With a trembling hand, Dominique removes the smart-binoculars from her belt pack. She switches the viewer from day to night vision, then zooms in, focusing on the villagers, all of whom are covered in the same gray dust.

Something’s happening. I’ve got to get down there …

The outskirts of the village is a swampy cesspool of silvery brown ooze, stagnant with humanlike feces, garbage, bones and the smoldering remains of ashen flesh. Twenty-inch scarab beetles feast upon the offering by the tens of thousands, their sharp mandibles creating a nerve-wracking crunching sound as they feed.

Sucking hard on her regulator, Dominique hurries through the knee-deep slime, making her way to more solid footing. The dusty soil beneath her feet is now a spongy surface saturated with the same brownish gray liquid of the swamp, ooze rising from the porous earth with each step.

She comes to the first quadrangle of claylike, windowless shanties. The rows of odd-shaped dwellings are listing in this unstable mire, their foundations sinking into stagnant sewage.

Dominique gags into her mouthpiece and readjusts her nose apparatus, the stench of her surroundings almost unbearable even through her breathing apparatus.

Composing herself, she makes her way to the end of a row, then peeks around a fractured wall.

The dust-choked streets appear deserted.

A fluttering sound causes her to look up. Perched on the roofs across the street are four owl-like creatures, each the size of a twelve-year-old human child. Their bulbous, featherless heads are caked in gray dust, their pupilless round eyes blinded by white cataracts. The folded wings, incapable of flight, are scaly, ending in sharp talons.

The mutant creatures are staring at her, gasping painful breaths through their deformed beaklike mouths.

What kind of evil creates such genetic mutations?

Dominique moves back into the shadows, contemplating. Her once-black environmental suit is already covered in gray dust. Grabbing handfuls of soil, she rubs more of the soot on her face and hair, camouflaging herself as best she can.

Satisfied, she moves down the grime-covered roadway, heading for a wider avenue that she prays will lead her to Jacob.

Dominique encounters the next villager as it hobbles out of the doorless entry of a one-room shanty. The miserable wretch had probably been a male. The scowling being is walking on its hands, its lower torso having been severed below the waist. Massive pustulating blue scabs bleed through the gray cover of dust that coats its skin.

Topping off its painful deformities is a bowling-ball-sized violet-glowing orb that has been surgically embedded in the life-form’s lower back.

The tortured being grunts as it straddle-walks on heavily callused knuckles, the ends of its tunic dragging along the dirt. A fine ebony mist snorts from its flared nostrils with each excruciating exhalation.

Fear and compassion fill Dominique’s mind as she watches the life-form struggle with its artificial weight. She waits another moment, then hurries past him to a central thoroughfare.