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“You know what Little Pete needs?” Astrid demanded. “Do you know what you’d be asking?”
Lana fell silent. She looked at the child she’d been touching. With her free hand she felt his neck, searching for a pulse. Then she laid her head on his chest, ear to his heart. Finally, she sat back. “I didn’t realize how damaged . . . I should have started sooner.”
It took Astrid a moment to realize what she had just seen. She stumbled back, stopped herself, met Lana’s haunted gaze.
“Yeah. That’s my life now,” Lana said. She raised a trembling finger to touch her own temple. “And now with it. With it back in my head. Extra fun.”
Lana stood up, nearly lost her balance, stretched to crack her back. “Well, now I have time for Sam. Plenty of time for Sam.” She accepted a glass of water from Peace and dropped down beside Sam.
“See those scissors?” Lana pointed to a pair of heavy shears on a table. “Bring them here and cut away his shirt. We have to start with his back.”
Astrid did as she was asked. She gasped seeing the bone protruding stark and white through Sam’s shoulder. But when they rolled him tenderly onto his side she saw the twisted jumble of his spine and almost lost hope.
“Yeah, that’s not good,” Lana said. “You’re going to have to help me. We need to straighten him out a bit, get the spine lined up. It goes a whole lot quicker if you at least get all the pieces back in place first. Where is Dahra? I could really use . . .” Then she remembered. “Two down, both hurt on lonely roads,” she said softly. “One dies. One lives, at least for now. The God you don’t believe in anymore rolls the dice.”
Sam groaned in his sleep when Astrid cut the last of the fabric away.
“She was a good person, Dahra,” Lana said. Her lip trembled. “She was a good person, that girl.” She looked around the room, at kids softly crying, moaning, asking for water. “Bunch of good dead people.” Then, shaking her head as if trying to throw something off, she yelled, “Sanjit! Send Peace to find some kind of a board. Like a shelf would do.”
Lana lit a cigarette, sucked in deep, and blew it out in Astrid’s direction. “You ever notice something, Astrid? No two moofs have the same power. There’s not two kids with super-speed, just one. Not two or three or five or ten with Sam’s laser thing, just him. One Jack, one Dekka.”
“Yes,” Astrid acknowledged cautiously.
“One healer.”
“Yeah, we all noticed that,” Astrid said, making no secret of the fact that she wished someone less volatile was that one healer.
“But this Gaia monstrosity seems to be able to heal itself, and to shoot light beams, and to do the whole telekinesis thing. Interesting, isn’t it? Kids have been telling me stories while I lay my little magic hands on them. Okay, now take Sam by the waist. Grab on, because this is going to be really bad.”
Astrid did as Lana directed. Don’t start crying, she told herself. But it hurt seeing the body she loved broken this way.
“You’re going to pull, see, so I can try to push the bones back into line. And you’re going to keep pulling until I tell you different. Got that?”
“I do,” Astrid said.
“Pull.”
Astrid pulled and Sam thrashed and Lana yelled at Astrid for loosening her grip so Astrid tightened her grip and pulled hard and Sam opened his eyes and yelled and flailed with his hands so Sanjit ran over and grabbed his hands, fast, because Sam’s hands could be very dangerous, and Quinn came around to help Astrid pull.
Lana pushed vertebrae back into place with a sickening wet crunch, then slid a wooden shelf beneath him and let Quinn and Sanjit work together to wrap strips of sheet around and around, locking Sam into place.
Sam quieted and lapsed again into unconsciousness.
“He may have internal injuries,” Lana said. “I can fix the back and the shoulder, maybe. We’ll see about anything else.”
“I should get back to Edilio, see if he needs . . .,” Astrid said and stood to leave.
“Yeah. You should go,” Lana agreed. “And then you better figure out which is worse, smart girl: That we give someone up as a living sacrifice to Little Pete. Or the other thing.”
Lana was smirking now, angry and challenging. Astrid didn’t want to ask, because she knew the answer. But she couldn’t not ask.
“What other thing, Lana?”
“The thing where we kill Sam, and Caine, too, if we can find him, to disarm the gaiaphage.”
Astrid stood stock-still.
Lana laughed her cynical laugh. “Yeah, you’re the genius, but that doesn’t make me an idiot.”
