While Peter and Sara watched, Amy sat at the table and Mausami gently placed Caleb in her arms. One of his hands had come free from the swaddling. Amy bent her face toward him, allowing him to grab her nose with his tiny fingers. “A baby,” she said, smiling.

Maus gave a wry laugh. “That’s what he is, all right.” She pressed a palm against her chest, her aching breasts, and groaned. “Boy, is he ever.”

“I’ve never seen one.” Amy gazed into his face. Every bit of him was so new it was as if he were drenched in some miraculous, life-giving liquid. “Hello, baby.”

The house was too small to accommodate everyone, and Caleb needed quiet; they carried the extra mattresses out and moved into one of the empty houses across the trace. How long since there had been such activity here? Since more than one house had seen people living in it? By the river, great brambles of bitter raspberries appeared, sweetening in the sun; the water jumped with fish. Each day Alicia returned from the hunt, dust-dressed and smiling, game swinging from a lanyard slung across her back: long-eared jacks, fat partridges, something that looked like a cross between a squirrel and a groundhog and tasted like venison. She carried neither gun nor bow; all she used was a blade. “No one’s ever going to go hungry as long as I’m around,” she said.

It was, in its way, a happy time, an easy time—food plentiful, the days mild and lengthening, the nights quiet and apparently safe, under a blanket of stars. And yet, for Peter, a cloud of anxiety hung over all. In part he knew this was just his awareness of how temporary everything was, and the problems presented by their imminent departure—the logistics of food and fuel and weapons and the space to carry it all. They had only one Humvee, hardly large enough to accommodate everyone, especially a woman with a baby. There was also the question of what they would find at the Colony when they returned. Would the lights still be on? Would Sanjay have them arrested? A concern that might have seemed distant even a few weeks ago, nothing worth worrying over, but seemed so no longer.

Ultimately, however, it was not these questions that oppressed him. It was the virus. Ten remaining vials in their shiny metal container, resting in his pack where he had stored it in the closet of the house where he slept with Greer and Michael. The major was right; there could be no other reason why Lacey had given it to him. Already it had saved Alicia—more than saved her. This was the weapon Lacey had spoken of, more powerful than guns or blades or crossbows, more powerful even than the bomb she had used to kill Babcock. But stored in its metal box, it was doing nothing.