The-Infinite-Sea-Pdf

the wheat and fell. The woman ran to him and scooped him up, pressing the boy’s filthy face against her
breast, and the man with the gun stepped in front of her. He’s freezing. We have to get him inside. And
the man felt a great pressure inside his chest. He was squeezed between what the world had been and
what the world had become, who he was before and who he was now, and the cost of all the unspoken
promises weighing on his heart. He’s just a baby. Would you shoot a child? The woman walked past
him, up the steps, onto the porch, into the house, and the man bowed his head as if in prayer, then lifted
his head as if in supplication. He waited a few minutes to see if anyone else emerged from the wheat,
for it seemed incredible to him that a toddler might survive this long, alone and defenseless, with no one
to protect him. How could such a thing be possible?
When he stepped inside the parlor of the old farmhouse, he saw the woman holding the child in her
lap. She had wrapped a blanket around him and brought him water, little fingers slapped red by the cold
wrapped around the cup, and the others had gathered in the room and no one spoke, but they stared at
the child with dumbstruck wonder. How could such a thing be? The child whimpered. His eyes skittered
from face to face, searching for the familiar, but they were strangers to him as they had been strangers to
one another before the world ended. He whined that he was cold and said that his throat hurt. He had a
bad owie in his throat.
The woman holding him prodded the child to open his mouth. She saw the inflamed tissue at the back
of his mouth, but she did not see the hair-thin wire embedded near the opening of his throat. She could
not see the wire or the tiny capsule connected to the wire’s end. She could not know, as she bent over
the child to peer into his mouth, that the device inside the child was calibrated to detect the carbon
dioxide in her breath.
Our breath the trigger.
Our child the weapon.
The explosion vaporized the old farmhouse instantly.
The wheat took longer. Nothing was left of the farmhouse or the outbuildings or the silo that in every
other year had held the abundant harvest. But the dry, lithe stalks consumed by fire turned to ash, and at
sunset, a stiff northerly wind swept over the prairie and lifted the ash into the sky and carried it
hundreds of miles before the ash came down, a gray and black snow, to settle indifferently on barren
ground.