Quinn gasped.
Cigar saw something that looked very much like Quinn. But a Quinn with a storm of purple-and-red light around his head. Quinn enveloped in what looked like the beginning of a tornado.
Cigar saw Sanjit behind him. He glowed softly, a steady silvery light.
Then he saw Lana. Her eyes were beautiful. Shifting rainbows. Sudden, piercing shafts like bright moonlight. She outshone both Quinn and Sanjit. She was a moon to their stars.
But wrapped around her was a sickly green tendril, like an infinitely long snake that writhed and probed at her, seeking a way into her head.
And that was all that Cigar saw. Because everything around the three kids was blank, empty darkness.
There was no teasing or even conversation on the trip back to the lake. Sam drove slowly. Jack slept, snoring from time to time, but not so loud that it bothered Sam.
Dekka stared out of the window. They had waited until dawn—no point risking another drive through the dark. After all, the need for secrecy was long gone.
Sam had no doubt that Caine had the missiles.
No real doubt. Despite the nagging voice in the back of his head that told him that if Caine had the missiles he’d have long since used them to move against the lake.
No. That was stupid. Caine was probably just biding his time. Waiting.
Brianna came running up alongside the truck and made the signal for Roll down your window.
“You need me anymore?” Brianna asked. “Otherwise I’ll go catch some z’s.”
“No, I’m good, Breeze.”
But she didn’t zoom off; she kept pace. The truck was moving at no more than twenty to thirty miles an hour, so it was a pleasant walking speed for Brianna.
“You’re not letting Caine keep those things, are you?” Brianna asked.
“Not tonight, huh? I’m really beat. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to crawl into my bunk and pull the covers over my head.”
Brianna looked as if she was going to argue, but then she gave a theatrical sigh, winked at Sam like she had already read his inner thoughts, and zoomed away down the road.
Sam noticed that Dekka refused to look at her. He thought of talking to her about it, but he was talked out. He could barely keep his eyes open.
And yet, there it was again, that feeling of not quite seeing something. He felt eyes on him. Something watching him from out there in the black desert night.
“Coyotes,” he muttered. And he almost believed it.
They got back to the lake just as the faintest light of dawn shone from the false sun of the FAYZ. They got nice sunrises on the lake—if you could get past the fact that the “sun” was an illusion crawling up a barrier that was no more than half a mile away across the water.
Sam was stiff and tired. He crept onto the houseboat, careful not to wake anyone, and sidled down the narrow passage to his bunk. The shades were drawn and of course there were no lights, so he felt his way to the edge of his bed and crawled across it on hands and knees to find his pillow.
He collapsed on his back.
But even at the edge of sleep he was aware of something different about the bed.
Then he felt soft breath on his cheek.
He turned and her lips were on his. Not gentle. Not soft. She kissed him hard, and it was like he’d been awakened by an electric power line.
She kissed him and slid on top of him.
Their bodies did the rest.
At some point in the hours that followed he said, “Astrid?”
“Don’t you think you should have made sure of that about three times ago?” Astrid said in her familiar, slightly condescending tone.
They said many things to each other after that, but nothing that involved words.
OUTSIDE
MARY TERRAFINO HAD come through the barrier four months ago. She had leaped from a cliff inside the FAYZ at the exact moment of her fifteenth birthday.
She had landed. Not on the sand and rocks beneath the cliff, but two miles away from the barrier. She had appeared in a dry gulch and would have died but for the two dirt bikers who were racing across bumps and drops, yelling and roaring along and definitely not looking for what they found.
The bikers had not called for an ambulance. They had called animal control. Because what they thought they had seen was a terribly mangled animal. It was an understandable mistake.
Mary was in a special ward at the UCLA hospital down in Los Angeles. The ward had two patients: Mary and a boy named Francis.
The doctor in charge was a woman named Chandiramani. She was forty-eight and wore her white coat over a traditional sari. Dr. Chandiramani had a tense but proper relationship with Major Onyx. The major was supposedly the liaison with the Pentagon. In theory he was there only to offer Dr. Chandiramani and her team any necessary support.
In reality the major clearly thought he was in charge of the ward. He and the doctors often clashed.
It was all very polite, with never a raised voice. But the Pentagon’s priorities were somewhat different from those of the doctors. The doctors wanted to keep their two horribly damaged patients alive and comfortable. The soldiers needed answers.
Major Onyx had arranged to have equipment installed in the room, and in both adjacent rooms, that definitely had nothing to do with Mary’s medical condition. Dr. Chandiramani had pretended not to understand any of it, but the doctor had not always confined her studies to medicine. In earlier life she had made a serious start at studying physics. And she knew a mass spectrometer when she saw one. She knew that this room, and Francis’s room, were effectively inside of a sort of super-sensitive mass spectrometer. What other instruments the major had packed into the walls and ceiling and floor she could only guess.
Francis was alive. But no way had yet been found to communicate with him. There were brain waves. So he was conscious. But he had no mouth or eyes. He had one appendage that might be an arm, but it was in a continuous state of spasm, so even if the fingers had not been oddly jointed claws he would not have been able to use either a keyboard or a pencil.
Mary had somewhat more potential. She had a mouth and it appeared to have some limited functionality in terms of speech. They’d had to remove some of the grotesque teeth that had grown through her cheeks. And they had performed other surgeries to repair her tongue and mouth and throat to the best of their abilities.
The result was that Mary could speak.
Unfortunately she had only screamed and leaked tears out of the smear that was her only eye.
But now they had found the right mix of sedatives and antiseizure meds, and Dr. Chandiramani had finally agreed to allow Major Onyx and an army psychologist to question the girl.
The first questions were overly broad.
“What can you tell us about conditions inside?”
“Mom?” she had asked in a voice that was barely a whisper.
“Your mother will come later,” the psychologist said in a soothing voice. “I am Dr. Greene. With me is Major Onyx. And Dr. Chandiramani, who has been taking care of you these last months since you escaped.”
“Hello, Mary,” Dr. Chandiramani said.
“The littles?” Mary asked.
“What does that mean?” Dr. Greene asked.
“The littles. My kids.”
Major Onyx had close-cut black hair, a dark tan, and intense blue eyes. “Our information is that she took care of the little children.”
Dr. Greene leaned closer, but Dr. Chandiramani could see him fighting the nausea that people always felt seeing Mary. “Do you mean the little children you took care of?”
“I killed them,” Mary said. Tears flowed from her one tear duct and ran down the seared, boiled, lobster red skin.
“Surely not,” Dr. Greene said.
Mary cried aloud, a sound of keening despair.
“Change topic,” Dr. Chandiramani said, watching the monitor.
“Mary, this is very important. Does anyone know how this all
started?”
Nothing.
“Who did it, Mary?” Dr. Chandiramani asked. “Who created the anom—the place you called the FAYZ?”
“Little Pete. The Darkness.”
The two doctors and the soldier looked at one another, puzzled.
The major frowned and whipped out his iPhone. He tapped it a few times. “FAYZ Wiki,” he explained. “We have two ‘Pete’ or ‘Peters’ listed.”
“What are the ages?” Dr. Chandiramani asked.
“One is twelve; one is four. No, sorry, he would have turned five.”
“Do you have children, Major? I do. No twelve-year-old would be happy to be called ‘Little Pete.’ It must be the five-year-old she’s talking about.”
“Delusional,” Dr. Greene said. “A five-year-old did not create the anomaly.” He frowned thoughtfully and scribbled a note. “Darkness. Maybe she’s afraid of the dark.”
“Everyone’s afraid of the dark,” Dr. Chandiramani said. Greene was getting on her nerves. So were the major and his horrified stare.
The monitor above Mary’s bed suddenly beeped urgently.
Dr. Chandiramani reached for the call panel and yelled, “Code blue, code blue,” but it was unnecessary, because nurses were already rushing in through the door.
At the same time Major Onyx’s smartphone began chiming. He didn’t answer it, but he did open an app of some sort.
A tall, thin doctor in green scrubs swept in behind the nurses. He glanced at the monitor. He put his stethoscope in his ears and asked, “Where is her heart?”
Dr. Chandiramani pointed to the unlikely place. But she knew it was useless. All lines on the monitor had gone flat. All at the same time. Which was not how it happened. Heart, brain, everything suddenly and irreversibly dead.
“You’ll find the other one’s gone, too,” Major Onyx said calmly, consulting his phone. “Francis. Something pulled his plug, as well.”
“Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?” Dr. Chandiramani snapped.
The major jerked his head, indicating that the other doctor and the nurses should get out. They didn’t argue.
Major Onyx closed the app and put his phone away. “The people who were ejected when the dome was created? They came out clean. So did the twins. The rest, the ones who’ve appeared since? They’ve always had a sort of … umbilical cord … connecting them to the dome. J waves, that’s what we call them. But don’t ask me what they are, because we don’t know. We can detect them, but they are not something encountered in nature.”
“What does ‘J wave’ stand for?” the doctor asked.
Major Onyx barked out a laugh. “Some smart-ass physicist at CERN called them ‘Jehovah waves.’ According to him they might as well come from God, because we sure don’t know what they do or where they come from. The name stuck.”
“So what just changed? Did something happen with these J waves?”
The major started to answer but, with a visible effort, and a last appalled look at Mary, stopped himself. “The conversation we just had? Never happened.”
He left and Dr. Chandiramani was alone with her patient.
Four months after her ghastly appearance, Mary Terrafino was dead.
ELEVEN
26 HOURS, 45 MINUTES
SAM WOKE TO a feeling of utter, profound, incredible relief.
He closed his eyes as soon as he opened them, afraid that being awake would just invite something terrible to appear.
Astrid was back. And she was asleep with her head on his arm. His arm was asleep, completely numb, but as long as that blond head was right there his arm could stay numb.
She smelled like pine trees and campfire smoke.
He opened his eyes, cautious, almost flinching, because the FAYZ didn’t make a habit of allowing him pure, undiluted happiness. The FAYZ made a habit of stomping on anything that looked even a little bit like happiness. And this level of happiness was surely tempting retaliation. From this high up the fall could be a long, long one.
Just yesterday he’d been bored and longing for conflict. The memory shocked him. Had that really been him grinning in the dark at the prospect of war with Caine?
Surely not. He wasn’t that guy. Was he?
If he was that guy, how could he suddenly do a 180 and now feel so different? Because of Astrid? Because of the fact of her in his bed?
Without moving he could see the top of her head—her hair looked as if someone had cut it with a weed whacker—part of her right cheek, her eyelashes, the end of her nose, and farther down a long, shapely, much-scarred and bruised leg entwined with his own leg.
One of her hands was on his chest, just over his heart, which was starting to beat faster, so fast and so insistently he was afraid the vibration might wake her. Her breath tickled.
Sam’s mind was happy to let this go on forever. His body had a different idea. He swallowed hard.
Her eyelash flickered. Her breathing changed. She said, “How long can we go before we have to talk?”
“A while longer,” he said.
The while longer eventually came to an end. Astrid finally pulled away and sat up. Their eyes met.
Sam didn’t know what he expected to see in her eyes. Maybe guilt. Remorse. Loathing. He saw none of those things.
“I forget,” Astrid said, “why was I so against doing that?”
Sam smiled. “I’m not about to remind you.”
She looked at him with a frankness that embarrassed him. Like she was taking inventory. Like she was storing images away in memory.
“Are you back?” Sam asked.
Astrid’s gaze flicked away, evasive. Then she seemed to think better of it, and she met his gaze squarely. “I have an idea. How about if I just tell you the truth?”
“That would be good.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “But I’m out of practice lying. I guess living alone kind of made me intolerant of BS. Especially my own.”
Sam sat up. “Okay. Let’s talk. First, let’s jump in the lake for a minute.”
They made their way on deck and plunged off into the chilly water.
“People will see us,” Astrid said, smoothing her hair back and revealing the tan line on her forehead. “Are you ready for that?”
“Astrid, by now not only everyone at the lake, but everyone in Perdido Beach and probably whoever is out on the island knows all about it. Taylor’s probably been here and gone, most likely Bug, too.”
She laughed. “You’re suggesting gossip actually moves at speeds that are impossible.”
“Gossip this juicy? The speed of light is nothing compared to the speed this will move at.”
“Move at?” she mocked. “Your preposition is dangling.”
Several bits and pieces of leering jokes came to Sam’s mind, but Astrid had gotten there quicker and she shook her head and said, “No. Don’t. That kind of joke would be beneath even you.”
It was good to have her back.
They climbed aboard and toweled off. They dressed and came out onto the top deck with breakfast: carrots, yesterday’s grilled fish, and water.
Astrid got down to business. “I came back because the dome is changing.”
“The stain?”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah, but we thought maybe it was because of what Sinder’s doing.”
Astrid’s eyebrows rose. “What is Sinder doing?”
“She’s developed a power. She can make things grow at an accelerated rate. She has a little garden right up against the barrier. We’re experimenting a little, eating just a little of the vegetables, seeing if there’s any kind of … you know, effect.”
“Very scientific of you,” Astrid said.
He shrugged. “Well, my scientist girlfriend was off in the woods. I had to do my best.”
Had she just reacted to the word “girlfriend”?
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to…” He wasn’t sure what he hadn’t meant to do.
“It wasn’t the word ‘girlfriend,’” Astrid said. “It was the possessive. The ‘my.’ But I realized that was stupid of me. There’s no better way to say it. It’s just that I haven’t been thinking of myself as anyone’s anything.”
“No girl is an island.”
“Seriously? You’re misquoting John Donne? To me?”
“Hey, maybe I’ve spent the last four months reading poetry. You don’t know.”
Astrid laughed. He loved that laugh. Then she grew serious. “The stain is everywhere I looked, Sam. I traveled along the barrier. It’s everywhere, sometimes just a few inches visible, but I saw areas where it rose maybe twenty feet or so.”
“You think it’s growing?”
She shrugged. “I know it’s growing; I just don’t know how fast. I’d like to try to measure it.”
“What do you think it is?” he asked.
She shook her head slowly, side to side. “I don’t know.”
He felt as if a hand was squeezing his heart. The FAYZ punished happiness. He had made the mistake of being happy.
“Do you think…,” he began, but he couldn’t quite get the words out. He changed it to, “What if it keeps growing?”
“The barrier has always been a kind of optical illusion. Look straight at it in front of you and you see a blank, non-reflective gray surface. A nullity. Look higher up and you see an illusion of sky. Day sky, night sky—but never a plane. The moon waxes and wanes as it should. It’s an illusion but it’s also our only source of light.” She was thinking aloud. The way she sometimes did. The way he had missed.
“I don’t know, but this seems like some kind of breakdown. You know how sometimes a movie projector—like the one we had at school, remember?—will get dimmer and dimmer until pretty soon you’re squinting to see anything?”
“You’re talking about it going completely dark?” He was relieved that his voice did not betray him with a tremor.
Astrid started to reach to touch his leg and stopped herself. Then she twined her fingers together, giving them something else to do. She wasn’t meeting his gaze but looking slightly past him, first to his left, then to his right.
“It’s possible,” she said. “I guess, yes. I mean, that was my first thought. That it’s going dark.”