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“I can’t believe this happened,” the red-haired man said. He stood up and extended his hand to Diana. “Amazing, right? Am I the first guy in?”
Gaia stepped in, grabbed the man’s hand, then shifted her grip to his wrist, put her other hand on his bicep, and with one swift, sudden movement tore his arm off at the shoulder like she was ripping a drumstick from an overcooked turkey.
“Gaia!” Diana cried.
The man screamed, an eerie, awful sound.
“Ahhh! Ahhhh! Ahhhh!”
Blood sprayed from both the arm and the shoulder. The man fell onto his back, screaming, screaming, screaming as blood sprayed like water from a cut garden hose.
Diana dropped beside him, crying, “Oh God, oh God!”
Gaia casually slung the arm onto a flat rock. She raised one hand and played a terrible, burning light—just like Sam’s light—up and down the arm.
She wasn’t destroying, though: she was cooking.
“No, no, no!” the man screamed. “Ahhh! Ahhh!”
“He’s going to die, Gaia!”
“Possibly,” Gaia said, evaluating the cooked arm. “A lot of blood—”
“Gaia!”
Outside the dome the other man was screaming silently, his eyes wide, his mouth a horrified O. The phone in his hand tilted crazily.
Diana tore the man’s small backpack open, found a T-shirt, and tried to stuff it into the gruesome, shredded wound that had been his shoulder. The man’s eyes rolled up into his head, and he passed out as blood continued gushing, making mud of the dirt.
“Gaia! Save him!” Diana begged, and looked up to see Gaia ripping with her child’s teeth at the charred and smoking bicep.
“Yes, I should save him,” Gaia said through her chewing. “He’ll be easier to move if he’s alive.” She ripped another chunk, a long, stringy piece of muscle, and while she chewed and sucked it into her mouth, she knelt beside the unconscious man and put her hand on the bloody mess of shoulder.
Diana scooted backward, pushing violently away.
Gaia held the cooked arm out toward her carelessly as she focused on the wound. “You should also eat. There is enough for both of us now.”
Diana rolled to her knees and retched. There was nothing in her stomach to come up. But she retched, tears flooding her eyes.
The man’s eyes fluttered open. He looked up at Gaia and screamed again, but more weakly. The one outside was banging on the dome with a piece of the ladder, yelling and threatening without making any sound.
Diana started crawling away. Her mind was spinning crazily: images, memories. Hunger and the smell of Panda’s flesh, and the memory of the taste of it, and the memory of the sickening way it had flooded her with relief at the time, the way it had filled her stomach.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she cried, over and over again, scraping scabbed knees over sharp rock.
Diana stood, so weak she could barely stay up, and tried to run away, but with a flick of Gaia’s finger she was yanked back to land beside the brutalized man.
He screamed, but weakly.
His eyes focused on hers, confused, afraid. Betrayed.
Diana felt herself spinning down a long tunnel, wishing to hit bottom, wishing for death. And, mercifully, she fell unconscious.
FIVE
74 HOURS, 41 MINUTES
“WHERE THE HELL is everyone?” Caine demanded. But he was demanding it of no one in particular. He was king in Perdido Beach, but he was a king without a court. Literally the only person with him at that moment was Virtue Brattle-Chance, an African kid—not African American, but literally from Africa.
