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Maybe. If at the right moment he committed: all-in. And if they failed? What she would do to him . . . She wouldn’t let him die; he would beg for it, but she would just go right on and he would—
“Who is it?” Gaia asked.
Would she know if he lied? He couldn’t hesitate. “I think it’s Edilio.”
“What are his powers?”
“None,” Caine said. And thought, Unless you count having the courage to stand out there facing the gaiaphage.
“Then keep moving, Father,” Gaia said.
“He does have a gun.”
“Do you think I fear a gun?”
You should, you arrogant . . . “No, but I do,” Caine said.
“Ah. I see. I can’t have you killed yet,” Gaia said.
Suddenly shots rang out. One, two, three, four, five, six.
Gaia laughed gleefully as the bullets buzzed by. “My leg is sufficiently healed. Stay down, Father, I still need your power. You can’t die just yet!”
She blurred away like Brianna.
Quinn.
Hurt bad. On highway. Reach me from that little cove if u can.
Sam.
Quinn read the note twice. The truth was, this Taylor—this weird Taylor 3.0 standing here—creeped him out. She wasn’t in as bad a shape as when he’d last seen her down the hall from Lana’s room—Taylor 2.0—but she was still pretty strange.
The truth was also that the note moved him. Sam was calling on him. Him. After all the ups and downs he’d been through with Sam. Of course it was because the others were more important for the fight. Of course. Still.
“Worth using a bit of diesel,” Quinn said, trying to sound all cool about it. “Thanks, Taylor. I hope you—” But she was gone. And frankly, he was relieved. Quinn had come a long way since the first days of the FAYZ, but he was still not fond of weird, impossible creatures.
“How is it I got more normal and everything else got weirder?” he asked the night air.
Somewhere fairly far away there was the sound of gunfire.
Dekka waited, heard the sudden burst of gunfire, and saw Edilio running past in staged terror—well, not entirely staged terror; it had to be at least partly very real terror. She herself was quivering with fear. She dared not even peek around the side, could not give away the ambush. One chance to get it right.
Then suddenly gunfire from half a dozen guns.
She popped up and yes! Yes! Gaia had hit her force field. Gaia was still running, but running in the air, flailing, getting nowhere.
The gaiaphage—she refused to think of it as a little girl—was about head height now, orange in the rays of a setting sun. She still hadn’t realized what had happened to her.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
She saw a chunk of flesh blown from Gaia’s arm. But the bullets were missing. Gaia was rising too fast and too high now to make an easy target. Dekka had to moderate the field, drop her again, bring her back down into range.
Twin beams of brilliant green light stabbed from Gaia’s hands, and the firing from the moving van faltered. No one had been hit, but now Gaia was using the altitude to her advantage: she was able to spot the shooters and was firing back.
It was like some terrible parody of a rock concert laser show. Bright beams of light melted runs in the road surface, then reached the moving van and sliced it neatly into three uneven pieces.
Dekka heard an unearthly scream and saw people bolting from the van. Blinding light followed them as they ran.
