If no one picked her blackberries, the birds would get them.
She went on this way for a while, fully aware of the fact that she was nostalgic over things that had usually been pretty miserable, realizing that she was as trapped as Sam in waiting, waiting, waiting for doom.
The image of the coyote with the human face and legs came suddenly to mind. It knocked the breath out of her.
BANG. BANG. She could hear the sound of the gun better in memory than she had at the time. At the time she’d been numb. Now she recalled, too, the way the gun bucked. The way the abomination bled out in the sand.
The way the little girl’s face relaxed in death and the blind eyes filmed over.
What terrible thing was happening? Why couldn’t she figure it out? Why couldn’t she help Sam to pull off one more impossible victory?
One of the great reliefs about living on her own had been the fact that she had no expectations to meet. She didn’t have to be Astrid the Genius, or Astrid the Mayor, or Astrid Sam’s girlfriend, or Why-won’t-she-shut-up Astrid.
All she’d had to do was get enough food to eat each day. A huge accomplishment that was all hers.
Sam had binoculars to his eyes. He checked the barrier. Then swung them inland.
“Mo’s on his way,” he said. He shifted slightly. “So is Howard, out in front of him by a quarter mile. He’s just… Okay, now I can’t see him.” He lowered the binoculars. “Figures. Howard’s heading to his still to bring back one more shipment of booze.”
Astrid made a wry smile. “Life goes on, I guess.”
Sam frowned. “You were telling me something. Earlier.”
“Get back to work. If I need you to worry, I’ll let you know.”
“Very funny.” He almost smiled.
He looked suddenly very young. Well, he was, Astrid supposed. So was she. But they’d forgotten about all that in this world where they were the elders. He looked like a kid, a teenager, a boy who ought to be yelling happily as he ran into the surf with his board.
That image made her hurt. A tear welled. She pretended to have a speck of dust in her eye and wiped it away.
He wasn’t fooled. He put his arms around her and drew her close. She couldn’t look at him for fear of crying. She couldn’t see the fear in him and not want to just hold him like he was a little boy.
“No,” he whispered. “You have to open your eyes, Astrid. I don’t know how many more times I’ll see them.”
Her cheek was wet when she pressed it to his.
“I want to make love to you again,” he said.
“I want to make love to you, Sam,” she answered. “We’re scared.”
He nodded and she saw his jaw clench. “Inappropriate, I guess.”
“Human,” she said. “Most of human history people huddled, scared in the dark. Living in little huts with their animals. Believing the woods around them were haunted by spirits. Wolves and werewolves. Terrors. People would hold on to each other. So that they wouldn’t be so afraid.”
“I have to ask you to do something dangerous soon,” Sam said.
“You want me to go out and check the measurements again.”
“I know we were thinking tomorrow morning....”
She nodded. “I think it’s growing faster than that. I think you’re right. I think we need to know whether we’ll have a sunrise tomorrow.”
His face was bleak. He wasn’t looking at her, but past her. He looked like he wanted to cry but knew it was futile.
Once again she saw him as he must have been once upon a time, long, long ago. A big, good-looking boy out in the waves, trading jokes with Quinn, giddy that they were skipping school. Happy and carefree.
She imagined him drawing strength from the sun beating down on his brown shoulders.
The FAYZ had finally found the way to beat Sam Temple. Without light he would not survive. When the final night came with no prospect of dawn, he would be done.
She kissed him. He did not kiss her back, just gazed at the growing stain.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, Sinder had been very fond of black. She had painted her fingernails black. Dyed her brown hair jet-black. Donned clothing that was either black or some secondary color chosen to accentuate the black.
Now her color was green. She loved green. Carrots were orange and tomatoes were red, but each lived within green. The green turned light into food.
“How cool is photosynthesis?” Sinder called to Jezzie, who was a half dozen rows away, down on her knees, searching with deadly focus for weeds, bugs, or disease that might endanger her beloved plants. An overprotective mother had nothing on Jezzie. The girl hated weeds with a burning passion.
Jezzie didn’t answer—she frequently didn’t when Sinder turned loquacious. “I mean, I remember learning about it in school, but, man, who cared? Right? Photo-wuh? But I mean, it turns light into food. Light becomes energy becomes food and becomes energy again when we eat it. It’s like… You know…”
“It’s a miracle,” Orc rumbled.
“No,” Jezzie said, “it would be a miracle if it didn’t also work for weeds. Then it would be a miracle.” She’d found a root of something she didn’t like and was pulling on it, grunting with the effort.
“I could pull that for you,” Orc said.
“No, no, no!” both girls cried. “But thanks, Orc.”
Orc did not wear shoes, but if he had they’d probably have been size twenty. Extra, extra, extra wide. When he stepped into the garden things had a tendency to be crushed.
Sinder liked to get down low and look at her plants from close up. From one side she would see the miraculous leaves outlined against the backdrop of the lake and the marina area. From the other side she would see them almost like mounted specimens against the pearly gray blankness of the barrier.
Now she was looking at the feathery structure of a carrot top against the blank black of the stain. It had the odd effect of making the leaf seem like a work of abstract art.
She looked up from the plant and saw the stain suddenly shoot upward. What had been a ragged, undulating wave of black extending only a dozen or so feet above her head blossomed like one of her charges to become a terrible black bloom thirty, fifty, a hundred feet high before it slowed and stopped.
She hoped Jezzie hadn’t seen it. But when her friend stood up there were tears running down her cheeks.
“I feel bad inside,” Jezzie said simply.
Sinder nodded. She glanced at Orc, but he was absorbed in reading. “Me, too, Jez. Like…” She didn’t have the words for what it was like. So she just shook her head.
Jezzie wiped dirt from her brow and managed to actually transfer more dirt there. She was looking down toward the marina. Sinder followed her gaze and saw Sam and Astrid holding each other close on the top deck of the White Houseboat.
Jezzie said, “At first when I heard she was back I thought it was a good thing. I thought Sam would be happy. You know: he’s been lonely.”
It was a fact of life in the FAYZ that kids cut off from TMZ and Facebook and the ins and outs of Hollywood and reality shows focused much of their gossip hunger on the closest thing they had to celebrities: Sam, who most people liked and everyone worried about; Diana, who most people didn’t like but whose baby everyone worried about; the baby itself, in particular betting about its gender and possible powers; news of Caine from Perdido Beach; affectionate speculation about Edilio and the nature of his friendship with the Artful Roger; theories about Astrid with passionate disagreement as to whether she was a good person and good for Sam, or alternately a sort of Jadis, the White Witch from Narnia; and, of course, the whispered-about, much-speculated-about relationship (or lack of same) between Brianna and Jack and/or Brianna and Dekka.
Remarks about Sam’s state of mind were no more unusual than speculation about Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber had once been. Except that every person at the lake felt his or her own fate was all too closely tied to Sam Temple.
“He doe
sn’t look good,” Jezzie said. Sam was a tiny, distant figure from where she stood. And Sinder might have pointed that out on some other day. But the truth was that something about the way Sam held Astrid was wrong.
Sinder looked out across her garden, the plants she knew as individuals, many with names she and Jezzie had given them. And she saw the line of stain push slowly now, slowly but relentlessly, toward the sky.
Drake found the light almost unbearable. The setting sun stabbed his eyes with jagged pain. How long since he had seen the sun? Weeks? Months?
There was no time down in the gaiaphage’s lair, no rising or setting moon, no mealtime, bath time, wake-up time.
The coyotes were waiting for him in the ghost town below the mine entrance. Pack Leader—well, the current Pack Leader, if not the original—licked a scab on his right front paw.
“Take me to the lake,” Drake said.
Pack Leader stared at him with yellow eyes. “Pack hungry.”
“Too bad. Take me.”
Pack Leader bared his teeth. The coyotes of the FAYZ were not the runts that coyotes had been back before the FAYZ. They weren’t as big as wolves, but they were big. But it was easy to see that they were not well. Their fur was mangy. There were bare patches on all of them where scraped gray-and-red flesh showed through. Their eyes were dull. Their heads hung low and the tails dragged.
“Humans take all prey,” Pack Leader said. “Darkness says don’t kill humans. Darkness does not feed pack.”
Drake frowned and counted the pack. He saw seven, all adults, no pups.
As if reading Drake’s mind, Pack Leader said, “Many die. Killed by Bright Hands. Killed by Swift Girl. No prey. No food for pack. Pack serves Darkness and pack goes hungry.”
Drake barked out a disbelieving laugh. “Are you bitching out the gaiaphage? I’ll whip the skin off you!”
Drake unwrapped his tentacle arm, which had been wound around his torso.
Pack Leader retreated a few dozen feet. The pack might be weak with hunger but they were still far too quick for Drake to catch. He felt uneasy. The gaiaphage would not listen to excuses. Drake had a mission. He had been to the lake before, but never alone. He knew he could follow the barrier, but the barrier itself was a long way off. If he wandered around lost he might be spotted. The success of his mission lay in stealth and surprise.
And then there was the problem of Brittney. Had the gaiaphage told her what to do? Would she do it? Would she know how to find the way without the coyotes as guides?
“How am I supposed to feed you?” Drake demanded.
“Darkness say to coyote: don’t kill human. Did not say don’t eat dead human.”
Drake laughed with a certain delight. This Pack Leader was definitely a smarter animal than the original one. The gaiaphage had ordered the beasts not to kill humans for fear they might unknowingly kill someone useful: Lana, or even Nemesis. But Drake knew which humans were expendable.
“You know where I can find a human?” Drake asked.
“Pack Leader knows,” Pack Leader said.
“Okay, then. Let’s get you boys some dinner. Then we go get Diana.”
Astrid found Edilio just coming back down from the Pit. The Artful Roger and Justin, the little kid Roger looked after, were with him, but Edilio sent them both away when he spotted Astrid.
“I got that thing, that … whatever it was. Up under a tarp. You want to look at it now?” Edilio asked.
“No. I’m sorry you had to do that. It couldn’t have been very pleasant.”
“It wasn’t,” Edilio said flatly.
“Listen, it looks like the stain is accelerating. Sam wants me to check the frames early.”
“I saw it growing. Faster. A lot faster,” Edilio said. “But I understand if Sam wants more information.” He blew out a weary breath and drank from a water bottle.
“Don’t come yourself,” Astrid said. “Just send one of your guys.”
Edilio made an incredulous face. “And tell Sam something happened to you because I wasn’t there?”
Astrid treated it as a joke and laughed.
But Edilio didn’t join in. “Sam’s all we’ve got. You’re all Sam’s got. Come on, it’ll be a quick, easy walk without having to carry those frames.”
The plan had been to allow twenty-four hours before checking the frames. The idea had been that a frame that was 10 percent stain might grow to 20 percent stain and that then Astrid could calculate the rate of growth.
But now that the plan was revealed as absurdly optimistic. All the frames were 100 percent filled with black. There was no chance of an accurate calculation: it had grown too far, grown too fast. And the rate of acceleration could only be increasing exponentially.
She stood looking up, craning her neck to see the tallest black finger yet. It stretched three hundred feet up the side of the dome.
As she watched, it grew. She could see it moving.
Then, from a low point in the stain, a new black tendril shot up as fast as a car on the freeway. It just seemed to explode upward. Up and up, and she tilted her head back to see it, and up farther and farther.
The stain crossed the line between blank pearly gray and sunlight. Then it slowed. But that slim black finger violated the sky like graffiti on the Mona Lisa. It was vandalism. It was ugliness.
It was the future written clearly for Astrid to see.
FIFTEEN
22 HOURS, 16 MINUTES
MOHAMED HAD SET out from the lake on the tedious walk to Perdido Beach as soon as he could get a water bottle and a little food in his belly.
He carried a pistol and a knife, but he wasn’t really worried. Everyone knew he was under Albert’s protection. And no one messed with Albert’s people.
For most of the time since the coming of the FAYZ, Mohamed had lain low, stayed out of the way of all the big wheels who were busy killing and being killed.
As crazy as things were in the FAYZ, the smart move was to just do the minimum to get food and shelter. And not even shelter some of the time.
He was thirteen, a man. He was thin and starting to get taller, a growth spurt that had left his shorts too short and his shoes too tight. His family had just moved to Perdido Beach when his mother got a job at the power plant. The school was supposed to be better than the one he’d been at in King City. His dad still worked there, working ten hours a day at the family’s Circle K, selling gas and cigarettes and milk to a mostly Hispanic population. It was a really long commute, and some nights his dad hadn’t come home, which made everyone feel strange and abandoned.
But that was the way it was, his father had explained. A man worked. A man did what he had to do to take care of his family. Even if it meant he saw less of them.
Sometimes Moomaw—Mohamed’s paternal grandmother—would talk about going back to Syria. But Mohamed’s father would shut that down right away. He had left Syria when he was twenty-two and didn’t miss it at all, not even a little, no, sir. Yes, he’d been a medical student there and sold hot dogs to farmhands now, but it was still better.
Was it tough sometimes being the only Muslim at the Perdido Beach school? Yeah. He’d been pushed around by Orc a few times. Kids made fun of him for praying. For refusing the pepperoni pizza at lunch. But pretty soon Orc had lost interest and most kids didn’t even think twice about where his parents came from or how he prayed.
Fortunately Mohamed’s family had never been all that strict about the dietary laws. He hadn’t eaten pork since the coming of the FAYZ, but he would have in a heartbeat if anyone had some. He’d eaten rat, cat, dog, bird, and fish and slimy things he didn’t have a name for. He’d have jumped all over a pepperoni pizza if anyone had one. Staying alive was not a sin: Allah saw all; Allah understood all.
Someday this would all end; Mohamed was sure of that. Or tried to be. Someday the barrier would come down and his father and mother and brothers and sister would be waiting for him.
How would he get along with his brothers? They would as
k him all the questions his parents wouldn’t. They’d ask him what he had done. They’d ask him if he represented. They’d ask him if he had stood up or wimped out. That was what brothers were like, at least his.
Whenever the barrier came down there would be all kinds of people talking to the media and telling all kinds of stories. And pretty quick people would realize they hadn’t just all sat around catching up on their homework.
People would realize it had been more like a war. And then all those questions. Were you scared, Mohamed? Were you picked on? Did you ever run into all these insane freaks we hear about on TV?
Did you ever kill anyone? What was it like?
He hadn’t killed anyone. He’d had a couple of fights; one of them was pretty bad. He’d had a nail driven into his butt cheek and broken his wrist.
Mohamed figured he’d change that story a little. Nail in the butt sounded funny. It hadn’t been, but if he ever got out, yeah, he’d change that story.
As for freaks, the only one he’d spent any time with was Lana. She had healed his butt and his wrist.
So, yeah, don’t diss all the freaks, not to Mohamed.
When it came time for the Big Split, Mohamed had been forced to commit, one way or the other. He had gone to Albert and asked his advice. Until then Mohamed had stuck to working in the fields, but Albert had seen something in him.
Albert had liked him for the fact that he had no real friends. No family inside the FAYZ. He liked the way Mohamed had managed to stay under the radar. All those things—plus Mohamed’s basic intelligence—made him just right for the job Albert had for him: representing AlberCo at the lake.
Mohamed still had no friends. But he had a job. An important one. Albert would want to know details of Astrid’s return. He’d want to know that she was measuring some kind of stain on the dome. Maybe he’d want to know about some weird, mutant animal Astrid had supposedly killed. And he would definitely want to hear what Mohamed knew about the secret mission Sam and Dekka had gone out on.
Mohamed walked down the familiar, dusty road.
He walked alone.
Howard was already en route to Coates. He had a long day of work ahead of him. Hopefully his contractors would have run some corn and assorted other vegetables and fruits up to Coates and locked them in the rat-proof steel cupboards in the kitchen.