Hero

by Michael Grant

  Dekka frowned, confused. Was Sam so out of it he still thought this was the FAYZ? “Caine was a bastard, but his power was limited. He could never have done what Vector did at City Hall. Have you seen any of the video? He—”

  “Right,” Sam interrupted. “That wasn’t just terrible, it was sadistic, cruel. It was meant to terrorize. Caine was a bad person, a very bad person, but no, he would not be capable of that, even if he’d had the power. But Drake? Drake would be every bit as vicious.”

  Dekka nodded, still confused and even worried that Sam was making a fool of himself.

  “Yes, Drake was evil. Sadistic and cruel. As morally sick as Vector, but with far less power.”

  “So?” Dekka cried, unable to contain herself any longer.

  “So,” Sam said. “Did I stop Caine?”

  “What?”

  “I battled Caine many times. Did I take him down?”

  “Not in the end, but—”

  “And Drake. Did I stop Drake?”

  “You tried. It wasn’t your fault that—”

  Sam held up a hand, silencing her. “I failed, Dekka. Again and again and again, I failed. I tried. I tried like hell—you know I tried; of all people you know that. But I failed.” Dekka was looking down, so Sam leaned forward and raised her chin. “Hey, Dekka: I failed. The big hero of the FAYZ? I failed.”

  “But you . . .” Dekka’s lower lip quivered. “You . . .”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, I tried. Just like you’re trying. But, Dekka, my love, you are up against so much more. The stakes are so much higher. The people fighting you are so much more powerful.”

  Five minutes earlier, Dekka would have sworn she wouldn’t cry. She’d have said she was way past that kind of emotion. But now she felt her throat convulsing with sobs and knew tears were rolling down her cheeks.

  “What you’ve done is amazing, Dekka. If you were a soldier they’d be pinning medals on you. Listen to me. If this is you measuring yourself against me, stop it. Just stop it right now.” He swept his arm around, indicating the group, the six scared, defeated faces. “The only thing you’re failing at is not pushing everything aside and remembering that you are still the leader of the Rockborn Gang.”

  Dekka’s eyes widened in alarm. “But you’re here now!”

  “Yes, I am,” Sam said. “And I am offering you my services, such as they are.” He leaned in close again to make eye contact, though Dekka was again looking at the floor. “Now, I’m going to do for you what you so often did for me. I’m going to tell you to drop the self-pity right the hell now, because people need you. So you are going to turn off the waterworks, and you are going to pick your head up, and you’re going to show me that defiant, screw-all-of-you, scary Dekka look I know so well.”

  Dekka wiped her tears again. She stifled the sobs, and the constrictions in her throat came once, and once again, and stopped. She took a deep, shaky breath that was steadier when she let it go.

  It’s not because I owe these people, though I do, Dekka thought. But I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and cry in front of Sam.

  After a long minute, Dekka said, “Is Astrid here with you?”

  “No, she had other things to do.”

  Dekka was alarmed. “But, Drake!”

  Sam fished out his phone, unlocked it, and swiped a few times. Then he turned the phone around to show Dekka his texts. The most recent was from Astrid.

  All taken care of. Love you.

  “Yeah, see the thing is, someone mailed Astrid a dose of the rock.” He arched a brow. “I can’t imagine who’d have done something like that.”

  “Is she . . .”

  “Oh, Astrid is very scary now.”

  Dekka managed a smile. “Astrid was always scary.” She met his gaze, unflinching now. “I don’t suppose the anonymous person who FedExed you one dose of the rock may have included two doses?”

  “Interesting that you’d mention FedEx, because I don’t believe I mentioned how the rock got to us.” He winked. “How the two doses of rock got to us.”

  “I wanted so much to keep you out of this,” Dekka said.

  “And yet, here I am.” He looked around at the others. “Here we all are.”

  A line from Tolkien came to Dekka. I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam. But she did not say it aloud.

  “Now, if you’ll have me, I will be the newest recruit to the Rockborn Gang.”

  Dekka laughed. “Well, depends on what you have to offer, young man.”

  A slow grin spread across Sam’s face. “Oh, you’re going to like this. It was a strangely fitting gift from the rock.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Domes

  DOMES HAD PLAYED an outsized role in four of the lives of the newly enlarged Rockborn Gang.

  Shade Darby had been sitting next to the PBA dome, the FAYZ. She’d been a kid of thirteen whose mother had been hired to add her own scientific expertise to the attempt to understand the dome.

  Shade could still remember the first time she’d seen it on the news. On video the dome looked like a nothingness, an opaque, nonreflective, vaguely gray-colored dome, a perfect half of a sphere twenty miles in diameter. There had been ground-level video and helicopter video and drone video up on YouTube, and she had seen as much of it as her Google-fu would bring her.

  Then she had seen it in person. No video could begin to convey the sheer size of the thing. Up close it wasn’t a dome; it was a gray wall, a gray wall that went up and up until it curved away many miles in the air, reaching so high that airliners had to divert to avoid smashing into it. It extended from horizon to horizon, incredibly large, dwarfing anything ever built by Homo sapiens.

  The only way to show just how big it was on a video was to go to satellite imagery. From near-Earth orbit, it was a giant gray punctuation mark. It lay over land and sea, unperturbed by either. It was unnatural in every way, in the sense of something unfamiliar, in the sense of something too perfectly shaped to be a part of any natural landscape. Unnatural in that its existence defied the laws of physics. It was impossible; that was the unique thing about the dome, the thing that made it different and, yes, more interesting than anything anywhere, anytime, ever.

  It was impossible.

  And yet . . .

  Shade had spent a couple of weeks with her mother in the army-slash-CHP-slash-media tent city that grew up where the northbound 101 came to an abrupt stop. Another few seconds on the 101 would have taken you to Perdido Beach, but Perdido Beach had lived up to its name. It was lost. It was gone. It had been covered by the dome.

  Shade had gone back to Chicago for a while to attend a math camp that had entirely lost her interest. Then, back to the tent, truck, and trailer village to find everything changed. The dome had become transparent, completely invisible, and yet, just as impenetrable. What had been a blank wall became a sort of aquarium, or living diorama. And for the first time the world’s questions about the mystery, some of them at least, were beginning to be answered.

  No, the dome was not solid like a big ball bearing.

  Yes, there were people inside. Children, teenagers, all younger than fifteen at the start, 332 of them—minus some deaths.

  Minus quite a few deaths.

  Shade had never told Dekka, but she had seen Brianna, in person. The Breeze had been within ten feet of her. Brianna was in some ways Shade’s counterpart, another girl with extraordinary speed, but within the dome the rules had been different. Brianna had run as Brianna. No Watchers in her head. No protective insectoid morph. Brianna came to the edge of the FAYZ, to stand almost within arm’s reach. She would take questions written for her on posters and iPads and scrawl the answers on pieces of wallboard or in one case the white shell of a clothes dryer. Paper, obviously, was in short supply in the FAYZ.

  So was soap. Clothing. Food. The kids huddled against their side of the barrier looked like abused puppies in a shelter: scared, wary, alert. Damaged.

  The only thing not in short su
pply were weapons. So many weapons. Crowbars, sledgehammers, baseball bats with spikes driven through them, the steel bars of hand weights, maple table legs, knives, machetes, and guns. Far too many guns.

  Shade had seen Brianna, and she had seen Caine, the infamous Caine, the self-proclaimed king of the FAYZ. He was a handsome devil, made more handsome in memory because he’d been played in the movie by an actor who was full-on Hollywood handsome.

  She’d seen Gaia, too. Gaia who had every power. Gaia, the mad child, the creature from videos with hundreds of millions of hits, especially the one where she had ripped a person’s arm off and . . .

  “They found a way to stop her,” Shade muttered. “Is Vector that much more dangerous?”

  It had been meant as a rhetorical question, but now she considered it seriously. Gaia had been a murderous, monstrous creature, but though she’d had designs on a life outside of the FAYZ, she had been taken down with the dome.

  Level One, some part of Shade’s mind said.

  We are now on Level Two of this insane game. With how many more levels to go? And no spare lives?

  “I’m tired of this game,” Shade said to no one.

  Dekka had first seen the dome when she stepped out of Coates Academy and snuck into the gloomy pine forest to smoke a joint.

  Coates was a school, but not a normal one. Coates was for the disappointing children of people who had means. Dekka’s family didn’t have money, but Coates had a scholarship for diversity, and Dekka—black and LGBTQ—was a twofer.

  The way she had disappointed her parents had been by being herself. She had come out and made a mess of it, saying things wrong, words that did not form the way she’d have liked. Dekka had been arguing with her parents about something unrelated when she had blurted out the truth. Her mother had been going on about Dekka’s obligation to be able to make her own way in the world, to find a husband who would love her and with whom she would have babies. And Dekka—who had never been the most tolerant of human beings, by her own admission—said, “If I marry anyone, it’ll be a girl, Mom, and if there’s a grandchild in your future it’ll be adopted.”

  Not, perhaps, her most diplomatic moment. She’d been just about to turn fourteen, an age when parents still harbor the illusion that their child is malleable, shapeable. Her parents dismissed the whole “lesbian thing,” and from there things went right downhill, her parents being stiff-necked evangelical Christians and Dekka being rebellious, sullen, increasingly irreligious, and above all, worst of all, though her parents would never quite admit it, a lesbian.

  So much anger and pain, and I wasn’t even getting laid. Boy or girl.

  They’d found out about the diversity scholarship at Coates, and Coates had found they had an honest-to-God black lesbian (ding-ding-ding!) and Dekka had been packed off, not even very upset, because after all, could it really be worse than home?

  It could be.

  It was clear from the start that Coates was not run by the administrators or the teachers, but by an intelligent, attractive, charismatic boy named Caine Soren. Caine ruled Coates like a gang boss. His chief enforcer was a boy who was also attractive, but the kind of attraction you might feel for a cobra. Drake was mesmerizing. It was hard to look away from him, and when you did you could feel his eyes following you.

  Caine was a rotten bastard. Drake was evil. And between them they ruled Coates and made Dekka’s life a misery.

  And then had come the dome.

  Dekka had been rescued from Coates, that’s the way she saw it. Rescued by Sam Temple, and not just rescued but raised to high status, made over as Sam’s strong right arm.

  Dekka had suffered, but she had suffered for a cause. Sam had never cared whether she liked boys or girls; he’d cared whether he could count on her in a fight. And he could, her and Breeze and Edilio. And yes, Astrid, though Astrid always played games within games. And every nasty fight, every vicious battle, had been fought to keep the kids in the FAYZ alive and as free as they could be. Dekka had been given responsibility . . . no, she corrected mentally, she had taken responsibility. She had picked a side and done what needed to be done.

  Isn’t that what you’re doing now?

  Yes, she had taken this responsibility on, but she would have gladly given way for Sam, once he appeared in New York. Dekka had been happier as his lieutenant than as a general.

  It’s what these stars on my shoulders are about—sending good young people into harm’s way.

  And losing. Getting beaten. Feeling helpless and inadequate and overwhelmed. Watching people die or live in agony and being able to do nothing about it. All of that.

  In a million years it never would have occurred to Dekka that she’d end up feeling sympathy for a four-star general. Or that she would try to step aside to make room for a white boy. The truth was that Peter Parker’s uncle was only half right. With great power came great responsibility; and with great responsibility came a weight so massive it threatened to crush you.

  But I’m not crushed. Not quite.

  Not yet.

  Sam Temple’s life had also been shaped by a dome. He’d been an average student in a mediocre school whose only real passion in life involved getting up at four thirty in the morning, carrying his board down to the beach, stuffing himself into a clammy wet suit, and paddling out into freezing water to wait and wait for the opportunity to ride a wave for thirty seconds.

  He’d had no plans. He’d had no real goals aside from the vague notion of a career that would leave him plenty of time to surf. He’d had no girlfriend and only one real male friend, Quinn Gaither.

  When the FAYZ had come, Sam had tried to avoid taking any sort of leadership role. But Sam had an event in his past that had been largely forgotten but that took on new saliency when every single adult, every parent, teacher, shopkeeper, doctor, and cop was suddenly . . . poof! Gone. Sam had once saved a school bus full of kids when the driver had suffered a heart attack. He’d never thought it was a big deal, and neither did anyone else once the excitement of the moment wore off. But in a world suddenly without responsible leaders of any sort, a world falling under the sway of a sociopath and his psychopath enforcer, people had looked to Sam.

  Slowly, reluctantly, Sam had become a leader. He’d made life-or-death decisions on an almost daily basis. He had been attacked, hurt, hated, mistrusted. But also admired and relied upon and even loved. And he had stored up enough nightmares to last ten men ten lifetimes each.

  Then, suddenly: no dome. Sam the reluctant hero had been transformed into Sam the fall guy and then Sam the media hero, and Sam the guy in a book his wife wrote, and Sam the actor who played Sam in the movie. He still had no goals and no plans. He intended to go to college eventually. He intended to get a job and a career and live the rest of his life—yes, in the shadow of his past, but hopefully with a brighter path ahead.

  He had started drinking. He was a happy drunk, never a bully or a bore, but when he drank, the darkness he’d experienced came seeping out of the mental box he’d stuffed it all in. He cried when he got drunk, then got drunker to numb the memories.

  With the help of therapy and Astrid, his rock, he’d gotten the drinking under control. For now. No alcoholic—and he admitted that’s what he was—could ever be completely safe from a sudden stumble and a long, long fall.

  But not today.

  Now everything he’d escaped four years earlier was back. The threat was bigger. The horror even deeper. The possibility of survival even lower.

  And the thing was, he was happier than he’d been in a long while. Especially knowing—though with a twinge of guilt—that the bulk of the weight was on Dekka’s shoulders now.

  He was back! School Bus Sam, who became Sam Temple, the hero of the FAYZ, had acquired a new power, and surfing would once again be delayed.

  Sam Temple 3.0.

  Was a part of him itching to be in charge? Yes, but it was a very, very small part. It was someone else’s turn.

  He looked down at han
ds that once had fired killing beams of light. He’d half expected the rock to regift him that same power, but, as always, the rock seemed to have its own agenda.

  Now, sitting apart from the others in a dark corner of the armory, Sam began to change, subtly. He became shiny, like he’d been run through a car wash and opted for the clearcoat. Shiny, and slick, and hard to the touch. He had taken a selfie and studied the effect. He looked like himself, yes, but himself dipped in clear plastic.

  He raised his right hand, palm facing up. And a transparent sphere appeared, just six inches across and hovering like a soap bubble waiting for a breeze. With his left hand he flicked the sphere and felt its solidity.

  Not a soap bubble.

  A dome.

  “Twitter is going to call me Bubble Boy,” Sam muttered. “Well. There are worse things.”

  Edilio was the fourth person whose life had been shaped by a dome. He’d been a nobody at school, an undocumented Honduran immigrant—an illegal, many people would say. He’d come to America as a small child with his parents. He had only vague memories of an interminable trip, most of it on foot, walking and walking by the sides of dusty roads, hot, thirsty, and boring, the whole length of Mexico. Weeks of sleeping in fields and under bridges.

  He had no memory at all of being taken across the border from Mexico to the US because he’d been delirious with a fever at the time, most likely, his mother said, some kind of waterborne disease.

  They had moved around various migrant labor camps, young Edilio sitting at the edge of a field under a wide hat, or sometimes under a sun shade or umbrella. He’d sat for hours watching stooped figures, including those of his mother and father, picking strawberries within sight of million-dollar homes. Later, when he was able, he had helped with the work. Mostly the Escobar family picked strawberries and grapes, occasionally pitching in on other physical labor, helping to move the mountains of oak barrels at a winery, or hauling bales of hay down out of lofts.

  But then his father had gotten lucky. One of the farmers he had worked for had a smaller plot of land, farther up the coast, mostly table grapes but some sauvignon blanc as well, from which they made a good white wine. The farmer needed a foreman to handle the seasonal labor, men and women, families like the Escobars. And from that had come a degree of stability. Edilio had been able to enroll in an actual school, not one of the traveling camp schools.