“Lyric, no,” Bex whimpers.
“Don’t worry. I got this,” I say to her as more bottles join the fun.
“Are you doing that?” Casto shouts at me. “Turn that thing off or I’ll shoot!”
“You should have let us go,” I remind him.
All the bottles shake violently, a deafening crescendo that cracks the air. There is an explosion of broken glass. Syrupy drinks splatter the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Before the cops can react, they are soaked in water, beer, and sports drinks. Bottles rocket across the room like missiles, zinging past my head. A jug of coconut water tags Casto in the head and knocks him completely off his feet. He lands with a painful thud. His gun skips across the slippery floor just as a bottle of cola clobbers one of his colleagues in the jaw. A jug of iced tea streaks through the air and hits the cashier in the chest. A dozen cans of energy drink track the third officer like drones, hitting him in the temple, the back, and the gut. He slips and falls fast on the wet linoleum, face-planting the microwave counter on the way down and knocking himself unconscious.
Perry finally scrambles to his feet. The gun that he holds in his hands shakes like a leaf in a strong breeze.
“What are you?” he asks. It’s a good question.
“I’m a Coaster, don’t you remember?” I say, then urge a two-liter bottle of mineral water to barrel into the back of his skull. He falls forward and his pistol fires. I hear the bullet whiz past me. It tugs the tail of my shirt, and when I look down, I see a faint trail of smoke drift out of the hole it made. My hands reach underneath frantically searching for a wound and the tacky traces of blood, but I can’t find anything. He missed me, but now I’m angry. I stalk over to him, lying on the floor, terror in his eyes, and suddenly knocking him down doesn’t feel like it was enough. This one needs to learn a lesson, one he can tell the whole world when the reporters come to ask him about his meeting with the terrorist teen, the Alpha monster, the girl who killed Coney Island. I can make sure he tells them all what I want them to hear: Don’t be stupid enough to get in my way.
My hand glows as bright as my rage.
Bex grabs the pack, then me, and pulls me through the door and out into the parking lot.
“No!” I cry, trying to free myself.
“C’mon!” she screams. “There will be more cops any minute.”
I’m frustrated, but she’s right. We need to go. We sprint across the road, where Arcade is still sitting on the hood.
“You were attacked?” Her glove blazes to life. “Why are you running?”
“We have to go now,” Bex shouts.
“A Daughter of Triton does not run from challengers!” Arcade says, releasing her second weapon, two jagged blades she calls her ‘Kala,’ serrated on their edges, which live in her forearms. They slide out with a shhhkkkttt!
“They’re not challengers. They’re police officers, and Lyric attacked them.”
Arcade gives me a pleased expression. It’s not a smile. She doesn’t do that, but it still makes me proud.
“More are on the way,” Bex continues as she pushes me into the driver’s-side seat, “and thanks to that stupid stunt, every cop in the world is going to join them. Get in the car!”
Bex opens Arcade’s door for her. The two of them share an unspoken battle of wills, then Bex throws up her hands in surrender and rushes around to the other side. She hops into the passenger seat and slams her door shut. Then she stuffs the key into the ignition and turns the car over for me.
“Lyric! Drive!” Bex shouts at me.
“This is shameful,” Arcade mutters, then begrudgingly gets into her seat. Once her door is closed, I throw the car into drive and stomp the gas pedal all the way to the floor. Tires scream on asphalt, and we shoot down the road, steering haphazardly as Bex calls out turn-for-turn directions. Arcade watches the windows, her gauntlet glowing and ready.
“Turn that off,” I shout to her. “You can see the light halfway down the road.”
Just as Bex predicted, the air fills with sirens. Police cars tear down every street. Some streets are so crowded with squad cars that we have to double back, and there’s a moment when we almost have to drive past the Piggly Wiggly again.
“Pull in there,” Bex cries, pointing to an IGA grocery store. I make an insane hairpin turn that nearly causes us to fishtail into another car, but I manage to right us before an accident happens. I burn up an aisle and into an empty parking space. Bex reaches over, throws the car into park, and turns off the engine, then forces me to duck down below the steering wheel.
Huddled on the floor, I look over to my friend. Her face has turned from a scowl to utter disbelief.
“The only reason we haven’t been caught is no one knew where we were,” she whispers to me. “You just ruined that. Everybody with a badge and a gun is going to head to Texas to find us, which would be fine if we actually knew where we were going, but we don’t, which means it’s just a matter of time before we get caught.”
“They were going to arrest us,” I say defensively.
Bex drops her head into her hands and shakes it sadly.
“That’s their job. We were committing a crime. When people commit crimes, police officers arrest them. That’s how society works, but you were treating them like bad guys. They’re cops. Just like your dad.”
“They are nothing like my dad. They called us Coasters! They humiliated us.”
“Fine! They are dumb cops in a stupid town. It doesn’t give you the right to put them in the hospital.”
“Lyric Walker did what was necessary,” Arcade says.
“She was showing off!” Bex shouts at her. “And she just made our lives a million times harder.”
The truth stinks. It took us forever to get to Texas from Brooklyn, two weeks of starving and hitching rides with perverts and sleeping on picnic tables. I just jeopardized all that sacrifice. What came over me back there? Why did I want to hurt those men so much? It wasn’t just because they called us Coasters. I was overcome with something that was beyond anger. I was looking for a fight.
“Let them come,” Arcade sneers. “When their fat bodies lie bleeding in the streets, it will send a message to those at Tempest who imprison our people.”
Bex pounds her fists onto the dashboard, then opens her door and gets out.
“Where are you going?” I cry.
“We have to find another car,” she snaps bitterly.
I watch her stomp off across the parking lot. Each step she takes away from me makes me anxious, as if she might get so far away that I’ll lose her completely.
“We should leave her here,” Arcade says.
“What?”
“She is not like us, Lyric Walker. She will be no help to us at Tempest. This is not her fight. She is human.”
“I’m human!” I cry.
She shakes her head. “No, you are not. You are Alpha, a new kind, but one of us nonetheless. She is a helpless human girl with no fighting skills. She is slowing us down with her tedious lectures, and when we arrive at the camp, she will die anyway. Here she will live.”
“We’re not abandoning my best friend!” I roar, then push the car door open and hit the ground running. I chase across the parking lot, grabbing Bex by the hand and spinning her around.
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You think this is about what you did? It’s not, Lyric. It’s about how you did it. How you always do it. You can’t see your face when you use that thing, but I can.”
“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with my face?”
“You’re too happy. When you are scaring someone, or hurting them, you’re smiling and proud of yourself.”
“That’s not true.” But as I say it, I know it’s a lie.
“Maybe you think you have to become this new Lyric so you can fight the bad guys, but you know what? The new Lyric sucks.”
She pulls away from me, leaving me to suck all alone.
Chapter Three
<
br /> BEX FOUND AN UNLOCKED CAR PARKED IN THE BACK OF THE GROCERY STORE. It’s an ancient Ford Taurus, lime-green and as big as a boat. The shocks are spongy and the brakes shriek as soon as I turn on the engine. The back windows won’t roll down and there’s no air conditioning, but the keys were under the visor and it has a full tank of gas, so it’s our new ride. I have to assume its owner is some poor kid who never thought anyone would want the rusty eyesore. Whoever it belongs to is not making bank. I feel bad, but we have to get out of town fast.
While Bex and Arcade load our stuff, I leave the owner of the Caravan a heartfelt and anonymous apology for its current state, especially for the dents and dings that weren’t there when we “borrowed” it. I’ve smashed a few of these loaners in the last two weeks. I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t have a driver’s license. City kids don’t usually get them. We walk everywhere or hop on the bus or subway. I never took a driving class, and I confess as much to the owner. My apology includes a sincere hope that the damage will not affect his or her insurance premiums, and also a “my bad” for the stink we are leaving behind after sleeping in it for a couple days. I hang one of the pine-scented car fresheners I swiped at the store from the rearview mirror, but I know it’s not going to make a big difference. We’re disgusting.
I carefully steer our new ride out of the parking lot and head to the edge of town, driving within a hair’s breadth of the speed limit. We all have our eyes glued to the road, looking for cops, or for helicopters sent to track us from above. As many officers as there are on the road, none stop us or even give us a second look. I guess the police don’t think anyone would steal this car either.
We’re half an hour out of town when Bex discovers something in the glove compartment we have desperately needed for a long, long time—a phone charger. It plugs into the cigarette lighter and will work on both our phones.
“This solves, like, a million problems!” I say, selling the positive in hopes of changing Bex’s mood, but I didn’t need to. She can’t hide her excitement. We haven’t had phones in two weeks, which in teenage-girl years equals about a zillion.
She plugs the cable into the socket and then fishes her dead phone out of her shorts. Once it’s plugged in, I realize how much I want it to work. We’ve all made sacrifices to find Tempest, but Bex has made the most. She left Coney Island not knowing if her mother survived the attack. We haven’t heard from Tammy since. Is she alive? Is she looking for Bex? Plus, there are other people we both care about. Did they get out of the Zone before the disaster? It’s been hard being in limbo, waiting for word, when the only conduit to the truth has been dead for weeks. This charger might give her answers, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
The screen lights up, and so does her face.
“C’mon,” I cry, scorning the phone’s snail-like pace. Where’s the shroom, and the apple, and the buzz?
“I know!” she groans.
But none of those things happen. Instead, the screen gets weird. A purple smear appears under the glass, then some ugly brown colors and lines, and then what looks like something important melting and spreading. Everything shuts down. Bex pushes the power button again—and again—but nothing happens. She tries to force a reboot, but the phone won’t respond. She unplugs the cord and tries it all over again, but there’s no response.
“It needs to charge,” I promise, ratcheting up the optimism until I sound like a cast member from Annie, but her face tells me the sun is not coming out tomorrow.
“It was in the water too long,” she whispers, reminding me that I found her half-dead in the water before I dragged her to safety. That phone was submerged for heaven only knows how long. So was mine. “Try yours.”
Dread hatches in my belly. My phone was soaked for even longer than Bex’s as I swam around trying to rescue people. It was still working when we got out of Brooklyn, but then I ran down the battery and couldn’t charge it. What if mine is busted too? I will lose every email my mom and dad ever sent me, every text message, and every single picture I have of the two of them. There are no photo albums back home. There is no “back home” anymore. Everything about our lives was washed away. All that’s left is on this little metal-and-glass machine.
I will lose the only picture I have of Fathom.
I plug the phone in with trembling hands like I’m cradling a baby sparrow I intend to nurse back to health. When I insert the plug, the screen is quiet and still. No shroom. No apple. No buzz. I don’t even get the light. I close my eyes and negotiate the terms of penance with God for my less-than-moral life as of late. I’ll do anything, I promise. All I want in exchange is one little electronic miracle.
Shroom.
Apple.
Buzz! Two weeks of messages and voicemails break through the levy and flood my inbox. Seven hundred and fifty-eight text messages appear before my eyes. The phone shakes like it’s having a seizure.
“Maybe Tammy sent a message to me,” I say hopefully.
Bex watches eagerly as I scroll through everything. I’d so love to give her some good news right now, but almost all of these messages are from people wishing me dead. They hope I get hit by trucks and bleed out in the street. They promise to do terrible things to my corpse. Some of them are from people I knew in the neighborhood, people I might have once considered friends.
“Anything?” Bex asks.
There’s nothing. I check twice.
“I don’t think she knew my number, Bex. She never called me,” I remind her, which is true, but not at all helpful. “It doesn’t mean anything. She probably sent you hundreds of them, and all we have to do is find a way to get them. They have to be in the Cloud. They store everything in the Cloud, right?”
She shrugs and turns toward the window.
“We’ll get them,” I promise, but I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know how to access “the Cloud.” I don’t even really know what it is. “Bex, c’mon. I’ll help.”
“Just let it go,” she whispers.
Another text buzzes and I quietly ask God for just one more favor. Let it be Tammy. I pull it up only to find something a million times more surprising.
CHIHUAHUAN DESERT. MR. COFFEE.
I gasp and drop the phone.
“He’s still helping me,” I cry, reaching into the glove compartment for a map of Texas I spotted earlier. I pull it out and open it wide.
“Why do you speak in riddles?” Arcade says, suddenly interested in what is happening in the front seat.
“It’s Doyle! He just told me where to find Tempest,” I say, scanning the map for the Chihuahuan Desert. It’s in the far southwestern-most edge of the state, hundreds of miles from where we are right now. It’ll take days to get there, but at least we know where to go. “We’re going to find them!”
Arcade nods, then snarls. “Move this machine, Lyric Walker.”
“Well, let’s get going already,” Bex adds, without bothering to look at me.
“Bex?”
“Drive.”
Chapter Four
TEXAS IS MASSIVE AND CROSSED BY INTERTWINING highways that lead you to endless tiny copies of the town you just drove through. Still, every dot on its map has a quirky claim to fame. Duncanville, Texas, once housed four nuclear warheads designed to protect Fort Worth and Dallas from the Russians. Hutchins, Texas, has the state’s largest men’s penitentiary. Terrell, Texas, is the birthplace of Jamie Foxx. Lindale, Texas, is the blackberry capital of the world. Chandler, Texas, boasts the state’s biggest horseshoe-throwing competition. Corsicana, Texas, has an annual cotton-harvest festival. Canton, Texas, is the former home of notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. I speed past each one, wondering at the lives of the people who call them home. I wonder if they’re bored. I envy them. When this is all said and done, I’m going to move to one of these little towns and bask in the boredom.
Bex and Arcade have no interest in the scenery. They nap while the road ticks off the miles. To kee
p me company, I flip on the radio but keep it low so I don’t wake up the happy twins. I’ve never seen anything as ancient as the Ford’s stereo. It’s a collection of clunky buttons with two knobs and a little window. I push one of the buttons, and a red line slides across the glass and lands on the number 1430. Static turns into polka music—lively horns and accordions. I push another button and land on a station playing a marathon of someone named Conway Twitty. I listen to a few songs. He’s not bad—kind of a country-pop thing—but then he sings that he wants a lover with a slow hand, which completely grosses me out. I push the next button, and the music is replaced by a fiery tirade.
“So, America, more news from the frontlines, and the casualty list continues to grow. The Alphas continue their onslaught.”
“Not the Alphas, dummy. The Rusalka,” I grumble at him.
“As reported, the city of Norfolk, Virginia, the site of the world’s largest military base, is lost. After several tidal waves and relentless flooding, the president has declared the base and surrounding neighborhoods a disaster area. FEMA and the Red Cross are on the scene, but there doesn’t appear to be anything to do. Folks, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Norfolk was a terrible blow not only to our country but to our military. We just lost trillions of dollars in weapons, ships, tanks, and supplies, and it’s the first American city to fall in this war.
“More coastal towns have been attacked, and as I have predicted many times on this program, the war between them and us is moving to small-town America. According to reports, the creatures came ashore in Jamestown, Rhode Island; Portsmouth, Virginia; and Rowayton, Connecticut, to wreak havoc.
“We lost a lot of good people yesterday. A hundred of these monsters marched into Panama City, killing one thousand. Yes, you heard that right, one thousand servicemen and -women. There are reports that some of the bodies were stacked in mounds that spelled out the word surrender. Disgusting. Unfortunately, yesterday’s losses bring this week’s death toll to a whopping three thousand one hundred and eighty-eight people, more than twenty-five hundred of them military personnel. Like we do every day, we ask listeners to join us in a moment of silence to honor these fallen American heroes.”