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  Unfortunately, Brianna was not the most cautious or sensible person in the FAYZ. She was bold, fearless, very, very dangerous in a fight, and had a sort of reckless charm. But she was not a person who carefully thought out her answers.

  So when Matt Lauer had asked whether kids had died in the FAYZ, Brianna’s chalked answer had been: A bunch. Kids have been dying all over the place. This isn’t Disneyland.

  Which was okay in itself, although it sent shockwaves of fear through the parent community.

  It was the follow-up question that caused the problem.

  Matt Lauer: Have you taken a life?

  Brianna: Absolutely. I’m the Breeze. I am the most badass person in here except for maybe Sam and Caine.

  Then before Matt could put up his next question, Brianna went on happily scribbling and holding her chalkboard up for the cameras, then rubbing it with her sleeve and scribbling some more.

  There’s some more I want to kill but sometimes it’s hard. I’ve cut Drake up with wire and a machete and blown his head off with a shotgun. He’s still not dead! LOL.

  And then:

  What I’m thinking about doing is slicing him up and then zooming the pieces all around, like up in the mountains, out in the water. Let’s see if he can put himself back together then. LOL.

  So basically Brianna had confessed to several killings—despite the fact she hadn’t actually killed anyone unless you counted bugs and coyotes—and bragged that she intended to go on killing and was in fact contemplating murder right then.

  And grinning.

  And striking poses for the cameras.

  And adding a jaunty “LOL.”

  And demonstrating just how fast she could twirl a bowie knife, a machete, and a garrote. And brandishing the sawed-off shotgun for which she had modified a runner’s backpack.

  All of this got back to Sam.

  Sam was not happy about it.

  “Oh, my God. Are you out of your mind? ‘LOL’? Really?” he demanded. “I thought I told everyone: no talking to people unless it’s your parents. I told you and Edilio told you. And then, because I knew perfectly well that you would pay no attention to that and do whatever you wanted, I looked you right in the eyes”—he pointed at her eyes for emphasis—“right in those eyes, and I said something along the lines of, ‘Breeze, don’t go telling horror stories.’”

  “He believes he said that.”

  That last was from Toto, the truth teller. The boy could not restrain himself from announcing the truth or falsity of everything he heard. And he was 100 percent accurate. And 100 percent annoying.

  Sam, Astrid, Brianna, and Toto were on the top deck of the houseboat at the lake. Two days had passed since the dome went transparent. Two days since they had seen the outside world for the first time in almost a year.

  Two days since Sam had burned Penny to ashes while his mother watched.

  And two days since the evil child, Gaia, and her mother, Diana, along with the foul Drake/Brittney creature, had retreated in pain and confusion.

  “In the eyes. Me looking straight at you,” Sam said, insisting, even as Brianna adopted a transparently false What, me? look.

  “Brianna, listen,” Astrid said. “You’re very useful at communicating with the world, but don’t go confessing to major crimes.”

  “Crimes!” Brianna’s eyes narrowed and her thin lip curled. “Hey, I only do what I have to do.”

  “We know that,” Sam said wearily. “We know that. The world may not.” Then he added, “LOL.”

  “Yeah, well they can all drop dead,” Brianna said heatedly. “What are they doing to get us out of here? They tried to kill us all! Now they’re going to judge us?”

  Sam’s face revealed his own private agreement, so he kept his eyes carefully averted from Astrid, as if that meant she wouldn’t notice.

  “They didn’t try to kill us; they were trying to blow open the dome,” Astrid said.

  “With a nuke?” Brianna shrilled.

  “She doesn’t believe that,” Toto said. Then he clarified: “Astrid doesn’t believe what she said, Spidey.”

  Toto was talking less often to his long-since-destroyed Spider-Man bust, the object he’d spent lonely months with, but there were still occasional references. No one took notice: at this point no one in the FAYZ was entirely sane.

  “Okay,” Astrid said icily. “Let me restate that: They didn’t set out to destroy us all. But they were willing to risk it.”

  Toto hesitated a moment. Then: “She believes that.”

  But now Astrid was angry, and not at Toto or Brianna or even Sam—to his relief. “They wanted their highway back. They wanted this to be over. And they sure didn’t want people discovering that they’d been tracking mutations for months. So they set off a freaking nuke under the dome. Is that true enough, Toto? And maybe it would have overloaded the dome and crashed it like they hoped, and we’d be free. But quite possibly it would have incinerated all of us, the reckless, stupid scumbags who would kill us after all we’ve gone through, gone through hell trying to stay alive!”

  There were other choice words, many, in fact, a long and erudite stream of them. Astrid had never been one for cursing, but she was very well-read and had obviously picked up a few phrases along the way.

  When she was done and both Sam and Brianna were staring at her with a sort of wary amazement, Toto said, “She believes that.”

  “Yeah, I kind of think she did,” Sam said dryly. “Do me a favor, Toto: go find Edilio, if he’s free, and Dekka. We’re wasting time.”

  Toto raised an eyebrow but did not comment. He climbed down to the dock. He was used to being sent on errands. It was almost as if people found him irritating.

  “Breeze: you know what I need from you. I understand that you love to entertain the lookers, but I need you patrolling.”

  “I was just going,” Brianna said huffily. She blurred, reappeared on the dock, and then, walking quickly backward, said, “By the way, they still want to interview you, Sam.” Then she zoomed away out of sight.

  “Why do I get the feeling we have a crazy twelve-year-old daughter?” Astrid muttered.

  Sam looked at Astrid with affection so obvious a blind man would have seen it. The days of wondering whether they would be together were over. It wasn’t that either of them had said it quite that way; it was just the way it was, it was there, it was a fact. It was chiseled in granite.

  Astrid stood with legs apart, arms crossed, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans so torn and ripped they looked like they’d been tailored with a chainsaw, her once-long blond hair now hacked short, her cool, judgmental blue eyes still judging, still watching the world more closely than anyone else.

  She was still Astrid the Genius, the girl who had so intimidated Sam back before the FAYZ that he hadn’t even let himself think about asking her out, or even talking to her. She had been so far above him—at least in his own eyes—that she was practically on a different planet.

  The funny thing was that he was still in awe of her, but she was no longer unattainable. She wasn’t the icy, distant Athena looking down at him from Olympus with affection mingled with disappointment. She had committed. She had bought in. And now it was as if an invisible FAYZ barrier of their own encircled just the two of them, defined them, and made each of them hate the idea of being apart.

  They spent their days and their nights together, and they still disagreed, and they still argued, and they sniped, and they were absolutely bound together into one.

  Unbreakable unless by death.

  Which was a very likely outcome, and a thought that wiped the smug, contented look from Sam’s face.

  Endgame. That word had quickly become part of conversation in the FAYZ. He had tried to quash it. Edilio had tried to quash it. Down in Perdido Beach, Caine had tried to quash it. It wasn’t good for people to start thinking things were coming to an end.

  But Sam was thinking it himself, and he was trying to imagine that ending. Each time he
tried, each time he ran the clock forward in his imagination, the fantasy would fall apart. He believed it was the endgame. He felt it in his bones. He just didn’t think he was going to make it out.

  When he saw the end, it was always a terrible one. And he always saw himself watching others leave the FAYZ while he did not.

  When had that morbid thought first surfaced? Had it been there festering in the back of his mind for a long time? Had it only now broken through to conscious awareness because people were talking about the endgame?

  Endgame. It can mean more than one thing, he thought.

  But it was all nonsense, all speculation. None of it meant anything. None of it mattered, not really. It would end how it ended.

  Edilio and Dekka arrived. They had very sensibly not brought Toto back with them.

  Sam didn’t get up, just gave them a wave as they climbed aboard the docked houseboat. Edilio plopped into a deck chair. He was weary and dusty. It would be wrong to say that he looked old—he was still physically a teenager, a sunburned, dark-skinned guy in jeans and boots, with a desperate-looking cowboy hat he’d found somewhere, over shaggy dark hair. He didn’t look old, but in some way it was impossible to define, he looked like a man, not a boy.

  That impression came only partly from the fact that he was carrying an assault rifle slung over one shoulder.

  “Word from PB is that Caine is trying to get Orc to force people away from the barrier and back to work,” Edilio said.

  “Maybe not such a bad idea?” Sam said.

  “Except it’s not working,” Dekka said. “Orc won’t go near the barrier. He doesn’t want anyone to see him. You know, the way he is. There’s, like, no produce down in Perdido Beach, not even cabbages,” Dekka went on. “If it wasn’t for Quinn still bringing in fish, they’d all be starving again. I’d almost say we need Albert back, if he wasn’t such a backstabbing little worm.”

  Dekka had never looked young; she’d been born with a serious face that over time had become forbidding. When she was annoyed—as she was now—her expression could become downright intimidating. And an angry Dekka was a storm front coming.

  “I guess you heard about Breeze?” Dekka asked, changing the subject. There was a mix of exasperation and affection in her tone. Dekka might not be over Brianna, but she had made peace with her rejection. The infatuation had burned out, but the love was still there.

  “Oh, we heard,” Astrid said. “You just missed her.”

  Edilio wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Something was on his mind. “We’re vulnerable here. We don’t know where Diana and that freak-show baby of hers are. And we don’t know what kind of power Gaia has—except that if she was really a normal kid, she’d be dead. We don’t even know what they want, what they’re after. Maybe they don’t want anything, though most likely . . .” He shrugged. “But the bigger vulnerability is probably down in PB. We got, what, two hundred fifty kids all together, between the lake and PB? Give or take. At least half of them are down there right now where the highway hits the barrier. Waving and crying and writing notes. Especially the littles, man. It’s not just no work getting done; it’s that they’re out in the open with no one protecting them.”

  “They’re a target,” Astrid said.

  “Big one,” Dekka said.

  “That’s Caine’s territory down there,” Sam said, shifting uncomfortably at the temptation to palm off responsibility on his alienated brother.

  “Yeah, but a lot of them are our people. Lake people,” Edilio argued. “You notice it’s quiet around here? Half our people walked ten miles down to PB so they can cry looking at their family.” He didn’t say that with a sneer. Edilio didn’t own a sneer.

  Astrid said, “We have the same two top priorities we’ve had since the start: keep people fed and stop those trying to destroy us.”

  Sam smiled privately at the rather grandiose phrasing.

  “We need a plan beyond hoping Breeze finds Drake and Diana and Gaia,” Edilio said.

  “I was kind of hoping you had one,” Sam said. He was joking, but Edilio wasn’t smiling.

  Sam had the odd feeling that he’d just been caught goofing off in class. He sat up straighter and unconsciously lowered his voice half an octave. “You’re right, Edilio. What is it you want to do?”

  At some point, and Sam could not really pinpoint quite when, Edilio had stopped being his sidekick and become his equal, his full partner. The change had permeated the consciousness of the population at the lake, had become fact without anyone having to announce it. No one anymore told Edilio they’d have to “check with Sam”: in everything except for a battle, Edilio was in charge.

  Sam could not have been more pleased. He had discovered about himself that he had no talent for details. Or managing. And it was a wonderful thing to be able to lie in bed with Astrid and not feel the whole world was depending on him. In fact, glancing up at her now, with her sleeveless T-shirt gapping at the side, and the amazing line of her legs, and . . . He forced himself back to Edilio.

  “Okay, a couple things. First, while we have time, I want to prepare for the worst,” Edilio said. “We don’t have much extra food, but I want to stop people eating the last of the Nutella and Cup-a-Noodles. I want to put that stuff on a boat we’ll anchor out in the lake. Also some of the vegetables that Sinder is growing, the stuff that won’t spoil. I don’t want us getting caught flat-footed again. From now on, people want to eat, they had better get their butts back to work.”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah.” Up above, the sky was cloudy. But they were not quite normal clouds. They moved in a strange pattern, seeming to slide by, swifter close in, slower off in the far northern distance. Toward the southeast the sky turned dark blue. It was all part of the dome effect.

  The newly transparent sphere that contained the FAYZ was twenty miles in diameter, with the nuclear power plant at its center. That meant that directly over the power plant the top of the sphere was ten miles up. At that point the top of the sphere approached the stratosphere, up beyond clouds, beyond much oxygen. It was quite a bit lower here at Lake Tramonto, which was near the northwest edge. This close to the barrier they could be seen from the outside by anyone with a decent set of binoculars.

  Just forty-eight hours after the barrier had gone clear it was still very strange to Sam to be able to look across Lake Tramonto and see the rest of Lake Tramonto. There was a marina over there, probably not a mile from where he was sitting. There were boats, and people, too, though not more than a handful. Some had ventured out in the boats to nose right up against the barrier and look in, like people staring at the animals in the zoo. There was one over there right now with two guys pretending to fish but actually shooting video. Sam waved and felt foolish.

  Life in the FAYZ had changed.

  As if to make that point, Astrid shaded her eyes and looked off to the north. “Helicopter.”

  There was a helicopter with some sort of logo, maybe a news station or a police department, impossible to read from this distance. It was hovering above the “out there” marina, most likely aiming a camera into the dome. Perhaps focusing, as well as they could from that distance, on the four of them sitting there.

  Sam fought a sudden childish impulse to give them the finger.

  Edilio was still talking, and for the second time Sam felt like a distracted student in class.

  “What we need most of all is simple information,” Edilio was saying. “What are Drake and Diana and that kid going to do? And what can they do? Right now we’re blind.”

  “Irony,” Astrid said. When everyone just stared at her blankly, she sighed and explained, “For the first time we can see the real sky, and the world outside of this fishbowl, and we’re still blind.”

  “Ah,” the three said in unison. “Yeah, right.”

  “You know, it’s not a witty remark if I have to explain it,” Astrid said, obviously disgruntled.

  “I want to talk to Caine,” Edilio said. “I’m going to head down to PB
. We need to work together.”

  “You want me to come?” Sam asked.

  “If it’s you down at the barrier trying to get kids motivated, it will just get Caine pissed off. And we don’t have time for that whole enemies thing. To be honest with you . . . Well, I was wondering, Sam . . . I mean, just a suggestion . . .”

  Sam smiled affectionately at his friend. “Dude: if you got a job for me, just tell me what it is.”

  “It’s not just a job. It’s . . . Okay, here it is: Even Breeze can’t be everywhere. She searches, but she doesn’t search smart. I love her, but she just zooms around randomly and doesn’t let anyone tell her where to look.”

  Sam nodded. “You want me to go looking for trouble.”

  “Breeze is all over the area around PB, looking for any sign that Gaia and Drake are heading toward town—and of course making sure the TV cameras see her. But maybe Gaia is holing up somewhere, waiting. Getting stronger. Or maybe she’s on the move.”

  Sam thought about it. “The mine shaft, the National Guard base, the Stefano Rey, or the power plant.”

  “Same as my list. And you can’t take Dekka with you; I—we—need her here.”

  “Who can I take?”

  “We don’t know what Gaia can do. Sam, you may not be strong enough to take her, it, whatever. Not alone for sure, or even with Dekka.” He nodded respectfully at Dekka. “No offense to you, Dekka.”

  Dekka nodded slightly to say no offense was taken. Dekka knew the limits of her powers.

  “I don’t think we should wait for Gaia to choose the time and place,” Edilio said.

  “She ran away with Diana and Drake,” Astrid said. “She didn’t come right back; she ran off. That doesn’t make me think she’s all that dangerous.”

  Sam looked down and smiled. “If Toto was here, he’d call BS on that, Astrid. The gaiaphage did not choose to take on a body thinking it would get weaker. You know that.”

  The mood, which had been light earlier, thanks to Brianna, had grown steadily darker. Edilio had brought reality with him. And reality had a bad feel.