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“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.
