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Jack stared in confusion. “Of course not. That would mean penetrating the FAYZ barrier.”
“Oh.” The disappointment was like a sharp pain. Brianna, like most of the kids in the FAYZ, had learned to deal with the loss of parents, grandparents, older siblings. But the hope of actually speaking with them…
It was her mother Brianna missed most. There was a big age gap between Brianna and her little sisters. Brianna’s father had been out of her life since the divorce. Her mother had remarried—a jerk—and then had had twins with him. Brianna liked the twins okay, but they were eight years younger than she was, so it wasn’t like they hung out together.
It was Brianna’s stepfather who had insisted on sending her to Coates. His reason was that her grades were falling. Which was a lame excuse. Lots of kids had trouble with math and didn’t end up getting shipped off to a place like Coates.
Brianna had talked her mother into standing up to her stepfather. This was going to be her last year at Coates. Next year she was going to be back at Nicolet Middle School, in Banning. Back where she belonged. Not that there weren’t some tough kids at Nicolet, but there were no Caines, no Bennos, no Dianas, and definitely no Drakes.
No one at Nicolet had ever encased her hands in a block of cement and then left her to starve.
Besides, it would be so cool to blow all her old friends away with her new power. Their heads would explode. Their brains would melt. She could be a whole track team all by herself.
“There are no satellites to link to,” Jack was going on in his pedantic way. He was definitely kind of cute. And she thought he was kind of interesting. Kind of cute mostly because he was so clueless while at the same time being scary smart. She had noticed him even before, back when Coates was just a miserable hellhole and Jack was only on the periphery of the Caine clique.
“Why hasn’t Sam told anyone?” Brianna asked. “Why hasn’t he turned the system back on?”
“There’s no way to stop the Coates kids from using it, too, unless we disable the tower up on the ridge. Or unless I figure out a way to replace the entire authorization protocol and then authorize only certain numbers. Which would be a big programming job since I would be starting from scratch.”
“Oh.” Brianna peered closely at him. “Well, we don’t want to do anything that will help Caine and Drake and that witch, Diana. Do we?”
Jack shrugged. “Well, I was scared of Drake. I mean, everyone is scared of Drake. But Caine and Diana, they were okay to me.”
Brianna didn’t like that answer. The “interested” smile she’d worn for him evaporated. She held up her hands. The scars from Drake’s cruel “plastering” were gone. But the memory of that abuse, and the horror of starvation, especially now that it was back, were still fresh. “They weren’t so nice to me.”
“No,” Jack admitted. He looked down at the ground. “But still. I mean, they all—Sam and Astrid and all—they asked me to figure it out, the phones I mean, and I did. I want…I mean…I mean, I did it. I did it. It works. So we should turn it back on.”
Brianna’s expression hardened. “No. If it helps the Coates people in any way, then no. I don’t want their lives to be any easier. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer in every way they can suffer. And then I want them to die.”
She saw shock register behind those askew glasses. Jack was no different from most people, Brianna admitted to herself with some bitterness: he didn’t take her seriously. Of course she maintained an aura of cool and everything—after all, she was the Breeze. She was a superhero, so she had some obligation to carry off a certain style. But she was also Brianna. Regular girl.
“Oh, did that sound too harsh?” she asked, letting annoyance resonate in her tone of voice.
“A little bit,” Jack said.
“Yeah? Well, thanks for helping. Later,” Brianna said. And she was gone before he could say something else stupid.
Du
ck woke up.
He was completely disoriented. He was flat on his back. Wet. Wearing nothing but a bathing suit. In the dark.
He was cold. His fingertips were numb. He was shivering.
He felt something hard and sharp beneath his shoulder blades and he shifted to lessen the pain. He looked around, bewildered. There was a faint light from above. Sunlight bouncing weakly down a long dirt shaft.
Duck tried to make sense of it. He remembered everything: sinking to the bottom of the pool, then sinking through the bottom of the pool. He remembered choking on water and his lungs burning. There were scrapes down his sides, and along the underside of his arms.
And now, here he was, in a hole. A deep hole. At the bottom of a mud-sided shaft that he had somehow caused by falling into the earth.
Falling into the earth?
It was impossible to be sure how far down underground he was. But from the faraway look of the light, he had to be at least twenty feet down. Twenty feet. Underground.
Fear stabbed at his heart. He was buried alive. There was no way he’d be able to clamber back up through that narrow muddy shaft to the surface.
No way.
