The Hatchlings hurled the air-conditioner unit from the access hatch and blasted onto the roof as if sprayed from a fire nozzle.
Alex and I turned to face them.
But as the breeze swirled down at us, they puddled instantly where they stood. As they fell away, only one remained standing.
The sole female in the group.
She stiffened. And then walked to the edge of the building. She lay down on her back. As Alex and I watched with amazement, her stomach pulsed and then burst open, releasing a stream of orange mist.
Alex and I looked out across the city.
Dozens of females scaled to various high points—billboards, rooftops, streetlights—and burst open.
A New Year’s fireworks display.
The orange mist spread across the blocks, a growing cloud, eating through the male Hatchlings below. The streets filled with the sounds of screeches, the anguish of the dying.
As we watched with astonishment, the mist coated the armor of the Drones and Queens. The acid seemed to gnaw through the suits, because they burst from their armor, one after another, bleeding out into the air.
I heard an echo of the Rebel’s words when I’d asked about the Drones and Queens: They’ve been accounted for as well.
No matter how much we’d hypothesized that the dispersal mechanism built into my and Patrick’s cells was plug-and-play, there’d been no way to know for certain that the weaponized pathogen would act the same as the Rebel’s serum.
Not until now.
All over the city peaks, female Hatchlings continued to burst. The wind whipped the orange mist toward Ponderosa Pass, Creek’s Cause, and beyond. I don’t know how long Alex and I stood there watching the concentration of mist thicken and sweep away to cities and states unseen. It was near impossible to tear our eyes from the sight before us. After a time we noticed something on the virtual monitors in the hollowed-out bank building.
Hatchlings were disintegrating by the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Females climbed to high points across the city and exploded, laying waste to Drones, Queens, and male Hatchlings.
Like the great Dusting, but in reverse.
I recalled another piece of the Rebel’s speech about the serum: It is engineered to spread at a massively accelerated rate.
Once the trend spread to Chicago and caught the lip of the East Coast, Alex and I shuffled toward the access roof. We had to wade through bodies of Hatchlings all the way down through City Hall. The building was lined with decomposing flesh, the stench nearly unbearable.
At last we stepped out into the vast courtyard.
All around us a landscape of destruction.
But then we heard a cry of joy.
JoJo and Rocky sprinting up the main thoroughfare, flapping their arms and hollering at us.
I lifted a hand in greeting. Alex and I hadn’t spoken, not since Patrick’s death. There was too much grief and wonder.
We watched the kids approach, whooping and screaming. JoJo waved Bunny’s head by the ears. At last she slammed into me.
We stood there for a moment, the four of us in the wide expanse of the courtyard. Orange mist spun all around us, like we were inside a snow globe.
“Patrick,” JoJo said, looking around frantically. “Where’s Patrick?”
My chest felt bricked in, my lungs tight. “He’s gone,” I said, and saying it made it real and permanent.
JoJo squeezed me harder, and I felt those bricks falling away, all the emotion opening up. It was hard to breathe, but I managed.
Rocky’s forehead was shiny with sweat. “How?” he asked.
“Saving us,” Alex said. “Saving everyone.”
The mist settled over the surrounding high-rises, texturing the asphalt and abandoned cars, and I thought about how it wasn’t just mist. It was Patrick. He was the air, and he was life, and he was the reason it would be safe here for the next twenty-four thousand years.
In that safety was freedom. And yet with freedom came a new kind of fear. All my life I’d always thought it was what I wanted. Freedom. But I realized now it was a kind of void, too. There were no Harvesters to fight against. No parents to look after us. No aunts and uncles.
No big brother.
It was down to just me to shape myself and the world however I wanted. I could strive. I could fail. And at the end of the day, who I would become—what my world would become—would rest on my shoulders.
Next to me Alex held her hand to her mouth, and I could tell that the same kinds of thoughts were flooding through her. No matter what we faced, at least I had her at my side. And she’d have me at hers.
Far in the distance, I thought I heard the confused cries of kids locked away in holding pens somewhere. Then the wind shifted, and there was a sound unlike any I’d heard in over two months’ time.
Quiet.
I thought of those incoming signals Zach had told us about. Survivors out there for us to find.
Something tumbled toward us from above, riding the wind. A black cowboy hat.
Patrick’s.
I watched the hat twirl in the air. It landed at my feet. I crouched. Picked it up. Stared at it, feeling a lifetime of emotion gather at the back of my throat.
I put it on.
Taking Alex’s hand, I turned to face the faintest gleam of light to the west.
The first rising sun of the New Year.
“Come on,” I said. “We got work to do.”