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She was not a person Sam could love She was not a person who could love hi to him now But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain She was still, in soht Genius," shein the woods with fleabites in her ar of smoke and carrion, hands awarily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the sun Because that was definitely the life of a genius

The trail led closer to the barrier now She knew this trail well; it would disappear through the barrier There would be soh terrain for half a mile before another trail would appear Orback; who could tell

Here, suddenly, she noticed that the dark part of the barrier had crept higher Two tall spikes of black on the barrier, like fingers reaching up out of the earth The taller of the two stretched up for maybe fifteen or twenty feet

Astrid steeled herself for a necessary experier and touched the black portion of the barrier

"Ahhh!" She cursed under her breath It still hurt to touch That hadn’t changed

As she threaded her way through dense bushes and e, she considered the proble the advance of the stain Here, too, she saw rising fingers of darkness, not as high as the others she’d seen, and thinner She watched one of the stains closely for half an hour, anxious at wasting ti to have some kind of observation The scientifically inclined part of her brain had survived intact where other aspects had di At first she her and instead it had thickened

"Still remember how to calculate the surface area of a sphere?" Astrid asked herself "Four pi r squared"

She did the math in her head as she walked The diameter of the barrier enty miles, which hly twelve point six; r squared is a hundred So the surface area is twelve point six times a hundred One thousand two hundred and sixty square round or underwater, so six hundred and thirty square miles of do," Astrid told herself, taking pleasure fro until the dome was dark? Astrid wondered

Because Astrid had very little doubt that the stain would continue spreading

Into her head ca to her that he was afraid of the dark It was in his room, in his former home, the place he’d shared with his mother It was perhaps the reason that in a sudden panic he had created the first of ould come to be known as Sas to be scared of now Surely he was over that ancient terror

She hoped so Because she had a terrible feeling that a very long night was co

The baby would not look at her Diana looked at hi so filled her with sick dread

He could already walk But this was a dreas didn’t have to make sense It was a dream; she knew that for sure because she knew the baby was not able to walk

It was inside of her A living thing inside of her own body A body within a body She could picture it in there with its eyes closed, all twisted so that its tiny legs were drawn up to its barrel chest

Inside her body

But now in her head, too In her drea to look at her

You don’t want to shownow Tiny, webbed fetus fingers clutched a doll

The doll was black and white