“No!” she screamed, her face inches from his. “Not this time. Tell me. Tell me!”
Little Pete looked at her and met her gaze. Aware. But still, he said nothing.
A waste of time demanding Little Pete use words. Words were her tool, not his. Astrid lowered her voice. “Petey. Show me. I know you have the power. Show me.”
Little Pete’s eyes widened. Something clicked beneath that blank stare.
The ground split open beneath Astrid. The dirt was a mouth. She cried out and fell, spinning downward, down a tunnel in mud lit by neon screams.
Diana opened one eye. What she saw before her was a wooden surface. A spilled Cheerio was the closest recognizable object.
Where was she?
She closed her eye and asked herself that question again. Where am I?
She’d had a horrible dream, full of gruesome detail. Violence. Starvation. Despair. In the dream she had done things she would never, ever do in real life.
She opened her eyes again and tried to stand up. She fell backward a very, very long way. She barely felt the floor when it smacked her in the back of the head.
Now she saw legs. Table legs, chair legs, the legs of a boy wearing frayed jeans and beyond the splayed, scarred legs of a girl in shorts. Both sets of legs were tied with rope.
Someone was snoring. Someone too close. A snore from an unseen source.
Bug. The name came to her. And with it the shock of knowing that she was not dreaming, had not dreamed.
Better to close her eyes and pretend.
But the girl, Penny, her legs strained against their ropes. Diana heard a moan.
With clumsy hands Diana grabbed the chair and pulled herself up into a seated position. The urge to lie back down was almost irresistible. But hand over hand, and then numb foot over numb foot, Diana pulled herself back up and into the chair.
Caine slept. Bug snored loudly and invisibly on the floor.
Penny blinked at her. “They drugged us,” Penny said. She yawned.
“Yeah,” Diana agreed.
“They tied us up,” Penny said. “How did you get free?”
Diana rubbed her wrists, as though she had been tied up. Why hadn’t Sanjit tied her? “Loose knots.”
Penny’s head wobbled a little. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus. “Caine’s going to kill ’em.”
Diana nodded. She tried to think. Not easy in a brain still slowed by whatever drug Sanjit had slipped her.
“They could have killed us,” Diana said.
Penny nodded. “Too scared,” she said.
Or maybe they just aren’t killers, Diana thought. Maybe they just weren’t the kind of people who could take advantage of a sleeping foe. Maybe Sanjit wasn’t the kind of kid who could cut a sleeping person’s throat.
“They’re running,” Diana said. “They’re trying to get away.”
“Never hide on this island,” Penny said. “Not for long. We’ll find them. Cut me loose.”
Penny was right, of course. Even drugged Diana knew it was true. Caine would find them eventually. And he was the kind who killed.
Her true love. He was not the beast Drake was, but something worse. Caine wouldn’t kill them in some psychotic rage. He’d kill them in cold blood. Diana staggered out of the room, moving like a drunk, slamming into a doorway, absorbing the pain, moving on. Windows. Big windows in a room so huge it made the furniture arranged here and there in separate pods look like dollhouse toys.
“Hey, untie me!” Penny demanded.
She spotted Sanjit immediately. He was in profile against a red sky, standing at the edge of the cliff. There was a little girl with him. Not Virtue, some girl Diana had not seen before.
That’s what Sanjit had been hiding: there were other kids here on the island.
Sanjit looped a rope around the girl in a sort of web. He hugged her. Leaned down to speak to her face-to-face.
No, not the killing kind, Sanjit.
Then he began to lower the clearly terrified girl out of sight. Over the cliff.
There was a shout from the other room. Bug. He yelled, “Ah ah ah ah! Get them off me!”
Bug was awake. Penny had used her power to give Bug a nice shot of fear adrenalin.
As Diana watched, Sanjit himself climbed over the side. He faced the house as he did so. Did he see Diana standing there, watching?
Diana heard Penny coming into the room, at least as wobbly as Diana herself.
“You stupid witch,” Penny snarled. “Why didn’t you untie me?”
“Bug seems to have taken care of that,” Diana answered.
She had to cut Penny off before she saw what was happening. Before she saw Sanjit.
Diana picked up a vase from a side table. Very pretty crystal. Heavy.
“This is nice,” Diana said to Penny.
Penny looked at her like she was crazy. Then Penny’s eyes focused beyond Diana. Out of the window.
“Hey!” Penny said. “They’re trying—”
Diana swung the vase and caught Penny on the side of the head. She didn’t wait to see the effect but staggered, vase still in hand, to the kitchen.
Caine was still asleep. But he wouldn’t be for long, maybe, not long enough. Penny’s power of hallucination could wake the dead. She would send terrors into Caine’s dreams and wake him as she had Bug.
Diana raised the vase over her head. It occurred to her in a moment of wry clarity that while Sanjit might not be the kind of person who would brain someone in their sleep, she apparently was.
But before she could smash the vase down on her true love’s head, Diana’s flesh erupted. Gaping red mouths appeared on her arms, gnashing with serrated shark’s teeth. The mouths were eating her alive.
Diana screamed.
In some corner of her mind she knew it was Penny. She knew it wasn’t real, because she saw the mouths but did not feel them, not really, but she screamed and screamed and her fingers let go of the vase. From far off came the sound of shattered crystal.
The red mouths were crawling up her arms, eating her skin, baring muscle and sinew, eating their way to her shoulders.
And then they stopped.
Penny stood there, snarling. Blood streamed from the side of her head. “Don’t mess with me, Diana,” Penny said. “I could send you screaming off that cliff yourself.”
“Let them go,” Diana whispered. “They’re just nice kids. They’re just nice kids.”
“Not like us, you mean,” Penny said. “You’re a stupid idiot, Diana.”
“Let them go. Don’t wake Caine up. You know what he’ll do.”
Penny shook her head, disbelieving. “I can’t believe he likes you, not me. You’re not even pretty. Not anymore.”
Diana laughed. “That’s what you want? Him?”
Penny’s eyes gave it all away. She looked longingly, lovingly at Caine, still passed out. “He’s all there is,” she said.
Penny reached with a trembling hand and gently stroked Caine’s hair. “Sorry to have to do this, sweetheart,” Penny said.
Caine woke shouting.
THIRTY-NINE
29 MINUTES
ASTRID FELL AND fell knowing it wasn’t real, knowing it was all an illusion of some kind. But it was very hard to believe that when her clothing rippled and her hair flew straight up and her arms were reaching for the walls of a tunnel that couldn’t possibly be real but seemed like it was.
But after a while falling began to feel like floating. She was suspended in the air and things no longer streamed past; they floated around.
Symbols, Astrid thought.
She was relieved to see that her brain still worked. Whatever was happening, whatever power was giving her this intense waking dream, it wasn’t frying her brain. Reason intact. Words right there where she had left them.
Symbols. Neon symbols arrayed across a dark landscape.
Not even symbols, she realized: avatars.
There was a monstrous face framed with long dark hair that f
ormed snakes. Dark eyes and a mouth that dribbled fire.
There was a female being with orange rays, like sunset beams spraying out of her head.
A male with a hand held up and a green light formed in a ball. This avatar was far away, at the edge of the dark playing field.
One avatar was neither male nor female but half of each sex. Metal teeth and a whip.
Nerezza. Orsay. Sam. But what was the fourth avatar?
It was this fourth avatar that seemed to be in contention between two manipulators, two players. One player was represented by a box. The box was closed but for one edge that shone so bright it was hard to look at. Like a toy box containing a sun.
Petey, Astrid whispered.
The other player she felt rather than saw. She tried to turn her eyes toward it, to see it, but it was always just out of range. And she realized that the light box was restraining her, not allowing her to see the opponent.
For her own good. Protecting her.
Petey would not let her look at the gaiaphage.
Astrid’s mind flooded with images of other shadow avatars. Dark avatars. Dead. Victims in the game.
All of these were in neat little rows, like pawns lined up before the soul-killing emptiness that was the gaiaphage.
“Astrid!”
Someone was yelling her name.
“Astrid! Snap out of it!”
The game field disappeared.
Astrid’s eyes saw the plaza, her brother just getting to his feet, and Brianna shaking her roughly.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Brianna demanded, more angry than concerned.
Astrid ignored Brianna and searched for Nerezza. She was nowhere to be seen.
“The girl, there was a girl here,” Astrid said.
“What’s going on, Astrid? I just—” She stopped talking long enough to cough ten, twelve times in startlingly rapid succession. “I just stopped Lance from beating some kid half to death. People all running around like nuts down on the beach. I mean, jeez, I take a day off to get over this stupid flu and suddenly it’s craziness everywhere!”
Astrid blinked, looked around, tried to make sense of way too much information. “It’s the game,” she said. “It’s the gaiaphage. It reached Petey through his game.”
“Say what?”
Astrid knew she’d said too much. Brianna was not the person to trust with the truth about Little Pete. “Did you see Nerezza?”
“What? The girl who hangs out with Orsay?”
“She’s not a girl,” Astrid said. “Not really.” She grabbed Brianna’s arm. “Find Sam. We need him. Find him!”
“Okay. Where?”
“I don’t know,” Astrid cried. She bit her lip. “Look everywhere!”
“Hey,” Brianna said, and then interrupted herself to cough until she was red in the face. She cursed, coughed some more, and finally said, “Hey, I’m fast. But even I can’t look everywhere.”
“Let me think for a minute,” Astrid said. She squeezed her eyes shut. Where? Where would Sam have gone? He was hurt, angry, feeling useless.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
“Oh, God, where?” Astrid wondered.
She hadn’t seen him since he had gone off to deal with Zil and the fire. What had happened to make him run away? Had he done something he was ashamed of?
No, that wasn’t it, either. He had seen the whipped boy.
“The power plant,” Astrid said.
“Why would he be there?” Brianna frowned.
“Because it’s the place that scares him most,” Astrid said.
Brianna looked doubtful. But then her frown lines relaxed. “Yeah,” she said. “That would be Sam.”
“You have to get him, Brianna. He’s Petey’s best piece.”
“Ummmm…what?”
“Never mind,” Astrid snapped. “Get Sam here. Now!”
“How?”
“Hey, you’re the Breeze, right? Just do it!”
Brianna considered that for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I’m outta—”
The “here” was lost in the wind.
Astrid handed the game player to her brother. He looked down at the ground, oblivious. He felt the game player for a moment, then dropped it.
“You have to keep playing, Petey.”
Her brother shook his head. “I lost.”
“Petey, listen to me.” Astrid knelt before him, held him, then thought better of it and let him go. “I saw the game. You showed me the game. I was inside it. But it’s real, Petey. It’s real.”
Little Pete stared past her. Not interested. Not even seeing her, maybe, let alone hearing her.
“Petey. He’s trying to destroy us. You have to play.”
She shoved the game at him. “Nerezza is the gaiaphage’s avatar. You made her real. You gave her a body. Only you have that kind of power. It’s using you, Petey, it’s using you to kill.”
But if Little Pete cared, or even understood, he showed no sign of it.
It was a panic run. Most of the population of Perdido Beach, all running and no one knowing quite why. Or maybe they all knew why but each had his own reason.
Zil loved it. Here at last was the total blind panic he’d hoped would result from the fires. Here was all order breaking down completely.
Kids on the beach stumbled in the sand. Some ran screaming into the water.
Drake, alive. Drake with his whip hand lashing at them, like he was driving cattle into the sea.
More kids sticking to the road, running parallel to the beach. Zil was with them, running with Turk beside him, looking for the freaks, seeing a kid whose only mutant power was the ability to glow brightly, harmless, but a freak and like all freaks he had to be dealt with.
Turk pulled up, raised his shotgun, aimed and fired. He missed, but the kid panicked and smashed facedown against the curb. Zil kicked him and kept running. He shouted in wild glee as he ran.
“Run, freaks! Run!”
But there were very few freaks in the mass of kids on the road. Too few real targets. But that was okay because the point right now was fear, fear and chaos.
Nerezza had told him it was coming. A freak herself? Zil wondered. He would hate to have to kill her, she was hot and mysterious and so much better than boring, pasty Lisa.
He spotted Lance ahead. Good old Lance, but he had lost his gun and his bat.
“I need a weapon!” Lance cried. “Give me something!”
Turk had a nail-studded stick. He tossed it to Lance. They took off again, a pack of wolves chasing down a terrified herd of cattle.
The older kids were pulling away. But the fat ones, the young ones, they were falling behind, worn out or simply unable to keep up on shorter legs.
They were all crammed onto the curved road that led to Clifftop.
Zil pointed. “That kid there. There! He’s a freak lover!”
Lance got there first and swung the nailed stick. The kid evaded it and hared off the road, tumbling down the slope into bushes and coming to rest against a cactus.
Zil laughed and pointed. “He’s yours, Turk!”
And Zil was off again, with Lance at his side, Lance like a blond warrior god, like Thor, slashing away at everyone now, no longer differentiating between freak or non-freak, they could all die, all of them who had refused to join Zil. “Run!” Zil screamed. “Run, you cowards! Join me, or run for your lives!”
He paused for a minute, winded from running uphill. Lance stopped beside him. Others, half a dozen of them, the Human Crew faithful, each of them a human hero, Zil thought fiercely.
Then Lance’s grin fell. He pointed. Back down the road they had just climbed.
Dekka, walking, but fast just the same.
Relentless.
Someone was beside Zil. He could sense her. Nerezza. He looked at her. Her throat was red, like the first stage of serious bruising. There was a cut on her forehead. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was all astray.
“Who did that to you?” Zi
l demanded, outraged.
Nerezza ignored him. “She has to be stopped.”
“Who?” Zil jerked his chin toward Dekka. “Her? How am I supposed to stop her?”
“Her powers don’t reach as far as your gun, Zil,” Nerezza said.
Zil frowned. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“How do you know? Are you a freak?”
Nerezza laughed. “What am I? What are you, Zil? Are you the Leader? Or are you a coward who hides from some fat, black lesbian freak? Because right now you choose which to be.”
Lance glanced nervously at Zil. Turk started to say something but couldn’t seem to find the right words.
“She has to be stopped,” Nerezza said.
“Why?” Zil asked.
“Because we’re going to need gravity, Leader.”
Mary reached the top of the road, up to Clifftop. A series of smaller pathways led down to the cliff itself.
She looked back to check on her charges and saw the whole population of Perdido Beach seemingly following her.
Kids were spread all down the road, some running, some wheezing and gasping for breath. At the back of the crowd Zil and a handful of gun-toting thugs.
Farther off, kids who had fled to the beach were being herded back onto the road.
This second group fled from a different terror. From where she stood Mary could too clearly see Drake, driving terrified kids before him. Some were in the water. Others tried to climb over the breakwater and the rocks that separated Perdido’s main beach from the smaller beach beneath Clifftop.
As the Prophetess had said. The tribulation of fire. The demon. And the red sunset in which Mary would lay down her burden.
Mary cried, “Come with me, children, stay with me!”
And they did.
They followed her across the overgrown, formerly manicured grounds of Clifftop. To the cliff. To the very edge of the cliff, with the blank, inscrutable FAYZ wall just to their left, the end of their particular world.
Down below on the beach, Orsay sat cross-legged on the rock that had become her pulpit. Some kids had already reached her and gathered, terrified, around her. Others were scrambling down the cliff to her.