before that, it had been Moderators 200, Zeds 0, or whatever. The point was that, statistically, the guns would work.

“Stay sharp,” Lock said.

A few yards away, between the truck and the Airstream, a car door opened.

This shocked the emerging Moderators, who, like Bellos and Ramsay, found it difficult to remember seeing the strange car.

A young man stepped out. He had dark, buzzed hair and pale, chilly skin. His eyes were as blue as the sky above, though more suggestive of bad weather.

The young man was taking something from his jacket, a little glass bottle with a dropper top. He was uncapping it.

He was another one of them. Ronan Lynch.

“Oh, shit,” said a Moderator named Nikolenko.

Ronan Lynch squeezed drops of liquid onto the flattened wheat, and every drop released wind, fury, leaves. It was an East Coast winter squall contained in a bottle.

Impossible, dreamt, mind-bending.

It churned Moderators from their feet and sent bullets wide. It pummeled their bodies and thoughts. It was not just weather but also the feel of weather, the dread of it, the damp, pressed-down sloth of a socked-in late-year storm, and they couldn’t rise as it soaked them.