Fear (15 page)

“So she’s a freak?” Sanjit suggested.

“She was already a freak,” Lana said. “And none of the freaks have ever developed a second power. Or stopped being human. Even Orc seems to be human beneath that armor of his.”

“So the rules are changing,” Sanjit said.

“Or being changed,” Lana said.

“What do we do with her? She’s still alive.”

Lana didn’t answer. She seemed to be staring at the space a few inches in front of her face. Sanjit reached for her, to touch her arm, remind her she wasn’t alone. But he stopped himself. Lana’s wall of solitude was going up, shutting her off in the world she shared with forces Sanjit could not understand.

He let her be, just kept his position close by. It made him feel very isolated. His gaze was drawn irresistibly to the monstrous parody of Taylor.

Taylor’s mouth snapped open. A long, dark green, forked tongue flicked out, seemed to taste the air and withdraw. Her eyes remained blessedly closed.

Sanjit felt himself back on the streets of Bangkok. One of the beggars he’d known back in Bangkok had a two-legged dog he kept on a leash. And the beggar himself was legless and his hands were formed into two thick fingers and a stub of thumb.

Other street kids had called him a two-headed monster, as if the man and the dog were a single malformed creature. Sometimes they would throw rocks at the beggar. He was a freak, a monster. He made them afraid.

It’s not the monsters who are so completely different that are scary, Sanjit reflected. It’s the ones who are too human. They carry with them the warning that what happened to them might happen to you, too.

A part of Sanjit was telling him to kill this monstrous body. There was no way to help her. It would be an act of charity. Taylor, after all, was just one manifestation of a consciousness that would go on forever. Samsara. Taylor’s karma would determine her next incarnation, and Sanjit would earn good karma for a charitable deed.

But he’d also heard people of his religion say,
You can never take a life because if you do you interrupt the proper cycle of rebirth
.

“Do you ever have feelings you can’t really explain?” Lana asked.

Sanjit was startled out of his own thoughts. “Yes. But what do you mean?”

“Like … like feeling that a storm is coming. Or that you’d better not get on a plane. Or that if you turn the wrong corner at the wrong time you’ll come face-to-face with something awful.”

Sanjit did take her hand now and she didn’t refuse him. “Once I was to see a friend in the market. And it was as if my feet were refusing to move. Like they were telling me, ‘No. Don’t walk.’”

“And?”

“And a car bomb went off.”

“In the market where you didn’t want to go?”

“No. Ten feet away from the place where I was standing when my feet told me not to move. I ignored my feet. I went to the market.” Sanjit shrugged. “Intuition was telling me something. Just not what I thought it was telling me.”

Lana nodded. Her face was very grim. “It’s happening.”

“What’s happening?”

She fidgeted and dropped his hand. Then she smiled wryly and took his hand back, holding it between hers. “Kinda feels like a war is coming. It’s been coming for a long time.”

Sanjit broke out a grin. “Oh, is that all? In that case all we have to do is figure out how to survive. Haven’t I told you what ‘Sanjit’ means? It’s Sanskrit for ‘invincible.’”

Lana actually smiled, something so rare it broke Sanjit’s heart. “I remember: you can’t be vinced.”

“No one vinces me, baby.”

“Darkness is coming,” Lana said, her smile fading.

“You can’t tell the future,” Sanjit said firmly. “No one can. Not even in this place. So: what do we do with Taylor?”

Lana sighed. “Get her a room.”

IT WASN’T
POSSIBLE
to draw on or mark the surface of the dome. So Astrid gave Sam a plan and Sam asked Roger—he liked to be called the Artful Roger—to build ten identical wooden frameworks. Like picture frames exactly two feet by two feet.

The frameworks were mounted on poles, each exactly five feet high.

Then Astrid, with Edilio for security, and Roger to help carry, walked along the barrier from west to east. They paced off distances of three hundred paces. Then, using a long tape measure, they measured off a hundred feet from the base of the barrier. There they dug a hole and set up the first frame. Another three hundred paces, then another carefully measured hundred feet, and another frame.

At each frame Astrid stepped back to a precisely measured ten paces. She took a photograph through each frame, carefully thumbing in the day and time and approximately how much of the area inside the frame appeared to be covered by the stain.

This was why Astrid had come back. Because Jack might be smart enough to think of measuring the stain, but then again he might not think of it.

It was not that Astrid was lonely. It was not that she was just looking for an excuse to go to Sam.

And yet, look what had happened when she did, finally, go to Sam.

Astrid smiled and turned away so Edilio wouldn’t see it and be embarrassed.

Had this been her desire all along? To find some excuse to go running back to Sam and to throw herself on him? It was the kind of question that would have preoccupied Astrid in the old days. The old Astrid would have been very concerned with her own motives, very much needing to be able to justify herself. She had always needed some kind of moral and ethical framework, some abstract standard to judge herself by.

And, of course, she had judged other people the same way. Then, when it had come down to survival, to doing whatever it took to end the horror, she had done the ruthless thing. Yes, there was a certain crude morality at work there: she had sacrificed Little Pete for the greater good. But that was the excuse of every tyrant or evildoer in history: sacrifice one or ten or a million for some notion of the common good.

What she had done was immoral. It was wrong. Astrid had set aside her religious faith, but good was still good, and evil was still evil, and throwing her brother into the literal jaws of death…

It wasn’t that she doubted she had done wrong. It wasn’t that she doubted she deserved punishment. In fact, it was the very idea of forgiveness that made her rebel. She didn’t want forgiveness. She didn’t want to be washed clean of her sin. She wanted to own it and wear it like a scar, because it was real, and it happened, and it couldn’t be made to unhappen.

She had done something terrible. That fact would be part of her forever.

“As it should be,” she whispered. “As it should be.”

How strange, Astrid thought, that owning your own sins, refusing forgiveness, but vowing not to repeat them, could make you feel stronger.

“When do we check back?” Edilio asked her when they were finished installing.

Astrid shrugged. “Probably better come back tomorrow, just in case the stain is moving faster than it appears to be.”

“What do we do about it?” Edilio asked.

“We measure it. We see how much it advances in the first twenty-four hours. Then we see how much it advances in the second and third twenty-four-hour periods. We see how fast it grows and whether it’s accelerating.”

“And then what do we do about it?” Edilio asked.

Astrid shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“I guess I’ll pray,” Edilio said.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Astrid allowed.

A sound.

The three of them spun toward it. Edilio had his submachine gun off his shoulder, cocked, and the safety off in a heartbeat. Roger sort of slid behind Edilio.

“It’s a coyote,” Astrid hissed. She had not brought her shotgun, since she was carrying half of the measuring frames. But she had her revolver and drew it.

It was almost immediately clear that the coyote was not a threat. First, it was alone. Second, it was barely able to walk. Its gait was shuffling and it seemed lopsided.

And something was wrong with its head.

Something so wrong that Astrid could hardly encompass it. She stared and blinked. Shook her head and stared again.

Her first thought was that the coyote had a child’s head in its mouth.

No.

That. Wasn’t. It.

“Madre de Dios,”
Edilio sobbed. He ran to the creature now just twenty feet away and so terribly visible. Roger put a comforting hand on Edilio’s shoulder, but he looked sick, too.

Astrid stood rooted in place.

“It’s Bonnie,” Edilio said, his voice shrill. “It’s her. It’s her face. No,” he moaned, a long, drawn-out wail.

The creature ignored Edilio, just kept walking on two coyote front legs and twisted furless legs—bent human legs—in the back. Kept walking as though those empty, blue, human eyes were blind, and those shell-like pink human ears were deaf.

Edilio wept as it kept moving.

Astrid aimed her revolver at the creature’s heart, just behind the shoulder, and fired. The gun kicked in her hand and a small, round, red hole appeared and began leaking red.

She fired again, hitting the creature in its canine neck.

It fell over. Blood pumped from the thing’s neck and formed a pool in the sand.

Once again, the avatar broke apart.

Pete had tried to play with the bouncy avatar and it had broken apart, changed color and shape, and stopped.

He had tried to play with another avatar and it had melted into something different.

Was this the game?

It wasn’t very fun.

And he was beginning to feel bad when the avatars fell apart. Like he was doing a bad-boy thing.

So he had imagined the avatars all back the way they started.

Nothing happened. But things always happened when Pete wanted them really hard. He had wanted the terrible sirens and screams to stop and the world not to burn up and he had created the ball he now lived in.

He had wanted other things and they had happened. If he wanted something badly enough it happened. Didn’t it?

Well, now he was feeling sick inside and he wanted the avatars to go back and be right again. But they didn’t.

No, Pete corrected himself. He’d always been afraid when the big sudden things happened. He couldn’t just wish them and make them happen. He’d always been scared. Panicked. Screaming inside his overloaded brain.

He wasn’t afraid now. The frenzy that used to take him over couldn’t touch him now. That was the old Pete. The new Pete wasn’t scared of noises and colors and things that moved too fast.

The new Pete was just bored.

An avatar floated by and Pete knew it. Even without the stabbing bright blue eyes, without the shrieking voice. He knew her. His sister, Astrid. A pattern, a shape, a coil of strings.

He felt very lonely.

Had he ever felt lonely before?

He felt it now. And he longed to reach out, and with just the smallest touch, to let her know he was here.

But, oh, so delicate, those avatars. And his fingers were all thumbs.

The joke made him laugh.

Had he ever laughed before?

He laughed now. And that was enough for a while, at least.

Albert had made the decision early on to play Caine’s ridiculous game of royalty. If Caine wanted to call himself king, and if he wanted people to call him “Your Highness,” well, that didn’t cost Albert a single ’Berto.

The truth was Caine did keep the peace. He enforced rules, and Albert liked and needed rules.

There had been very little shoplifting at the mall, the ironically named stalls and card tables that were the market outside the school.

There had been fewer fights. Fewer threats. Albert had even seen a decline in the number of weapons being carried. Not much of a decline, but every now and then you could actually see a kid forgetting to carry his nail-studded baseball bat or machete.

Those were good signs.

Best of all, kids showed up for work and they put in a full day.

King Caine scared kids. And Albert paid them. And between the threat and the reward, things were running more smoothly than they ever had under Sam or Astrid.

So if Caine wanted to be called king…

“Your Highness, I’m here with my report,” Albert said.

He stood patiently while Caine, seated at his desk, pretended to be absorbed in reading something.

Finally, Caine looked up, affecting an expression of unconcern.

“Go ahead, Albert,” Caine said.

“The good news: Water continues to flow from the cloud. The stream is clean—most of the dirt and debris and old oil and so on has been washed away. So it’s probably drinkable down at the beach reservoir as well as directly from the rain. Flow rate is twenty gallons an hour. Four hundred and eighty gallons a day, which is more than we need for drinking, with enough left over to water gardens and so on.”