Sole Survivor

Infiniface didn't actually forge documents as much as use their computer savvy to manipulate the system into spitting out real papers for people who didn't exist.
        He had undergone inner changes too, and he credited those to Nina-though he continued to refuse the ultimate gift that she could give him. She had changed him not by her touch but by her example, by her sweetness and kindness, by her trust in him, by her love of life and her love of him and her calm faith in the rightness of all things. She was only six years old but in some ways ancient, because if she was what everyone believed she was, then she was tied to the infinite by an umbilical of light.
        They were staying with a commune of Infiniface members, those who wore no robes and left their heads unshaven. The big house stood back from the beach and was filled at almost any hour of the day with the soft clatter of computer keyboards. In a week or two, Joe and Nina would move on to another group, bringing them the gift that only this child could reveal, for they travelled continuously in the quiet spreading of the word. In a few years, when her maturing power made her less vulnerable, the time would arrive to tell the world.
        Now, on this anniversary of loss, she came to him on the beach, under the gently swaying palm, as he had known she would, and she sat at his side. Currently her hair was brown. She was wearing pink shorts and a white top with Donald Duck winking on her chest-as ordinary in appearance as any six-year-old on the planet. She drew her knees up and encircled her legs with her arms, and for a while she said nothing.
        They watched a big, long-legged sand crab move across the beach, select a nesting place, and burrow out of sight.
        Finally she said, “Why won't you open your heart?”
        “I will. When the time's right.”
        “When will the time be right?”
        “When I learn not to hate.”
        “Who do you hate?”
        “For a long time-you.”
        “Because I'm not your Nina.”
        “I don't hate you any more.”
        “I know.”
        “I hate myself.”
        “Why?”
        “For being so afraid.”
        “You're not afraid of anything,” she said.
        He smiled. “Scared to death of what you can show me.”
        “Why?”
        “The world's so cruel. It's so hard. If there's a God, He tortured my father with disease and then took him young. He took Michelle, my Chrissie, my Nina. He allowed Rose to die.”
        “This is a passage.”
        “A damn vicious one.”
        She was silent a while.
        The sea whispered against the strand. The crab stirred, poked an eye stalk out to examine the world, and decided to move.
        Nina got up and crossed to the sand crab. Ordinarily, these creatures were shy and scurried away when approached. This one did not run for cover but watched Nina as she dropped to her knees and studied it. She stroked its shell. She touched one of its claws, and the crab didn't pinch her.
        Joe watched-and wondered.
        Finally the girl returned and sat beside Joe, and the big crab disappeared into the sand.
        She said, “If the world is cruel… you can help me fix it. And if that's what God wants us to do, then He's not cruel, after all.”
        Joe did not respond to her pitch.
        The sea was an iridescent blue. The sky curved down to meet it at an invisible seam.
        “Please,” she said. “Please take my hand, Daddy.”
        She had never called him daddy before, and his chest tightened when he heard the word.
        He met her amethyst eyes. And wished they were grey like his own. But they were not. She had come with him out of wind and fire, out of darkness and terror, and he supposed that he was as much her father as Rose Tucker had been her mother.
        He took her hand.
        And knew.
        For a time he was not on a beach in Florida but in a bright blueness with Michelle and Chrissie and Nina. He did not see what worlds waited beyond this one, but he knew beyond all doubt that they existed, and the strangeness of them frightened him but also lifted his heart.
        He understood that eternal life was not an article of faith but a law of the universe as true as any law of physics. The universe is an efficient creation: matter becomes energy; energy becomes matter; one form of energy is converted into another form; the balance is forever changing,