She tripped a little, or maybe she didn’t but only pretended, who cared: he took her in his arms. Yes, she felt different. Her belly was larger. Her breasts larger as well. The rest of her felt pitifully thin.
“How’s your mouth?” he asked, wanting badly to kiss her.
“Why, what do you have in mind?”
He laughed.
“Say it. But . . .”
“But what?” he asked.
She whispered it, sounding too vulnerable. “But only if it’s the truth, Caine. Only. If.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, satisfied.
He kissed her, and yes, her mouth still worked.
Then, serious, he said, “So we don’t go to the island?”
“Why were you going?”
He sighed. “I had two answers in mind. One, I was running away like a rat. That was the main answer. I can’t . . . I’d rather die. I can’t let her do that to me again. So I was running away.”
“Two answers?” Diana asked.
“Look, number one . . . no, numbers one through nine were running away. But the other answer, the one that was much less at, sort of, the forefront of my mind, but that was a possibility . . .” He ran out of steam after all that evasion. “Look, part of me was thinking about those stupid missiles of Albert’s.”
“You think they would kill her?”
He shrugged. “It’s all I could think of that would surprise her. Catch her off guard.” He sighed. The truth welled up inside him. The fact that he loved her. And the fact that it wouldn’t save him.
“We don’t make it out of here, do we?” he said.
Diana shook her head. “No, my love.”
They stood for a long time in each other’s arms. Then, at last, Caine fired up the motor and the boat headed toward the island.
And Diana, with Perdido Beach falling away behind her, with tears rolling down her cheeks, with the light of the onrushing fire reflected in her dark eyes, whispered another boy’s name.
“Little Pete . . .”
His name was Peter Ellison, but everyone had always called him Little Pete.
Sometimes Petey.
And now he heard his name. Like prayers floating up to him from the ghosts.
A voice he knew.
A voice he did not know.
A third voice that reached to him in a way like the Darkness sometimes did, silently, through that emptiness that connected all who had been touched by the Darkness.
In different words, in different ways, they each said, Take me.
Take me, Petey.
Take me, Little Pete.
Take me, you little freak.
TWENTY-FIVE
4 HOURS, 44 MINUTES
PUG, THE CRAZY thing, had actually fired one of the missiles at them as Caine and Diana neared the island.
The missile was not much good against a person with the power to move things with his mind—something Caine knew he would have to remember later. Maybe the element of surprise . . . maybe Gaia wouldn’t know what they were . . .
Yeah. Maybe. And maybe not. In which case, plan B.
Caine did not much like plan B.
But as he lay beside Diana in the big bed, the same one where they had conceived Gaia, he knew he had, finally, no alternative. He was trapped between pains: the pain that Gaia could bring, and the pain that would come if he lost Diana.
Why had she forced him to admit his feelings? Women. Didn’t they know that emotions were meant to be suppressed?
“Love sucks,” Caine muttered.
Diana nuzzled against him, her lips on his neck, sending chills all through his body.
A line of night-blue between separated curtains became a line of gray. Dawn, and time to go.
He slid carefully, silently, out of the bed. Where were his clothes? He’d left them right here, right on the floor, knowing he would have to dress silently to escape undiscovered.
“I hid them,” Diana said.
He turned to face her. “And why would you do that?”
“So you couldn’t sneak away. Really, Caine: how long have I known you? Also . . .”
“Uh-huh?”
“Also I like you like this.”
He swallowed hard, feeling strangely vulnerable and a little silly. “You said we couldn’t . . .”
“Mmmm. True. But I still like looking at you. It’s a good thing you’re so rotten,” she said with a long sigh. “Scares off most girls. I never would have had a chance with you if you’d been a decent human being.”
“I wasn’t running away,” he said.
“I know. I know what you were doing, Caine. And thanks for the thought. But I want to be there to see the end. I want to see you stop her.”
“Yeah,” he said, straining to put some slight shred of optimism into the word. “If you’re coming, then we have to go.”
“Or the reverse of that . . . We have a few minutes,” she said. “Come here. It won’t take more than a few minutes.”
Connie Temple had given up waiting for Astrid to arrive at the rendezvous Dahra had arranged. She had spent the night at a motel, then come back in the morning, just in case. She wrote a note and stuck it on the end of a stick where the northeastern shoreline of the lake met the barrier. The note said, Sorry I missed you. Connie Temple. There was a PS. Just the single word “Sam,” followed by a question mark.
It seemed somehow ludicrous. Like putting a Post-it on the refrigerator door for Sam, back in the old days.
As she was leaving, she noticed a body on the beach that she had not seen before. Maybe someone sleeping, maybe some survivor, most likely a body washed ashore. She watched until she was sure it was not Sam.
Boats were heading out from the outside marina, more lookers drawn by rumors of a slaughter at the lake. She couldn’t bear to think of mothers like herself possibly seeing the bloated body of a child floating just inches away, unreachable. A TV truck had come in the night. She saw cameras with long-distance lenses.
She climbed into the borrowed SUV and drove back down south. She tuned the satellite radio to a news station.
“The fire is clearly now spreading beyond the Stefano Rey. California fire officials are rushing firefighting teams to the perimeter of the anomaly. They are concerned that should the containment fail, the fire would spread immediately to the large forest outside the so-called FAYZ.”
Connie switched stations.
“. . . monstrous and evil children, and the idea that they should be allowed to walk out of that satanic place and infect decent God-fearing people with—”
On the third try she got a calmer voice. NPR. But the subject was still the same. The anomaly. The FAYZ. It was all anyone was paying attention to.
“. . . physics. As has been long theorized, especially by Dr. Jacobs at the University of California, Berkeley, these phenomena demonstrate that in some way we do not begin yet to understand, the laws that define our universe have been altered. What’s troubling, of course, is that if it can happen once, it can happen again. We can never again be entirely confident—”
Enough. She’d had her fill of clever people with impressive degrees trying to explain what was happening. People like that had convinced the government to try and implode the sphere with a bomb.
Finally she found the nineties-rock station and let that play the rest of the way while she tried to think. She was sleepy and nearly running off the road, so it wasn’t easy.
If the dome fell, if Sam and Caine walked freely out into the world, there was a better-than-even chance that they would be arrested shortly thereafter.
There wasn’t much, if anything, she could do about that except to warn the kids inside to start getting their stories straight. The local district attorney had soft-pedaled the matter of arrests and investigations, but other state officials were grandstanding, and Congress looked as if it would stick its nose in as well.
The idea that the kids inside should come through all they�
��d survived and then go to prison was intolerable. But with something like three hundred kids—fewer now—it would be child’s play for prosecutors to get some, at least, to testify against others.
And truth be told, didn’t some of those kids need to be locked up?
She pushed that thought aside, but the image of Sam with his deadly light blazing from his hands . . . the little girl he’d tried to kill . . . the other one he had incinerated . . . The fact that before all this ever started, he’d lashed out and burned the hand off her ex-husband, his stepfather . . .
She’d watched YouTubes of all the interviews with kids inside. Those that mentioned Sam described him as a leader, a fighter, someone who had saved them more than once. Inside the FAYZ he was a hero.
But one interview had stuck with her. It had been given by a young boy who called himself Bug and could almost disappear, or at least fade into the background to become nearly invisible. He’d said Sam was a killer.
He almost killed me once, Bug had said.
The stories of her other son, Caine, were much darker. Kids looked nervously over their shoulders when they talked about him.
But he’s not the worst, the super-speedy little celebrity who called herself the Breeze had said. He’s evil, absolutely. But he’s not psycho like Drake.
Yes, maybe some really would need to be locked up. Like rabid dogs or rogue tigers.
What could she do? Get a lawyer for Sam? She didn’t have that kind of money.
But wait, others would have that kind of money. Wouldn’t they? The kids in the FAYZ needed lawyers; they needed friendly politicians; they needed celebrities to speak for them. All that nonsense, they needed it. Public relations. Advisers.
All of which meant money. Lots of money.
Connie arrived back at the small trailer she’d shared with Abana Baidoo for almost a year. She found Abana sounding optimistic.
“I talked—well, you know, wrote notes to—another kid inside who said Dahra is loved by everyone. Running the hospital, a good girl.”
“Yes,” Connie said.
“Where have you been?”
Connie knew she should tell Abana that she had sent Dahra to the lake. But it would just worry her, probably needlessly. Most likely Dahra had not made it to the lake. Most likely she’d sent word or sent someone else or . . .
And she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell her friend she’d sent her daughter to a massacre.
“I went to the lake. I heard Sam was up there and I . . . I went up there.”
Abana looked closely at her, head tilted quizzically, sensing something wrong. “There’s some video of a crazy old woman saying she saw fires up there.”
Connie shook her head. “Not crazy. Something awful happened up there.”
That much she had to tell Abana. It would all come out anyway, but she didn’t have to tell Abana that she, Connie Temple, had sent Dahra there. So she told her what she had seen, and Abana started crying and then so did Connie.
They drank a fair amount of wine after that. The TV was on but muted. Connie saw a video of what they’d been talking about earlier on the radio: images of what was clearly a massive forest fire raging in the Stefano Rey and now spreading beyond it.
Then the news switched to long-range camera shots of the lake. The anchor was somber, obviously warning people that they were about to see something disturbing.
And then the picture shifted to a body floating facedown in the lake.
Abana was not looking at the TV; she was laughing over something funny that Connie didn’t really understand. So it was not then, not at that moment, that Abana would see her daughter, Dahra, floating facedown in the lake.
The sun rose and Edilio was still alive. It surprised him. He had spent the last part of the night on the steps of the town plaza. He’d gotten a little sleep, hunched over, head between his knees, but not much. He looked around owlishly, wondering how many of his people were still in place. How many had bailed? The thought of walking down to the barrier depressed him, because he was afraid he’d see all his soldiers there.
Albert was just striding up, looking peeved, which was more or less his regular expression.
“I’ve done an inventory on food,” Albert announced without preamble. “It’s not good. I don’t suppose you have any idea how long we have to hold out?”
Edilio blinked. “No, the gaiaphage has not given me the schedule either for how long until the barrier comes down or how long until she attacks again. Sorry.”
Albert sniffed. “You’ve learned sarcasm, Edilio.”
“I’ve learned a lot of things, Albert.”
Albert nodded at a pair of kids wandering past the long-destroyed fountain. “See that kid? Hair’s falling out. We already have pretty severe malnutrition.”
“Why do you think I brought you back?” Edilio snapped.
Albert held his hands out in a See what I mean? gesture. “You’ve drafted everyone to play soldier. I know business isn’t your thing, Edilio, but I need labor. I need people picking the crops. If they’re holding guns, they’re not picking crops. If they’re not picking crops, they’re not producing food, and if they’re not producing food, they’re not eating. And not eating is what causes malnutrition.”
Despite the pedantic and obnoxious way he said it, Albert was not wrong, so Edilio bit his tongue and took the lecture.
He nodded. “Yep.”
“The point is, don’t blame me,” Albert said. “I did my part.”
“They’re not playing soldier, Albert. They’re scared to death. They’ve gone down to the barrier to be with their families when they die.”
“Well, that’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“Is it? We had a busload of field-workers not come back, remember? Anyway, the fire’s coming.”
Albert shook his head impatiently. “Actually, if you send them into the fields, they’re probably safer than here. Concentrating them here in town, or worse yet down at the barrier, just makes it easier for the gaiaphage. Plus everyone starves. Including me. I’m already sick of Parmesan cheese. It smells a little like vomit, if you think about it.”
The thing was, Albert was right. Starvation was a sure thing. “You’re right,” Edilio conceded. “Get anyone you can to the fields. Tell them I said so. Bribe them. Threaten them. Do your thing, Albert.”
It was bizarre, but the truth was that the most useful thing people could do was go to work. Even with the beast stalking Perdido Beach, someone had to pick the cabbage.
Sinder could put her finger on the moment when she broke.
She had come to help Lana with Taylor. And she’d been feeling honored, somehow, by the request, and by the opportunity to work alongside the Healer.
Once upon a time, a million years ago, Sinder had been a Goth girl, very into dark fantasies, very into the clothes, the makeup, the look, and most of all the I don’t care about the rest of you people; I’m living my life feeling.
Yeah, I’m weird: deal with it.
Then: the FAYZ. And black fingernail polish was no longer available. Neither was food. Or water. Or safety.
She had seen terrible things. She had lost friends.
Eventually she had found a place at the lake, and discovered that she had a power, maybe the best of all powers. What she touched grew. So, of all the strange, impossible-to-imagine outcomes, the FAYZ had given Sinder a whole new life. As a gardener.
Even now it almost made her smile.
Carrots, cabbages, radishes, anything they could find seeds for, she could grow. Not like pop! overnight. Not like some special effect. Just like she had a really amazing green thumb, and when she spent time in her vegetable patch with Jezzie, she could grow some serious veggie. Some unusually big, fast-growing veg.
She had left the patch in Jezzie’s care. They had been farmers together, hoeing, weeding, watering. Talking about life.
Then had come the burned, wounded, terrified survivors of the lake. And Jezzie was not with them. None of Sinder�
�s friends were with them. Everyone she was close to had been slaughtered.
And that was when Sinder broke.
She had crept away in the night—no one cared. She had walked toward the bright lights of out there. They were magic, those lights. The FAYZ was so dark. Like being in some ancient village, back in the Middle Ages, or maybe in some forgotten jungle. It was always so dark.
But out there! The motel signs, the Carl’s sign, the camera lights, the flashing police lights, the headlights and taillights . . . She half closed her eyes and it became a single beacon of light, like a pulsing searchlight aimed right at her.
As she had headed down the hill, she had seen all the rest of them, all the kids. How many? More than a hundred, surely. The light from out there was like a cold sun shining on their faces.
Mostly people weren’t bothering to try and communicate. Most had seen their parents and written notes and waved and all of that.
Sinder had not. Sinder hadn’t thought she could bear it. But now in the light of day she searched the crowd out there. So many faces, some looking in, some looking away. They all looked so clean. They all wore clothing of the correct size. They were unarmed. And they all had food. They were having breakfast sandwiches and donuts and coffee.
Sinder’s stomach churned. But she was so much better nourished than most of these kids. They were skin and bones, a lot of them. Kids at the lake had been eating better than those in town.
Yeah, well, most of them were dead now, so what good had it been, feeding them?
Was her mother or father there? She searched the crowd, hundreds of faces. Then she saw the HD monitor that advertised “Reunion Center.” She went to it.
A bored-looking twentysomething out there looked at her quizzically, then, seeing the question in Sinder’s eyes, held up a placard. Searching for Loved Ones?
Yes, Sinder thought. I am. Loved ones. Living loved ones. I have plenty of dead loved ones.
Your Name?
Sinder had no paper. She wrote it in the dirt. The woman made the universal symbol for phone call. Then she pulled out a phone and started texting.
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