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Vicky looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t say that to the camera.”

“No,” Albert agreed.

“You did what you had to do. You’re a hero,” Vicky said.

It took a while to set up the equipment in the plaza. Albert would not get out of the vehicle. He made an excuse about enjoying the air-conditioning. About wanting to listen to the radio.

But as the afternoon wore on, they called for him to come onto the set.

The
set
.

They had cleaned it up inside. Not all the way, no, they couldn’t do that without weeks of work. But the debris, the filth, the pitiful decorations had been artfully rearranged. The service counter was gleaming incongruously. The menu had been uncovered and one panel replaced. The obscene graffiti had been cleaned off or painted over.

It was the sanitized version of the FAYZ.

He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn’t get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza.

“Kids just playing around, I guess, but it’s morbid; we’ll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to—”

“No,” Albert said.

“We’re almost ready for you,” the director assured him.

“That’s not a fake graveyard. Those aren’t fake graves. No one was
playing around
.”

“You’re saying those . . . those are actually . . .”

“What do you think happened here?” Albert asked in a soft voice. “What do you think this was?” Absurdly, embarrassingly, he had started to cry. “Those are kids buried there. Some of them were torn apart, you know. By coyotes. By . . . by bad people. Shot. Crushed. Like that. Some of those kids in the ground there couldn’t take it, the hunger and the fear . . . some of those kids out there had to be cut down from the ropes they used to hang themselves. Early on, when we still had any animals? I had a crew go out and hunt down cats. Cats and dogs and rats. Kill them. Other kids to skin them . . . cook them up.”

There were a dozen crew people in the McDonald’s. None spoke or moved.

Albert brushed away tears and sighed. “Yeah. So don’t mess with the graves. Okay? Other than that, we’re good to go.”

THERE WERE
POLICE
guards outside Sam’s hospital room. They stepped in occasionally to make sure Sam hadn’t disappeared. For the most part they were nice enough. And the check-ins were less and less frequent.

Police and prosecutors were not allowed to talk to Sam without either his mother or a lawyer present. His mother, Connie Temple, was also on TV fairly frequently, talking up the just-formed FAYZ Legal Defense Fund. So he had long stretches of time when he was not being questioned by police, prosecutors, or parent.

He spent those free hours trying not to think too much. And yet thinking too much. There was a tsunami of memories waiting to drown him.

Video of the final hours of the FAYZ had done a lot to change attitudes about the survivors. People had seen the entire dome glow red with fire. They had video, lots of video, of Gaia. They had confirmed that the murderous teen they’d seen at the end was the same person as the child who had ripped a man’s arm off. And eaten it.

Something about watching video of a murderous girl using lasers to slaughter children—and to kill three adults on the outside—had made people wonder whether the kids in the FAYZ deserved just a little slack.

Prosecutors did not believe in slack. They wanted an arrest and a trial. They had one target above all others.

At the moment that target was eating tacos his mother had brought in despite hospital orders against outside food.

“Oh, God, this is good,” Sam said as juicy beef and crisp lettuce dribbled out onto the tray on his lap.

“Still not tired of eating?” Connie asked him.

“I will never be tired of eating. I’m going to eat until I’m huge. Food, hot water, clean sheets. At least I’ll get those three in prison.”

Connie pushed herself up out of the chair, angry. “Sam, don’t talk that way.”

He bit into a second taco. Chicken this time. “Mmm. They want someone to put away. They need a scapegoat. It’s me.”

“You’re not being serious with me. I’m trying to treat you like an adult.”

Sam put the taco down. “Are you? You’re trying to treat me like an adult? Okay. Let’s have an adult conversation, Mom. Tell me how I had a brother, but you kind of forgot to mention it. Tell me how that happened. A lot of bad things happened because of that.”

“This isn’t something—”

“He gave his life in the end. Caine. Your son. He’s dead. You’ve seen the video.”

“Yes. And I feel terrible—”

“Don’t get me wrong: he was a bad person. Your son Caine. He was a very bad guy. You want a murderer? Well . . .” He stopped himself. “In the end, he gave himself up to Little Pete. He took the hit. Atonement, I guess. Redemption. Whatever.”

“Then tell that to the district attorneys. Tell them it was Caine. There are plenty of other kids out there talking, putting it on Caine.”

Sam pushed the food away angrily. He slid his legs over the side. His mother moved to help him, but he waved her off. “No. Don’t. I’m fine.”

He stood up. His legs were fine, at least. It was just the burns from the red-hot chain. It took so much longer to heal when you didn’t have Lana. Half his body was covered in bandages and a webbing that held them in place.

“I want to see Astrid,” he said.

“You know they won’t let you talk to anyone, Sam.”

“As soon as I’m better. They’re not keeping us apart.”

“Sam, you have more important things to worry about than your girlfriend.”

He turned on her, suppressed anger now boiling up. “My girlfriend? Like we’re talking about someone I dated? Like some girl I took to a movie?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Tell me. Tell me
why
.”

Connie looked around, spotted the pitcher of water, and poured a trembling cup. “This isn’t going to put me in a very good light.”

Sam said nothing. He had waited so long to find out. Since the first surprise realization that he and Caine were brothers. Fraternal twins, born just minutes apart.

“There was . . . There were . . .” She took a sip, shook her head slightly, trying to get up the nerve, unwilling to look at him. “I was married. I was not faithful.”

Sam blinked. “Caine and I were born at the same time.”

“Yes. Yes. There was my husband. He worked at the power plant. He was a very intelligent man. Very . . . good-looking, kind, decent. But I was young, and I wasn’t very smart about such things. I had an affair with a very different man. He was exciting. He was . . . forgive me . . . sexy.”

Sam winced. The images this conversation was calling up were not ones he wanted to see. He was suppressing enough; he didn’t need more.

“So there was my husband, and the other man. And when I realized I was pregnant, I also realized either of them might have been your father, or David’s.”

“David?”

“Caine. His adoptive parents gave him the name Caine. To me he was David. When your—when my husband died . . . when he was killed . . .”

“Mom. Did he die in the power plant?”

She nodded. “The meteor strike.”

Sam looked at her. She tried to meet his gaze and decided instead to drink more water. Sam hesitated. Did he want to know? What good would it do?

“Why did you give Caine up? David. Whatever you called him.”

“Maybe it was some kind of postpartum depression. I mean, I didn’t think so, but maybe it was depression. Some kind of delusional state . . .”

Sam waited.

“He was evil. Sam, that’s what he seemed to me. He was a beautiful baby. But . . . but I could
feel
something . . . some connection to a terrible darkness. He scared me. I worried I might hurt him.”

“It was your husband who died in the meteor strike,” Sam said, carefully not using the word “father.” “The man I knew as Dad.”

“Yes.”

One question remained.

“Tell me this,” Sam said, looking past her, out the window at the Southern California sun. “Caine and I don’t look much alike. One of us must have looked more like your husband. And one of us must have looked more like the other man.”

Connie Temple swallowed hard. She looked strangely young and vulnerable to Sam. He could almost see a teen mother there.

“David . . . Caine . . . was the spitting image of my husband.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling deflated.

“But it’s not that simple,” Connie said.

It was purely by accident that Edilio Escobar happened to see the TV report of a boy found wandering in the burned-out forest of the FAYZ.

He was eating. He’d been eating more or less without stop, because he couldn’t focus on anything else, couldn’t think about the future, or even tomorrow. He couldn’t talk to his parents. His mother just cried a lot, and his father, well, his father didn’t really want to know. His father had work. His father was not ready for stories of his son’s life.

The truth was, as much as they loved him and welcomed him back, he was a liability to them. He was a big neon finger pointing at the family of undocumented workers.

They were living in a trailer in Atascadero. Too many bodies in too little space. It was clean, but it was also an overstuffed, hot steel box surrounded by other overstuffed, hot little boxes, many of them also full of people who did not need the attention that Edilio drew.

Edilio would have to figure something out. But he was exhausted. All the way down to the marrow, he was exhausted.

His mother kept the beans and rice and lemonade coming.
Someday, Edilio,
he told himself,
you will get tired of beans and rice and lemonade. But it won’t be anytime soon
.

He looked up from the narrow table, saw his mother at the stove, then looked above her to see his automatic rifle wedged in atop the cupboards.

Full of food and hollowed out. That’s how he felt. He was wondering if they could get away with selling the gun. Ought to be worth a hundred bucks or so. That would maybe take some of the strain off his family’s finances.

He had not told his mother about himself, his personal self. He’d kept the stories simple. He’d answered the mostly clueless questions of friends and neighbors. He was polite, but not volunteering much. Not arguing when they came up with wild theories. Sooner or later it would all come out.

But he might not come out. It was one thing to be gay in the FAYZ—people had bigger worries on their mind than who liked who. It was another thing to come out to his family. And it would be still more difficult if he had to be openly gay in the completely unfamiliar, macho culture of Honduras.

La migra
could come at any moment. There were plenty of people who didn’t like the idea of Edilio as some kind of folk hero. Too many interviews with survivors had mentioned him as a leader in the FAYZ. He was conspicuous.

“I can’t eat any more,” Edilio said, pushing the plate away.

“You want to go out and play?” His mother posed the question in Spanish. She tried to speak English with him, but mostly she ended up back in her comfort zone.

Go out and play.

Despite himself, Edilio had to smile. Like he was a six-year-old. “No, Mama, I’ll just see what’s on TV . . .” And that’s when he looked up and saw the video.

The video showed a helicopter landing in a clearing in the charcoal forest. A young man, a boy, at first running away, then caught by paramedics. Resisting. Then, it seemed, breaking down, before being finally led by kind hands to the helicopter door.

There was no audio: the TV had been muted.

Edilio’s heart stopped beating the instant he saw the frightened figure. The video was shaky and poorly focused. The boy’s face wasn’t clear. But Edilio knew.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen said the unidentified survivor had been taken to a hospital just south in San Luis Obispo.

“I need to go to SLO,” Edilio said.

“San Luis?
Por qué?
”

Edilio sighed. For several minutes he just couldn’t speak. His heart felt ten times its normal size. He had given up. A voice in his head berated him:
Why did you give up, Edilio? After all that’s happened, didn’t you learn not to give up?

He picked up a paper towel and pressed it against his eyes. He no longer felt as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. He felt, rather, that he might be on the verge of an uncontrollable laughing fit.

“Mama, sit down, okay? I have something kind of big to tell you.”

Connie left after telling Sam all he had asked her to tell him. Not what he had wanted to know, but that’s what happened when you got answers.

He sat in his hospital bed feeling winded. Feeling lost.

He wanted to talk to Astrid. He needed to talk to Astrid. But what could he do? They were blocking his calls and—

“Really, Sam?” he demanded of the empty room. “That’s all it takes to stop you now?”

The hospital was an older building on the University of Southern California campus, massive and imposing, but it still had windows that could be opened for fresh air.

An open window. Sheets. He stuck his head out and looked down. He was twelve floors up, but just two stories above the roof of a wing of the hospital.

He went into the tiny bathroom and removed most of his bandages. It hurt. He was not healed. And what he planned to do next would hurt even more. But the scabs probably wouldn’t do more than leak a little. That was nothing:
Remember when
. . .
No, Sam,
he told himself,
don’t remember when
.

He dressed in his street clothes, quickly wound the sheets into a loop, slid it over a pipe near the window, and without pausing to worry too much about it, swung out and slid down.

He pulled the sheet down after him. Then he bent over and let the pain subside. Yep. That hurt, all right.

He had left a note on his bed. The note said,
Poof!
He hoped the police guards would find it funny.

On the roof of the secondary hospital wing he could literally walk up to windows in the main building. He saw patients inside. One of them, an old man, waved. Sam waved back. A woman just stared. He smiled.