Sanjit sat back down. He turned back to the book. His hands were shaking.
Peace came in wearing footie pajamas and rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
“I forgot Noo Noo,” she said.
“Ah.” Sanjit spotted the doll on the floor, picked it up, and handed it to her. “Hard to sleep without Noo Noo, huh?”
Peace took the doll and cradled it to her. “Is Bowie going to be all right?”
“Well, I hope so,” Sanjit said.
“Are you learning how to fly the helicopter?”
“Sure,” Sanjit said. “Nothing to it. There’s some pedals for your feet. This stick thing called a collective. And another stick called…something else. I forget. But don’t worry.”
“I always worry, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you kind of do.” Sanjit smiled at her. “But that’s okay, because the stuff you worry about almost never happens, does it?”
“No,” Peace admitted. “But the stuff I hope for doesn’t happen, either.”
Sanjit sighed. “Yeah. Well, I’m going to do my best.”
Peace came and hugged him. Then she took her doll and left.
Sanjit returned to the story, something about a firefight with “Charlie.” He skimmed along, trying to glean enough clues to figure out how to fly a helicopter. Off a boat. Next to a cliff.
Loaded with everyone he cared about.
SEVENTEEN
15 HOURS, 59 MINUTES
“MOTHER MARY? CAN I get up and be with you?”
“No, hon. Go back to sleep.”
“But I’m not tired.”
Mary put her hand on the four-year-old’s shoulder. She led him back to the main room. Cots on the floor. Filthy sheets. Not much she could do about that anymore.
Your mother says that you have done enough, Mary.
Mother Mary, they called her. Like she was the Virgin Mary. Kids always professed admiration for her. They admired her all to pieces. Big deal. Not really very helpful as Mary trudged through the daily, nightly, daily, nightly grind.
Sullen “volunteers.” Endless battles between the kids over toys. Older siblings constantly trying to dump their brothers or sisters off on the day care. Scratches, scrapes, sniffles, bloody noses, loose teeth, and ear infections. Kids who just wandered off, like Justin, the latest. And endless, endless series of questions to be answered. A demand for attention that never let up, ever, not even for a second.
Mary kept a calendar. She’d had to make her own, carefully drawing it out on a big piece of butcher paper. She needed big spaces to write endless reminders and notes. Every child’s birthday. When a kid first complained of an ear infection. Reminders to get more cloth for diapers. To get a new broom. Things she needed to tell John or one of the other workers.
She stared at the calendar now. Stared at a note she’d made to give Francis a day off in honor of three months’ worth of great work.
Francis had given himself his own time off.
On the schedule a note from weeks earlier to find “P.” That was code for Prozac. She hadn’t found any Prozac. Dahra Baidoo’s medicine cabinet was just about empty. Dahra had given Mary a couple of different antidepressants, but they were having side effects. Vivid, absurd dreams that left Mary feeling unsettled all day long and made her dread sleep.
She was eating what she was supposed to.
But she had started vomiting again. Not every time. Just some of the time. Sometimes it came to a choice between not eating and allowing herself to stick her finger down her throat. Sometimes she couldn’t control both impulses, so she had to choose one.
And then sobbing, filled with hatred for her own mind, for the little cancers that seemed to eat at her soul night and day and night and day.
Your mother misses you….
On the calendar, Mother’s Day was a mark in red, “15th b’day!” She twisted Francis’s watch around and checked the time. Could it really be that late? Sixteen hours now. Sixteen hours until she would be fifteen years old.
Not long. Had to be ready for that, the big fifteen.
Had to be ready to fight the temptation that came to each kid in the FAYZ as they reached that deadly date.
Everyone knew by now what happened. Time would seem to freeze. And while you hung in a sort of limbo, a tempter would come to you. The one person you wanted most to please. The one you wanted most to be reunited with. And they would offer you escape. They would beg you to come across with them, to step out of the FAYZ.
There were a hundred theories of why it happened. Mary had heard numerological theories, conspiracy theories, astrological theories, every variation on aliens, government scientists….
Astrid’s explanation, the “official explanation,” was that the FAYZ was a freak of nature, an anomaly no one could understand, with rules the kids inside the FAYZ should try to discover and understand.
The weird psychological effect of the big fifteen was just a distortion in the mind. There was no reality to the “tempter” and no reality to the demon that followed it.
“Just your mind’s way of dramatizing a choice between life and death,” Astrid had explained with her usual slightly superior tone.
Mostly kids didn’t think about it. To a ten-or a twelve-year-old, age fifteen seemed a long way off. When your fifteenth started getting closer you started thinking about it, but Astrid—back when they still had electricity and printers—had actually printed up a handy little instruction sheet called “Surviving 15.”
Mary didn’t think Astrid would ever deliberately lie. No matter what Nerezza said. But she didn’t think Astrid was infallible, either.
Mostly Mary didn’t have time to waste on philosophical inquiries. To put it mildly. Mostly she was up to her neck in child-related crises.
But the date kept drawing closer. And then…Francis.
And now, Orsay.
On that day you will free your children so that you can be Mary the child again…
Mary could feel the depression closing in on her. It was a patient stalker. It watched and waited. And when it sensed the slightest weakness, it moved closer.
She had forced herself to eat.
And then she had forced herself to throw up.
She was not stupid. She was not unaware. She knew she was unraveling. Again.
Coming apart at the seams.
And soon she would be in that frozen, timeless stasis that Astrid’s helpful booklet had talked about. And she would see her mother’s face calling to her….
Lay down the burden, Mary…
And go to her…
Mary closed her eyes tight. When she opened them, Ashley stood before her. The little girl was crying. She’d had a nightmare and needed a hug.
A kid named Consuela, one of Edilio’s soldiers, had seen it first.
She had run to find Edilio. She was one of the late-night shift that kept an eye during the wee hours. She’d come across it, screamed, and gone running for Edilio. That’s what she was supposed to do.
And now Edilio was standing over it. Wondering what he was supposed to do. He knew the correct answer: report it to the council. He’d given Sam grief for failing to do that earlier.
But this…
“What should I do?” Consuela whispered.
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Should I get Astrid? Or Sam?”
Perfectly reasonable questions. Edilio wished he had a perfectly reasonable answer. “Take off,” Edilio said. “Good job. Sucks you had to see this.”
She left, grateful to get away. And Edilio stared down balefully at the thing…the person…the body…that would be like a dagger in Sam’s heart.
In the months since the death of Drake Merwin, the defeat of the gaiaphage and the deal with the zekes, a tenuous order and calm had come to the FAYZ.
Edilio felt that tenuous structure, the system Edilio had worked so hard to build, the system he had just started to believe might last, coming apart in his hands now, like tissue paper in a rainstor
m.
It had never been real. The FAYZ would always win.
Sam stood over the body. The sight of it rocked him. He took a stagger-step back.
Edilio grabbed him.
Sam felt panic welling up inside of him. He wanted to run. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was pounding in his chest. His veins filled with ice water.
He knew what had happened.
“Hey, Boss,” Edilio said. “You okay, man?”
Sam couldn’t answer. He took air in little gasps. Like a toddler on the edge of tears.
“Sam,” Edilio said. “Come on, man.”
Edilio looked from the mutilated body to his friend and back again.
He had been there. Sam knew the terrible wounds he was seeing. The body of a twelve-year-old boy named Leonard bore marks Sam knew and would never forget.
The marks of a whip.
The street was quiet. No one in sight. No one who could have borne witness.
“Drake,” Sam said in a whisper.
“No, man: Drake’s dead and gone.”
Sam, suddenly furious, grabbed Edilio’s shirt. “Don’t tell me what I’m seeing, Edilio. It’s him,” Sam yelled.
Edilio patiently pried Sam’s fingers off. “Listen, Sam, I know what it looks like. I saw you. I saw what you looked like that day. So, I know, all right? But man, it makes no sense. Drake is dead and buried under tons of rock in a mine shaft.”
“It’s Drake,” Sam said flatly.
“Okay, that’s enough, Sam,” Edilio snapped. “You’re freaking out.”
Sam closed his eyes and felt again the pain…pain like nothing he’d imagined could exist outside of hell. Pain like being burned alive.
The blows of Drake’s whip hand. Each one tearing strips of flesh…
“You don’t…You don’t know what it was like…”
“Sam…”
“Even after Brianna shot me full of morphine…you don’t know…you don’t know…All right? You don’t know. Pray to God you don’t ever know.”
Taylor chose that moment to bounce in. She took a look at the body and yelped. She covered her mouth and looked away.
“He’s back,” Sam said.
“Taylor, get Sam out of here. Take him to Astrid,” Edilio ordered.
“But Sam and Astrid are—”
“Just do it!” Edilio roared. “And then haul your butt around and get the other members of the council over there. They want to know what’s going on? Fine. Then they can get up out of their beds.”
“It doesn’t go away,” Sam said through gritted teeth. “You know that, Edilio? It doesn’t go away. It’s always with me. It’s always with me.”
“Take him,” Edilio ordered Taylor. “And tell Astrid we need to talk.”
EIGHTEEN
15 HOURS, 57 MINUTES
“WE GO TONIGHT,” Caine said. Weak. So weak in every muscle. Sore. Panting just from climbing the stairs to the dining hall. Like he’d run a marathon.
Starvation. It did that to you.
He tried to count the exhausted, gaunt faces that turned toward him. But he couldn’t keep the number in his head. Fifteen? Seventeen? No more than that, certainly.
The last candle flickered on the table that had once been piled high with turkey loaf and pizza, Jell-O and limp salad, cartons of milk, all the usual school lunchroom fare.
This room had once been full of kids. All so healthy looking. Some thin, some fat, none as gaunt and hideous as what was left here now.
Coates Academy, the fashionable place for the well-off to send their troublesome kids. Kids who started fires. Bullies. Skanks. Druggies. Kids with psychological problems. Or just kids who talked back once too often. Or kids whose parents wanted them gone from their lives.
The difficult, the losers, the rejects. The unloved. Coates Academy, where you could dump your kids and not be bothered by them anymore.
Well, that was certainly working out well for all concerned.
Now, the desperate remnants of Coates. The ones mean enough or lucky enough to survive. Only four of them known to be mutants: Caine himself, a four bar; Diana, whose only power was the ability to gauge another mutant’s powers; Bug, with his ability to almost disappear; and Penny, who had developed an extremely useful power of illusion: she could make a person believe they were being attacked by monsters or stabbed with knives or on fire.
She had demonstrated it on a kid named Barry. Barry had been made to believe he was being chased around the room by spears. It had been funny watching him run in terror.
That was it. Four mutants, only two of which, Caine and Penny, were any good in a fight. Bug had his uses. And Diana was Diana. The only face he wanted to see now.
But she had her head down, resting it on her hands with elbows on her knees.
The others looked to him. They didn’t love him or even like him, but they still feared him.
“I called everyone here tonight because we are leaving,” Caine said.
“Do you have any food?” a voice cried pitifully.
Caine said, “We’re going to get food. We know a place. It’s an island.”
“How are we going to get to an island?”
“Shut up, Jason. It’s an island. Used to be owned by two famous actors you probably remember. Todd Chance and Jennifer Brattle. It’s a huge mansion on a private island. The kind of place they’d have stocked with lots of food.”
“The only way to get there is on a boat,” Jason whined. “How can we do that?”
“We’re going to take some boats,” Caine said with far more confidence than he felt.
Bug sneezed. He became almost visible when he sneezed.
“Bug knows about this place,” Caine said. “It’s famous.”
“So why didn’t we hear about it earlier?” Diana asked, mumbling at the floor.
“Because Bug is an idiot and it didn’t occur to him,” Caine snapped. “But the island is there. It’s called San Francisco de Sales. It’s on the map.”
He pulled a torn and crumpled paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It was taken from an atlas in the school’s library. “See?” He held it up and was gratified to see flickers of actual interest.
“We’re going to get boats,” Caine said. “We’re going to get them in Perdido Beach.”
That killed whatever faint enthusiasm there had been. “They got all kinds of freaks and guns and all,” a girl nicknamed Pampers said.
“Yeah, they do,” Caine admitted wearily. “But they’re all going to be too busy to deal with us. And if any of them get in our way, I’ll take care of them. Me or Penny.”
Kids glanced at Penny. She was twelve years old. She’d probably been pretty once. A pretty little Chinese-American girl with a tiny nose and surprised eyebrows. Now she looked like a scarecrow, brittle hair, gums red from malnutrition, with a rash that covered her neck and arms in a lacy pink pattern.
Jason said, “I think you’re nuts. Go through Perdido Beach? Half of us can’t even walk that far, let alone fight. We’re starving, man. Unless you have some food to give us, we’ll fall out before we reach the highway.”
“Listen to me,” Caine said softly. “We’re definitely going to need some food. Soon.”
Diana looked up, dreading what Caine might do next.
“The only food we’re going to get is on that island. We reach it, or we find someone else to eat.”
NINETEEN
15 HOURS, 27 MINUTES
IT WAS WEIRD, Zil thought. Weird how it had come to this. Weird how scared he was, how rattly his insides were, but he couldn’t let on. Because he was in charge. Because they were all looking to him.
The Leader. Capital “T,” capital “L,” when Turk said it.
Turk, a creepy little toady with his bad leg and his rat face.
And Hank. Hank was scary. Probably crazy as a loon. Okay, not probably, definitely. Hank was always the one pushing, provoking, demanding.
The others. Twenty-three of them. Antoine, the fat dru
ggie. Max. Rudy. Lisa. Trent. Others Zil barely knew. The only one Zil really even liked was Lance. Lance was cool. Lance was the good-looking, smart one who made Zil feel like maybe this was all okay, like maybe Zil really did deserve to be The Leader, capital “T,” capital “L.”
Anyway, too late to turn back now. He’d made his deal with Caine. The deal was very simple: there were two people in the FAYZ who Zil had to fear above all others—Sam and Caine. Caine had offered Zil a chance to discredit one and wave good-bye to the other.
The time was now or never.
First things first. Gasoline. And after that it would be too late for second thoughts.
The declaration of total war against the freaks was a minute away.
Twenty-three of them filtered through the dark streets in ones and twos, guns and clubs hidden beneath hoodies and coats. Swaggering, some of them, others creeping along scared like mice. The great fear was that Sam might see them early. Try to stop them before they could start the party.
Zil laughed, not meaning to.
Turk was with him. Neither of them carrying a weapon, nothing that would give Sam an excuse if he stopped them.
“See, that’s a Leader,” Turk said in his greasy way. “You laugh despite everything.”
Zil said nothing. His stomach was in his throat.
So much could go wrong. Brianna. Dekka. Taylor. Edilio. Even Orc. Freaks and freak supporters, traitors. Any one of them could bring this to a sudden halt.
Zil felt as if he was standing at the edge of a cliff.
One step at a time. First, the gas station.
It had to be tonight.
Now.
And the whole town had to burn.
Out of that fire the Human Crew would gather the survivors under Zil’s leadership. Then he’d be the Leader, not just of this little crew of losers, but of everyone.
Brittney did not know where she’d been. Or what she’d done since leaving Brianna’s house. She had flashes, like single frames pulled out of a movie. A flash of a crawl space under a house. Of lying in the dirt again, of feeling it cold on her back. Of spiderwebbed wooden beams above her, a comforting coffin lid.