The tarot reader was ignored. No one had money to waste on that. A boy played a guitar of sorts while his little sister played a professional drum set they’d liberated from someone’s home. They were not good, but they were making music, and in a Perdido Beach without electricity, without recorded music, without iPods or stereos, where computer hard drives grew dusty and DVD players were untouched, even pitiful entertainment was welcome.
As Sam watched, a girl placed a quarter of a melon on the musician’s tip plate. They immediately stopped playing, broke the melon into pieces, and wolfed it down.
Sam knew there was a second market, out of sight but easy enough to find for those who were interested. That market sold alcohol and pot and various other contraband. Sam had tried to put a stop to the alcohol and drugs, but he had not accomplished much. He had more pressing priorities.
“New graffiti,” Astrid said, looking up at the wall behind the meat stand.
The black and red logo formed a crude “H” and “C.” Human Crew. Zil Sperry’s hate group.
“Yeah, it’s all over town,” Sam said. He knew he shouldn’t keep talking, but he did, anyway. “If I weren’t on a leash I’d go over to Zil’s so-called compound and put an end to this once and for all.”
“What do you mean? Kill him?” Astrid said, playing dumb.
“No, Astrid. Haul his butt to town hall and stick him in a locked room until he decides to grow up.”
“In other words, put him in prison. Because you decide to. And for as long as you decide to keep him there,” Astrid said. “For a guy who never wanted to be in charge, you’re awfully willing to be a dictator.”
Sam sighed. “Okay, fine. Whatever. I don’t want to fight.”
“So, how is the little girl from last night?” Astrid asked, changing the subject.
“Mary was taking care of her.” He hesitated. Looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was within range to overhear. “Mary asked her to sing. She says it’s like the world stops when she sings. Like no one talks, no one moves, the whole preschool just practically froze. Mary says it’s like an angel is singing. Just to you.”
“An angel?” Astrid said skeptically.
“Hey, I thought you believed in angels.”
“I do. I just don’t think this little girl is one.” She sighed. “More like a siren.”
Sam stared blankly at her.
“No,” Astrid said. “Not like a police car siren. Like Odysseus. Ulysses. The sirens. The ones who when they sang no man could resist them?”
“I knew that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I did. They did a parody on The Simpsons.”
Astrid sighed. “Why am I with you?”
“Because I’m incredibly attractive?”
“You are mildly attractive, actually,” Astrid teased.
“So, I’m a kind of really hot dictator?”
“I don’t recall saying ‘really hot.’”
Sam smiled. “You didn’t have to. It’s in your eyes.”
They kissed. Not a big passionate kiss, but nice like it was always nice. Someone hooted derisively. Someone else yelled, “Get a room.”
Sam and Astrid ignored all that. They were both aware that they were the “first couple” of the FAYZ, and their relationship was a sign of stability to kids. Like seeing Mom and Dad kissing: kind of gross, but kind of reassuring.
“So what are we going to do with the Siren now?” Astrid asked. “She’s too old to stay with Mary.”
“Orsay took her in,” Sam said. He waited to see whether the mention of Orsay would get a reaction from Astrid. No. Astrid didn’t know what Orsay was up to.
“Excuse me. Sam?”
He turned around to find Francis. Not the best time to be interrupted, not when he was trying to discuss his attractiveness with Astrid.
“What’s up, Francis?”
Francis shrugged. He looked confused and awkward. He stuck out his hand. Sam hesitated; then, feeling slightly ridiculous, he shook Francis’s hand.
“I felt like I had to say thanks,” Francis said.
“Oh. Oh, um…cool.”
“And don’t take it like it’s your fault, okay?” Francis said. “And don’t be mad at me. I tried…”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s my birthday,” Francis explained. “The big One-Five.”
Sam felt a bead of sweat roll down his back. “You’re ready, right? I mean, you’ve read the write-up on what you have to do?”
“I’ve read it,” Francis said. But his voice betrayed him.
Sam grabbed his arm. “No, Francis. No.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Francis said.
“No,” Astrid said firmly. “You don’t want to do this.”
Francis shrugged. Then he grinned shyly. “My mom, she needs me. She and my dad just broke up. And, anyway, I miss her.”
“What do you mean they just broke up?”
“They’ve been thinking about it a long time. But last week my dad just took off. And she’s alone, right, so—”
“Francis, what are you talking about?” Astrid demanded irritably. “We’ve been in the FAYZ for seven months. You don’t know what’s going on with your parents.”
“The Prophetess told me.”
“The what?” Astrid snapped. “Francis, have you been drinking?”
Sam felt frozen, unable to react. He knew instantly what this was about.
“The Prophetess told me,” Francis said. “She saw…she knows and she told me…” He was getting more and more agitated. “Look, I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“Then stop acting like an idiot,” Sam said, finding his voice at last.
“My mom needs me,” Francis said. “More than you do. I have to go to her.”
“What makes you think the poof takes you to your mother?”
“It’s a door,” Francis said. His eyes clouded over as he spoke. He wasn’t looking at Sam anymore. He was inside his own head, his voice singsong, as if reciting something he’d heard. “A door, a pathway, an escape to bliss. Not a birthday: a rebirthday.”
“Francis, I don’t know who is telling you this, but it’s not true,” Astrid said. “No one knows what happens if you step out.”
“She knows,” Francis said. “She explained it to me.”
“Francis, I’m telling you not to do this,” Sam said urgently. “Look, I know about Orsay. I know, all right? And maybe she thinks this is true, but you can’t risk it.”
He felt Astrid’s penetrating gaze. He refused to acknowledge the unspoken question.
“Dude, you are the man,” Francis said with a soft smile. “But even you can’t control this.”
Francis turned and walked quickly away. He stopped after a dozen feet. Mary Terrafino was running toward him. She waved her stick-thin arms and yelled, “Francis! No!”
Francis raised his hand and checked his watch. His smile was serene.
Mary reached him, grabbed him by the shirt, and yelled, “Don’t you leave those children. Don’t you dare leave those children! They’ve lost too much. They love you.”
Francis slipped off his watch and held it out to her. “It’s all I have to give you.”
“Francis, no.”
But she was holding air. Yelling at air.
The watch lay in the grass.
Francis was gone.
SEVEN
56 HOURS, 30 MINUTES
“WHAT ELSE HAVEN’T you been telling us, Sam?”
Astrid had immediately called a meeting of the town council. She hadn’t even yelled at him privately. She’d just nailed him with a poisonous look and said, “I’m calling a meeting.”
Now they sat in the former mayor’s conference room. It was gloomy, the only light coming through a window that was itself in shade. The table was heavy wood, the chairs deep and luxurious. The walls were decorated—if that was the right word—with large, framed photos of past mayors of Perdido Beach.
&n
bsp; Sam always felt like a fool in this room. He sat in a too-big chair at one end of the table. Astrid was at the other. Her hands were on the table, slender fingers flat on the surface.
Dekka sat scowling, irritated, though Sam wasn’t sure at whom she was directing her dark mood. A piece of something blue was stuck in one of her tight cornrows—not that anyone was foolish enough to point it out or laugh.
Dekka was a freak, the only one besides Sam in this room. She had the power to temporarily cancel gravity in small areas. Sam counted her as an ally. Dekka was not about talking without end and getting nothing done.
Albert was the best-dressed person in the room, wearing an amazingly clean and seemingly un-salty polo shirt and relatively unwrinkled slacks. He looked like a very young businessman who had stopped by on his way to a round of golf.
Albert was a normal, though he seemed nevertheless to have an almost supernatural ability to organize, to make things happen, to do business. Looking at the group through hooded eyes, Sam knew Albert was probably the most powerful person in the room. Albert, more than any other person, had kept Perdido Beach from starving.
Edilio slumped, holding his head with both hands and not making eye contact with anyone. He had a submachine gun propped against his chair, a sight that had become all too normal.
Edilio was officially town marshal. Probably the mildest, most modest and least-assuming person in the council, he was in charge of enforcing whatever rules the council created. If they ever got around to actually creating any.
Howard was the wild card in the group. Sam still wasn’t sure how he had managed to talk his way onto the council. No one doubted that Howard was smart. But no one thought he had an honest or ethical bone in his body. Howard was chief toady to Orc, the glowering, drunken-boy-turned-monster who had fought on the right side a couple of times when it had really counted.
The youngest member was a sweet-faced boy named John Terrafino. He was a normal, too—Mary’s little brother. He seldom had much to say and mostly listened. Everyone assumed he voted however Mary told him to. Mary would have been there, but she was simultaneously indispensable and fragile.
Seven council members. Astrid as chairperson. Five normals, two freaks.
“A few different things happened last night,” Sam said as calmly as he could. He didn’t want a fight. He especially didn’t want a fight with Astrid. He loved Astrid. He was desperate for Astrid. She was the sum total of all the good he had in his life, he reminded himself.
And now she was furious.
“We know about Jill,” Astrid said.
“Zil’s punks. Who wouldn’t still be doing stuff like that if we’d shut them down,” Dekka muttered.
“We’ve voted on that,” Astrid said.
“Yeah, I know. Four to three in favor of letting the sick little creep and his sick little friends terrorize the whole town,” Dekka snapped.
“Four to three in favor of having some kind of system of laws and not just fighting fire with fire,” Astrid said.
“We can’t just go around arresting people without some kind of system,” Albert said.
“Yeah, Sammy,” Howard said with a smirk. “You can’t just go all laser-hands whenever you decide you don’t like someone.”
Dekka shifted in her seat, hunching her strong shoulders forward. “No, so instead we let little girls be kicked out of their own homes and terrorized.”
“Look, once and for all, we can’t have a system where Sam is judge, jury, and executioner,” Astrid said. She softened it a bit by adding, “Although if there’s one person I would trust, it’s him. Sam’s a hero. But we need everyone in the FAYZ to know what’s okay and what’s not. We need rules, not just one person deciding who is out of line and who isn’t.”
“He was a really good worker,” John whispered. “Francis. He was a really good worker. The prees are totally going to miss him. They loved him.”
“I only found out about this last night. Actually, early this morning,” Sam said. He gave a brief description of what he’d seen and heard at Orsay’s gathering.
“Could it be true?” Albert asked. He seemed worried. Sam understood his ambivalence. Albert had gone from being just another kid in the old days, a person no one even really noticed, to being the person who in many ways ran Perdido Beach.
“I don’t think there’s any way for us to know,” Astrid said.
Everyone fell silent at that. The idea that it might be possible to contact parents, friends, family outside of the FAYZ was mind-boggling. The idea that those outside could know what was happening inside the FAYZ…
Even now, with some time to digest it, Sam felt powerful and not necessarily pleasant emotions. He had long been plagued by the fear that when the FAYZ wall somehow, some day, came down, he would be held responsible. For lives he had taken. For lives he had not saved. The idea that the whole world might be watching, dissecting his actions, questioning every panicky move, every desperate moment, was disturbing, to say the least.
So many things he didn’t want to have to ever talk about. So many things that could be made to look awful.
Young master Temple, can you explain how you sat by while kids wasted most of the food supply and ended up starving?
Are you telling us, Mr. Temple, that children were cooking and eating their own pets?
Mr. Temple, can you explain the graves in the plaza?
Sam clenched his fists and steadied his breathing.
“What Francis did was commit suicide,” Dekka said.
“I think that’s a little harsh,” Howard said. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the table, and interlaced his fingers over his skinny belly. He knew this would irritate Astrid. In fact, Sam guessed, he did it for just that reason. “He wanted to go running home to Mommy, what can I say? Of course, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone would choose to step out of the FAYZ. I mean, where else do you get to eat rats, use your backyard for a toilet, and live in fear of nineteen different kinds of scary?”
No one laughed.
“We can’t let kids do this,” Astrid said. She sounded quite sure.
“How do we stop them?” Edilio asked. He raised his head, and Sam saw the distress on his face. “How do you think we stop them? When your fifteenth birthday rolls around, the easy thing is to take the poof. You gotta fight to resist it. We know that. So how are we going to tell kids this isn’t real, this Orsay thing?”
“We just tell them,” Astrid said.
“But we don’t know if it’s real or not,” Edilio argued.
Astrid shrugged. She stared at nothing and kept her features very still. “We tell them it’s all fake. Kids hate this place, but they don’t want to die.”
“How do we tell them if we don’t know?” Edilio seemed genuinely puzzled.
Howard laughed. “Deely-O, Deely-O, you are such a doof sometimes.” He put his feet down and leaned toward Edilio as if sharing a secret with him. “She means: We lie. Astrid means that we lie to everyone and tell them we do know for sure.”
Edilio stared at Astrid like he was expecting her to deny it.
“It’s for people’s own good,” Astrid said in a low voice, still looking at nothing.
“You know what’s funny?” Howard said, grinning. “I was pretty sure we were coming to this meeting so Astrid could rank on Sam for not telling us the whole truth. And now, it turns out we’re really here so Astrid can talk us all into becoming liars.”
“Becoming?” Dekka snarked with a cynical look at Howard. “Wouldn’t exactly be a transformation for you, Howard.”
Astrid said, “Look, if we let Orsay go on with this craziness, we could not only have kids stepping out on their fifteenth. We could have kids not wanting to wait that long. Kids deciding to end it right away and thinking they’d wake up on the other side with their parents.”
Everyone at the table leaned back at once, taking that in.
“I can’t lie,” John said simply. He shook his head, and his red
curls shook, too.
“You’re a member of the council,” Astrid snapped. “You have to abide by our decisions. That’s the deal. That’s the only way it works.” Then, in a calmer voice, she said, “John, isn’t Mary coming up on her fifteenth before long?”
Sam saw the jab hit home. Mary was perhaps the single most necessary person in Perdido Beach. From the start she had stepped up and run the day care. She’d become a mother to the littles.
But Mary had her own problems. She was anorexic and bulimic. She ate antidepressants by the handful, but the supply was rapidly running out.
Dahra Baidoo, who controlled the medicines in Perdido Beach, came to Sam secretly and told him that Mary was in every couple of days, asking for whatever Dahra might have. “She’s taking Prozac and Zoloft and Lexapro, and these aren’t just nothing little meds, Sam. People have to go on and off these things carefully, according to the book. You don’t just grab whatever and mix them all up.”
Sam hadn’t told anyone but Astrid about it. And he’d warned Dahra to keep it to herself. Then he’d made a mental note to talk to Mary, and had forgotten to ever follow up.
Now, from John’s stricken expression, Sam could guess that he was far from certain that Mary wouldn’t give in to the poof and step out.
They took a vote. Astrid, Alberto, and Howard shot their hands up immediately.
“No, man,” Edilio said, shaking his head. “I’d have to lie to my own people, my soldiers. Kids who trust me.”
“No,” John voted. “I…I’m just a kid and all, but I would have to lie to Mary.”
Dekka looked at Sam. “What do you say, Sam?”
Astrid interrupted. “Look, we could do this temporarily. Just until we find out if Orsay is making this all up. If she came out later and admitted it was all fake, well, we’d have our answer.”
“Maybe we should torture her,” Howard said, only half kidding.
“We can’t just sit by if we think kids are going to be dying,” Astrid pleaded. “Suicide is a mortal sin. These kids won’t be getting out of the FAYZ, they’ll be going to hell.”
“Wow,” Howard said. “Hell? And we know this, how exactly? You don’t know any more than any of us do about what happens after a poof.”