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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.”
