It was not Drake but Brittney who finally came to the place where the gaiaphage lay. It was like living green sand. Billions of particles, each almost invisible to the eye, but together forming a single living thing, a hive.

The cavern was vast, impossibly huge. As if someone had sunk a sports stadium into the earth. The green, glowing mass of the gaiaphage covered stalactites and stalagmites, granite walls, and sandstone rock skyscrapers.

But beneath Brittney’s feet the floor was strangely level and smooth. The gaiaphage had left an uncovered space for her to see and to understand.

She knelt and pressed her hand against a clear patch of translucent, pearly gray beneath her. The searing pain a living person would have felt was only an interesting tingle to Brittney.

She knew what it was and where she was. This was the bottom of the FAYZ wall, the bottom of the giant bubble. She was ten miles down, at the lowest depths of the enclosed universe of the FAYZ.

Plague, Chapter 27