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And dark hints of someone called Drake and a creature called the gaiaphage.

The graphic that Fox News used was “Little Monsters” over a shot of Sam.

People drew comparisons to war criminals. To the killing fields of Cambodia. To the Nazis.

The outrage over the attempt to blast open the dome with a nuclear weapon had died very quickly to be replaced by the muttered suggestion that maybe next time the bomb should be bigger.

People were demanding the army be sent in to surround the anomaly—just in case the “containment” failed. The containment. Like these were dangerous wild animals in a zoo.

There were others who argued that the kids of the FAYZ—that word from the handwritten signs, “FAYZ,” was quickly gaining currency—were victims, desperate survivors who could not be blamed for doing whatever it took to stay alive. But these people were fewer in number and not nearly as loud.

The president was avoiding the press. Many politicians were not, and were using every opportunity to talk about being tough, being firm, sending National Guard and army troops. One congressman from South Carolina had said flatly that the Perdido Beach Abomination, as he called it, should be obliterated. “A quick and easy death is the only way,” he said. “Let God sort them out.”

This, finally, led some to try and calm the building hysteria.

The pope had issued a statement calling for compassion. The movie stars Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance, parents of the island kids inside, had issued an angry denunciation of the media, reminding everyone that these were children. Just children.

The American Civil Liberties Union had issued a press release with much the same message: children, just children trying to survive.

In a
Wall Street Journal
poll, 28 percent of respondents said that the FAYZ and everyone in it should be destroyed.

All of this had happened before the video that had crashed YouTube: a little girl ripping the arm off the first adult to somehow blunder into the FAYZ and then eating that arm.

The effect had been electric. Suddenly it was clear: this wasn’t child’s play. Whatever power was in there could kill adults as well. Connie had no doubt that the next poll would show many more people in favor of simply wiping out the FAYZ.

She carried a thick art pad and two black Sharpies and headed toward the barrier. It wasn’t easy getting through the crowd that had grown despite the California Highway Patrol roadblock, despite all efforts to get people to back off.

It wasn’t just parents now: it was every kind of nut who could wave a sign. It was people with their kids eating picnic lunches like this was a county fair. It was vendors offering flashing pins that said “FAYZ!” and T-shirts that said “Don’t Let ’Em Out.”

And the crowd had spread, north of the highway and south across the grounds of the abandoned, truncated half of Clifftop. Surfers rode beside the barrier, and in deeper water boats pressed close.

A no-fly zone had been established, but it didn’t apply to news helicopters, or to the drones on loan from the army. Google had repurposed one of its satellites to watch. It was getting crowded in orbit as foreign powers also looked in to see whether this was all some American conspiracy.

Connie walked north at the edge of the crowd, looking for an opening. Over the heads of the lookers she saw the kids, maybe a hundred of them, peering out like suffocating fish from a badly maintained fishbowl.

She had to climb halfway up a dusty hill before she could achieve a little piece of privacy. There were no kids up there, but she thought if she waited, one might come. She wrote a sign:

I am Sam Temple and Caine Soren’s mother
.

Then she waited. What felt like ages passed before a girl who might have been fourteen or so noticed her and climbed the hill. She did not have paper or pen, but she had a stick, and the ground at that spot was bare dirt.

The girl used the stick to write:

Team Sam

Connie wrote:

What’s your name?

Dahra
.

Dahra Baidoo? I’m friends with your mom!

She told me
.

Each time Dahra wrote she had to first wipe the ground clear with her hand.

I need to speak to Sam,
Connie wrote.

Sam & Caine looking 4 Gaia
.

Connie nodded. So her boys were working together. That certainly didn’t sound like the stories of a deadly rivalry between them. She looked hard at Dahra.

Can I trust you?

Dahra smiled wryly.
People do
.

It didn’t seem like a brag to Connie. Dahra, like all the kids Connie had seen, looked haggard and worn, with eyes that were way too old for the rest of her.

So this was the girl who had taken on the job of nurse, dispensing what medication she had, caring for the sick. Nurse Connie Temple had immediate sympathy for her. Good Lord, what must her life have been like? What terrible strains had this girl been under?

Things getting nasty out here
.

Yeah
. Dahra jerked her head toward the forest of signs down at the bottom of the hill.

You need to plan. Who can I talk to about that?

Dahra considered.
Edilio or Astrid
.

How can I get in touch with them?

Edilio very busy
. Then, when she saw that Connie had read that much, she added,
Astrid. They call her Astrid the Genius
.

Connie nodded. She knew the name. She knew most of the names of the kids in the FAYZ. This would be Astrid Ellison. Her parents were pains in the butt, the mother semihysterical and the father a tense, repressed engineer type, and they had contributed just about nothing to the group known as the families.

And judging by those early impressions when the barrier went transparent, Astrid was Sam’s girlfriend.

I need to talk to Astrid. It is URGENT. How?

Dahra considered this for a moment, sighed noiselessly, then drew a circle. At the top of the circle she drew what Connie knew was a lake. Then she stabbed the stick into the lake. Then she drew a wavy line from where they were now to the lake and pointed at Connie. And a second line inside the circle and pointed to herself.

Dahra was telling her to get to the lake and she would meet her there and deliver Astrid.

Connie nodded.

Dahra dropped her hand to the two-foot-long lead pipe that hung from a leather strap and looked worried. Scared.

And Connie wavered. Was she sending this girl in harm’s way? Was she meddling where she shouldn’t? She was about to tell Dahra to forget it, but Dahra had already turned away.

“What’s it all meant, Sammy boy? What’s it all meant?”

Sam didn’t bother to answer. Caine was just bored and looking to provoke him.

They each carried two water bottles and some dried fish in a backpack. They each carried a knife—a sheathed hunting knife for Caine and a big Swiss Army knife for Sam. They each wore a baseball cap. Caine slung a twelve-gauge shotgun over his shoulder, muzzle pointed up. Sam carried one of Edilio’s automatic rifles over his shoulder, muzzle down.

The fact was that both of them had more powerful weapons in their empty hands. And with guns came ammunition, and both ammunition and guns were heavy. After about two miles on the road Sam was regretting the weight.

“Have you thought at all about what people out there are going to think about this bloody mess?” Caine asked.

Sam had thought of little else. But the day had not yet come when he would bare his soul to Caine. “We’ve got bigger problems on our hands.”

Caine laughed, not believing it. “Nah, a dutiful son like you, surfer dude? You’ve thought about it.”

Caine was walking a little ahead of Sam. Was that because Caine trusted Sam at his back more than Sam trusted the reverse? Maybe. Or maybe, Sam thought, Caine had longer legs. One of those things was probably true.

“No, you definitely thought about it,” Caine went on, apparently not discouraged by Sam’s refusal to engage. “You barbecued Penny in front of your mommy.”

Sam felt a bit provoked. “Don’t you mean
our
mommy?”

Caine shook his head. “No, I do not. She may have provided the egg and womb space, but she was not my mother. Yours. Not mine.”

Sam winced a little. “You didn’t miss all that much.”

“Nurse Connie Temple,” Caine said. “I knew she was spying on me back at Coates, you know. I never did know why until, well, until I knew.”

“You figured she was just interested by you as a thug, a bully, and a manipulator?”

“Pretty much.”

Caine was refusing to be provoked, whereas Sam was distinctly uncomfortable. This little mission could take days. It wouldn’t do to let Caine work on him. He had to accept the fact that he was partnered with Caine. And that meant not calling up mental images of the plastering Caine had inflicted on kids who were now Sam’s friends. And the burning down of half the town in a mad plot with Zil and his little bigot brigade. And about a thousand other felonies.

“Felonies.” A legal word. There was a reason that word was popping up in his head.

Caine wasn’t the only killer in the FAYZ. Of course, Sam had done only what was necessary to save lives and defeat Caine and Drake. But would courts see it that way?

To torture himself Sam ran through the laundry list of things he’d done that could be called crimes. Breaking and entering. Destruction of property. Assault and battery. Public drunkenness. Driving without a license. Burning a hole in a nuclear power plant. Theft.

Caine was looking back at him from the top of a rise. “You have a lousy poker face, Sammy boy. What’s in your head is right there on your face. You’re thinking about it, and it’s not the first time.”

“I am still underage,” Sam said weakly.

Caine erupted in disbelieving laughter. “Yeah, that’ll do it. ‘I’m just a kid, Your Honor!’ Hah. They’ll have to find a few scapegoats, and guess who it will be? You and me, surfer dude. You and me.”

“You act like we’re getting out of here,” Sam said.

“Do I? Funny, because I expect we’ll all be dead. Because I’ll tell you what: that girl, that Gaia? We both know who she really is. I don’t think old green-and-gross chose to take on a body for fun. I think it expects to get out of here alive.”

That was way too close to Sam’s own thought process.

“Endgame,” Sam muttered, not really expecting Caine to hear.

“Yep,” Caine said. “That’s right. Endgame. The FAYZ barrier is coming down; at least that’s my bet. But there’s also a ninety percent chance you and me both end up dead. Ten percent chance we both actually get out of here alive. In which case we end up sharing a cell somewhere.” He laughed. “Kind of unfair, really, what with me being evil and all, and you just so darned virtuous and heroic.”

“So why are we doing this?” Sam asked. “Why are we on this mission?”

Caine stopped, turned around, and walked back to him. Sam was struck by the undeniable fact that even now, even after being beaten and humiliated by Penny, his brother could project that hard-to-define thing called charisma. Evil, yes, but a tall, handsome, charming kind of evil.

“Why are we doing this?” Caine asked him. “You know damned well why we’re doing this. Because it’s a fight. It may be
the
fight. It may be the final fight. And what else are we good at, you and me? What are we going to do if we ever get out there anyway? You going to sign up for some AP classes? Get your college essay started? Take driver’s ed?” Caine laughed, laughing at himself, it seemed. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Harvard will want me. I mean, how many former kings do they have applying?”

Sam tried to stop himself asking, but in the end he blurted it out. “And Diana?”

“Great body,” Caine said breezily. “And a very open mind.”

Sam didn’t buy it. “It’s more than that, you and her.”

Caine didn’t answer, which was all the answer Sam needed.

“Less talk, more walk,” Sam said.

“Ta-da?” Dekka echoed, staring at Brianna because it was much better than looking at Brianna’s trophy. “Ta-da?”

Astrid knelt down to look at the monstrous object. The temptation to taunt Drake was powerful. Drake had been the bogeyman in her life. Drake had made clear that he intended to kill Astrid, slowly and with every humiliation his diseased mind could conjure up. Astrid had spent almost four months in the forest, and fear of Drake had been the constant. She had spent hours practicing the smooth unlimbering and aiming of a gun just so that when the time came she would at least get in a useless shot.

There was a second effect of seeing Drake helpless: Sam would face one less enemy. His odds of survival had just ticked up.

Dekka was obviously thinking the same thing. “One down,” she said.

As she watched, the object moved, oozed, coming slowly together. The lizard tail remained.

“What are we supposed to do with him?” Dekka asked.

Just then Roger, known as the Artful Roger for his skill in drawing, came up the side. “Is Edilio around? Because—ahhhhh! Oh no. Oh no.”

“Hey, Roger,” Brianna said. “Have you met Drake?”

“Oh, God, no. Oh . . . Oh . . .”

“I know!” Brianna said proudly. “We’re just trying to figure out what to—hey, you know what? You should totally draw him so we can always remember what he looked like.”

Dekka, in as dry and nonchalant a tone as she could manage, said, “Roger, can we help you?”

“Can you . . . ?” He had definitely forgotten why he was there.

“You were looking for Edilio, right? He’s down in PB.”

The Drake head was almost back to being Drake with the addition of the lizard tail, and the larynx was mostly repaired, so he was able to produce a windy, wheezing sound while his tongue and mouth worked furiously.

“I figured Sam would fry him up,” Brianna said.

“Sam’s not coming back right away,” Astrid said. She was trying to mimic the light tone, but failing. She was worried about Sam. And she was a little sickened by the emotions that swept over her in waves: bitterness, rage, triumph. How much of her life had been about fearing this psychopath? And now he was in her grasp. Now he was without his famous whip hand. Now he was helpless.