Kira stepped forward, trying to see the wounds better. “What warning?”

“I have repaired the climate,” said the creature. “I’ve fixed the planet we broke so long ago. Now the world can heal again.”

Kira shook her head, barely understanding what he was trying to say. “You’re saying you’re the one who made it cold?”

“I cleansed the air, the water, the atmosphere. Earth’s protective layers. Undid all the damage from our weapons in the old war. I’ve restored balance. We’ll have seasons again. The first winter will be hard, and none of the people are ready. I warned them to help them survive.”

“You’re one of the Trust,” said Kira. She ran through her mental list, cataloguing every member she knew and which ones she didn’t, to puzzle out who this might be. There were only two unaccounted for, and one was her father, Armin Dhurvasula. Her mind reeled at the thought that this impossible creature—so altered by gene mods that he’d lost his humanity completely—might be her father.

She tried to speak, but her voice was lost. She coughed, shivering in the cold spray of the ocean sound, and tried again. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“No one has used my name in . . . thirteen years.”

She stared at the wounds, at the dark blood seeping out onto the cold gray rocks below. She barely dared to speak it. “Armin?”

“No,” said the creature. It watched the coming storm with sad, wistful eyes. “My name was Jerry Ryssdal.”

Kira felt a rush of emotion—loss and sadness, that the man she’d found was not her father, and joy, that her father was not this thing dying slowly on the beach. Guilt, that she took joy in any aspect of another man’s death. She wondered if some of those emotions were his—his sadness at dying, his joy at fixing the weather. His guilt for destroying the world.

Jerry Ryssdal was the one she knew the least about; Vale had said he lived in the south, near the eternal fires of old Houston. He’d changed himself, Vale said. Kira had never known what to make of that, but it was obvious now. A brutal barrage of gene mods to help him survive in the toxic wasteland. He’d dedicated his life to restoring the world—not the people in it, but the world itself. Somehow, impossibly, he’d done it.

The first winter will be hard, she thought, repeating his words. She’d never known a real winter; very few people had. There hadn’t been one since the old war, before the Isolation War, when buttons were pushed and hell was unleashed and the world had been changed forever. Not forever, she thought. It’s changing back now. But any change this drastic will be painful to endure.

She looked up and saw the first snowflake fall.

Chapter Twenty-eight

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT