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“Now we’re talking about bringing in more mutants? I’m not a general; I’m not some big organizer who should be running this.”
“What about this Edilio person?”
Dekka shrugged. “Edilio’s great. I trust no one more than him. But his job is organization; he’s not really a leader and he knows it. The thing is, even a natural leader like Sam . . . I mean, this isn’t the 314 square miles of the FAYZ; this is the whole country. The whole planet.” She turned for the first time to look at Cruz. “We’re not going to win, Cruz. We can’t.”
“We can try,” Cruz said.
“So we can be good little avatars in some alien’s simulation?”
“Oh, that,” Cruz said.
“Yeah: that. If that’s what we are, a sim, a program, if all this is fake . . .” She waved a hand to encompass Central Park and the larger city. “Then why are we bothering?”
“Nothing’s really changed,” Cruz said. “Look, I believe we were created by God. If I find out God created some aliens who created us, well, okay, that’s pretty weird. But we are still us. You know? The sun is in the sky, donuts taste good, and there’s another Star Wars movie. You know?”
Dekka was silent again, shaking her head slowly, side to side. She heaved a heavy sigh and said, “The four guys at the Pine Barrens? They’re still alive. The mayor updated me. Us. Texted me, anyway. They tried shooting them full of opioids to reduce the pain. Didn’t work.” She turned to make eye contact. “They just scream. It’s hell. That’s hell, right? Eternal torment without the escape of death?”
Cruz put her hand on Dekka’s arm, the first time she could remember touching Dekka. “Sweetie, there is a whole lot of pain and horror coming from this. People all over the country. All over the world. It’s awful. We can’t help all those people. We can only do what we can do.”
“It’s never going to get put back together, is it? The world. The country. Our lives. This isn’t the FAYZ; we’re not trapped in some dome hoping to get out and thinking everything will be fine if only we can escape. It’s never, ever going back to normal, is it?”
Cruz wanted to argue. She wanted to dismiss Dekka’s despair and cheer her up. But when she thought of lying, she just didn’t have the energy for it.
“No, it’s not,” Cruz said.
CHAPTER 23
Problems at Home
SAM TEMPLE HAD never been the sort of person to spy on others. He was certainly not the sort of person who would spy on his wife. What he had with Astrid was a relationship that had already endured more stress than a hundred normal marriages. They weren’t just solid as a couple; they were chiseled out of granite.
And yet . . .
Sam was also not overly neat or particularly obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen, so he was not the sort of person to reorganize the dishwasher. But the thing was, he had a coffee cup he’d left out on the balcony for, oh, maybe a week, and it had grown a ring of something green and scummy. He wanted to get it cleaned before Astrid noticed it because Astrid was overly neat and quite obsessed with keeping a clean kitchen.
But the dishwasher was almost completely full. In order to wedge his cup in there he had to move a few things around and . . . and then he saw the glass. It had clearly been used for orange juice. But clinging to the bottom and sides of the glass, along with the innocent pulp, were grains of something gray and gritty.
Sam pulled the orange-juice glass out and looked at it from every angle. Then he ran his finger around the inside and worked the grit between his thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, Astrid,” Sam whispered. “No, no, no, sweetheart.”
Astrid was at a spin class or Pilates or whatever, he could never recall. The world was falling apart, but the exercise classes must never stop; this was LA, after all. He glanced at the clock on the microwave, which displayed the proper time because: Astrid. He had a solid half hour, minimum.
It took just five minutes to locate the FedEx envelope, still containing a baggie partly filled with powdered rock.
Sam sat on the edge of their bed and hung his head, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of memory, and with those memories came dread. Dread of a repeat. Dread of more and more and more. He felt sick inside. He wanted to cry.
He wanted a drink.
But this wasn’t about him, or his feelings; it was about Astrid. There was no point in asking why she had done it, and no point in asking where the powder had come from. Two women who loved him in different ways were doing their best to protect him. He couldn’t get angry over the deception; they’d done it because they were worried about him.
They think I’ll crack. They think I’ll drink.
And Sam knew that Astrid did not trust him to be able to stop Drake. Which was fair enough because he knew he couldn’t stop Drake. He’d had many battles with Whip Hand, back when Sam could still fire a killing beam of light capable of cutting through stone. He’d killed Drake, or so Sam had once thought. And when they got word that Drake was still alive, Sam had done . . . had done what?
Stuck my head in the sand and did nothing.
He raised his head and saw his own forlorn reflection in the mirrored closet doors. He looked at himself almost curiously, as if trying to understand what was going on inside his own head. He was no longer the serious, quiet young surfer dude. His hair was growing darker. His skin, too, since he did still love to paddle out and sit there off the beach, sit out there on his board with his legs freezing, waiting for a wave he could ride all the way in. The surf report website was still the last thing he checked at night and the first thing he checked on waking. He didn’t get to the beach as often as he would have liked, but still he felt a need to know the surf conditions at Venice Beach, Zuma, Ventura. . . . Each time he checked, he told himself not to look at conditions for Perdido Beach, his old beach, the one where he and Quinn had surfed before the FAYZ had stilled the waters and made surfing impossible. But he always did.
