First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2017 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First e-book edition 2017

ISBN 978 1 4052 8483 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1766 3

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

For all the GONE fans,

the best fans in the world

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART ONE: ORIGIN STORIES

Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier

1: THE MEET CUTE

2: DROPPING THE NAME TAG

ASO-2

3: THE COMMITTING OF CRIMES

4: BAD START, WORSE FINISH

5: A PERFECT SPECIMEN

6: HANGING WITH DEAD PEOPLE

ASO-4

7: AN UNHAPPY GUINEA PIG

8: DADDY ISSUES

9: ON THE RUN

10: TURNING WHITE TO RED

ASO-5

Meanwhile, in Scotland

11: A REALLY BAD COMMUTE

12: BEING USED

13: ALL DONE BEING USED

PART TWO: HERO, VILLAIN, MONSTER

Interstice

14: A CAREER SETBACK

15: A NICE TALK

16: SHADE VS KNIGHTMARE

17: BATTLE OF THE LIGHTHOUSE

Aboard the Okeanos Explorer

18: GOING HOME

19: MEET THE PSYCHOPATH

PART THREE: ROUGH BEASTS

20: FIRST ON THE SCENE

21: COOKING DRAKE

22: FIRE, WATER AND SHADE DARBY

23: LATE TO THE PARTY

24: THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING WORSE

25: SOMETHING WORSE

26: INNOCENT BYSTANDER

27: HEROES, VILLAINS, MONSTERS

28: CONSEQUENCES

29: AFTERMATH

Back series promotional page

About the Author

PART ONE
|
ORIGIN STORIES

Shade Darby, Four Years Earlier

“IT’S THE MONSTER!” Shade Darby cried out, speaking to no one in particular.

The monster was a girl who appeared to be in her teens, but was in reality mere days old. She was known the world over from her first recorded appearance during which she had torn off a man’s arm and eaten it. While the man watched in shock and agony.

The girl, the creature, the monster, now covered from head to toe in blood, stood in the middle of the highway.

There was no traffic on the highway. There hadn’t been in a year. That was how long the dome had sat astride the 101 at Perdido Beach, creating the world’s longest detour.

One day the dome had simply appeared, a perfect sphere twenty miles in diameter which extended down beneath the ground as far as it rose into the sky. That dome was centered on a nuclear power plant, but encompassed vast tracts of forest, hills, farmland, ocean, and almost all of the town of Perdido Beach, California, which lay at the extreme southern end.

The instant the dome appeared (impenetrable, opaque, and utterly impervious to drills, lasers, and shaped explosive charges), every single person fifteen years of age and older had been ejected.

Ejected.

They had popped up on the beach, in the road, on lawns, in homes, in people’s swimming pools. Some had been injured or killed, suddenly materializing in front of speeding trucks. Some had drowned, finding themselves without warning a mile out to sea. A few had materialized in solid objects, with one man skewered by a lamppost, like a human shish kebab. And some had been turned inside out, for reasons that no one had understood then or later.

One of the first scientists to be called to the scene to explain this incredible, impossible, and yet terrifyingly real phenomenon was Dr. Heather Darby of Northwestern University, in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. She had soon realized that this would be no overnight jaunt and that the study of the dome would take months if not years.

So Dr. Heather Darby had flown her daughter out to stay with her in the temporary housing complex hastily erected by the military.

For Shade Darby, thirteen years old, it had been wonderful. First and foremost, there was the beach. Evanston had a beach, but it did not compare to the long stretches of golden sand south of Perdido Beach. Then there was the excitement of being in a sprawling, makeshift compound teeming with soldiers and police and scientists and media and, of course, the Families of the captives in the dome.

The Families. People capitalized it because everyone knew what that meant. They’d been all over TV, the Families. Hysterical at first, then angry, and finally depressed and resigned and hopeless.

But most of all for Shade there was the awe-inspiring, overwhelming presence of the dome itself. It was a mystery so profound that no human had yet come close to understanding it, not even her mother.

Finally, after many months, a decision had been reached in secret to explode a small nuclear device—that was the official term; normal people called it a bomb—at the desert-fronting eastern edge of the dome. It was the very first thing to have any impact whatsoever on the dome. And the effect it had was . . . well, the greatest show the world had ever seen, because suddenly the dome had gone . . . transparent.

When the dome first appeared and ejected everyone fifteen and over, it was speculated that all those under that age were still inside the dome, but no one knew for sure. Many thought the dome might be a solid, a massive ball, like the world’s biggest ball bearing, just sitting there. But most believed that approximately three hundred and thirty-two children, aged fourteen down to newborn, were trapped inside.

Oh, the theories!

The theory Shade Darby liked best was that they were all inside, all those children. She wanted to believe that some benign power had taken care of them. Shade, like most people, hoped that they were all somehow okay.

Then the dome had become transparent, and the world seemed to freeze in place as every television and news website on Earth stared through cameras mounted on TV trucks, drones, helicopters and satellites—not to mention millions of individual smartphones—at what lay revealed.

The children definitely were inside. They were not okay. They were not at all okay. They were filthy, starved, scarred in body and mind, armed with everything from spiked baseball bats, lead pipes, and kitchen knives, to home-made flamethrowers, shotguns, and automatic weapons.

And there were far fewer than three hundred and thirty-two still alive.

They stared out through the dome, those wild children, and the world had stared back.

A savage, descent-of-man, dystopian madness.

And of course an instantly trending Twitter and Instagram meme. #Dome #PerdidoBeach #LOTF #BubbleKids. And then, when those inside had managed to communicate through scribbled notes held up for the cameras, the world learned what those on the inside called it and a new hashtag was born: #FAYZ.

The mordant acronym FAYZ: Fallout Alley Youth Zone.

But the dome was not the only warping of reality, for it soon became clear that some of those inside, not all, but some, had acquired fantastic powers. Supernatural powers. Comic book powers. Powers they did not always use for good.

Shade had been there every day since the dome had gone transparent, watching rapt and often appalled. Her mother had standing orders for Shade to stay away from the dome, but Shade was the daughter of two scientists, and curiosity ran very deep in her genetic make-up. So each day, as soon as she was sure her mother was occupied, Shade would wrap her too-noticeable auburn hair into a bun and cover it with a cap, then sneak from the grim barracks down to the dome, joining the throng of families.

It was the Families that kept it all from being mere spectacle. The Families would hold up signs. Do you know Monica Cowell? Is James Tipton safe? Please tell me if my son, my daughter, my sister, my grandchild is alive and safe.

#NameTheDead.

Many of the parents and grandparents learned that the one they had been praying for had been dead for months. Dead from starvation. Dead from animal attack. Dead from suicide.

Dead from murder.

A girl who called herself the Breeze, a skinny, puckish girl who could move at impossible speeds, wrote signs and held them up to be seen and photographed.

Sorry, your son Hunter is dead.

Sorry, your daughter Carla died eight months ago.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Life had not been peaceful inside what the media and the authorities and even the President of the United States called the Perdido Beach Anomaly. PBA. PBA lacked the bitterly dry humor of FAYZ, which solemn adults thought too glib.

Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected. Synonyms: oddity, peculiarity, abnormality, irregularity, inconsistency, incongruity, aberration, quirk, rarity. “PBA” was safe and bloodless and sounded scientific, but Shade knew that all it signified was, “We don’t know.”

Theories? Lots of theories. But understanding? There was none of that.

Shade had watched it all, heard the cries of grief, seen the tear-streaked faces. It was sickening but fascinating, and impossible to look away from.

Inside the dome, frightened children huddled close to their side of the transparent force field. Two very different worlds stared at each other, like monkeys in a cage, though which side were the monkeys was not at all clear.

Outside the dome, parents held up signs to be read by six-year-olds armed with butchers’ cleavers and gnawing on raw fish. Ten-year-olds sat sullen and listless, drinking from whiskey bottles. And nothing could be done. The atmosphere outside was thick with sadness and despair. But beneath all that sadness and despair, at a discreet distance where they could be hypocritically denied, were excitement and anticipation.

It was the greatest show on earth.

Shade sat cross-legged on the folded blanket she brought, arm’s length from the dome wall. Just beyond, right where she could have shook their hands if the barrier were gone, sat half a dozen kids, ranging from toddler to teen. More behind them, and more still stretching north and south. Refugees unable to cross the invisible border. Dying while the world watched with morbid fascination.

It was strange and disturbing, being so near, seeing everything yet hearing nothing. A few days earlier, Shade had been in this same spot eating a cereal bar and the kids on the other side had watched her every bite with a predatory intensity. They had salivated like dogs. Shade had not made that mistake again.

Then had come rumors of a terror to dwarf all others in the dome. A terror called Gaia, though the signs held up inside the dome used half a dozen different spellings. Guyuh. Gayu.

#Gaia.

Dozens of fake Gaia Twitter and Facebook and Instagram accounts under that name, all finding the notion terribly amusing. Until the tape.

At the instant of transparency, at the moment the nuke had detonated, the dome’s force field had failed for just a split second. A young man named Alex, an adult of sorts, had been attempting to climb the dome. In that instant of transformation, the dome had flickered and he had fallen through, becoming the only adult inside. His bad luck.

It had been his arm that Gaia had torn from his body. She had then cooked the flesh with a blast of searing light from her hands, and ripped the medium-rare flesh, chewing and swallowing as the man named Alex lay traumatized and weeping at her feet. This event had been caught on video. The video practically burned down the internet as everyone on planet Earth not living in a cave or a coma, watched it in appalled fascination.

That had taken a lot of the fun out of #GaiaForPresident.

It was that girl, that monster Gaia, who now appeared at the south end of the dome, covered in blood and burns, her clothing rags.

Shade Darby’s phone rang, making her jump. Her mother of course. She knew why her mother was calling. Dr. Heather Darby was making sure her daughter was safe in the barracks, because Heather Darby, at that moment just a hundred feet away in a tent crammed with scientific equipment, knew her daughter did not always listen to her.

Shade let the call go to voicemail. No way was she leaving. No way was she going to miss this. The show was approaching its climax, Shade could sense it. Something big was coming.

There came the chime of a text. Shade did not even look at it.

And then as Gaia stared balefully down at the huddled mass of frightened children pressed against the dome wall, she raised her hands.

“Shade! Shade Darby!” Her mother’s voice was barely audible above the rising swell of voices as people cried out and pointed.

Gaia raised her hands and beams of light, so bright that Shade could scarcely look at them, stabbed from Gaia’s upraised palms into the crowd of children pressed desperately, hopelessly inside the dome.

For what felt like slow-ticking minutes, Shade stared in disbelief. Children were sliced through by the beam of light. Children burned. A boy no more than seven years old melted like a candle in a microwave, burned and melted, and from Shade’s throat came a rising wail, a scream, and all around her screams and bellows of horror, and then it had all risen in pitch, because sound did not escape the dome . . . but light did!

“Shade!”

Gaia’s killing beams scythed through the children in the dome, but stabbed as well through the transparent barrier. Laser light burned cops, tourists and media. It burned the Families. It burned the tacky souvenir stands with their plastic dome keychains.

People became herd animals, a mass of wildebeest spotting a lioness springing from the tall grass. People recoiled, backed away, saw the person standing beside them decapitated, and ran in sheer panic, all reason gone, shoving and climbing over each other as those deadly beams swept left and right, and people were cut down as they ran. Arms and heads dropped away like macabre litter, torsos ran two steps before toppling over. Seared human meat smoked and sent up a nauseating barbecue smell.

Shade felt her body tingling, felt her heart seem to stop then speed up, felt the echo of her own screams inside her head as she lay face down, hugging the ground, but never looking away. She never once looked away as trapped children, their mouths open in unheard cries of despair, died before her eyes, died so close she would have felt their last breath.

Then behind Gaia came a creature that seemed almost to be made of gravel. It barreled down the hill, heavy and awkward, a boulder with thick legs and windmilling arms. It slammed into Gaia and sent the blood-drenched monster-child flying. There came a ragged cheer from the onlookers crawling on the ground like Shade, or cowering at what they hoped was a safe distance behind emergency vehicles and National Guard Humvees.

Inside the dome a handsome boy with dark hair and a commanding air appeared. He was improbably armed with a shoulder-held missile, like something from a news report of distant war. He leveled the missile and fired it at Gaia. The missile flew, leaving a trail of smoke and sparks, traveling a short distance and missing its intended target. It exploded silently against the inside of the barrier, a dozen feet above Shade’s head. She recoiled in reaction, pressing her face into the dirt, hands over her ears though there was no shock wave.

The explosion inside the dome shattered the stone creature, stripped the outer covering away, leaving, for just a moment, an almost human shape. A boy. But a dead boy. He fell alongside dozens of others, and bloody Gaia howled silent rage and brutish laughter.

She was, Shade thought, the most amazing creature she had ever seen or imagined: fearless, insane, evil, and powerful. A demented young goddess. Fascinating.

Beyond Gaia, the boy who fired the missile seemed to shrug. They were speaking, Gaia and the dark-haired boy, an almost normal-seeming conversation. Others on the inside looked on, tense, but keeping their distance. The boy was a teenager not that much older than Shade herself, but he did not have youthful eyes.

Then came a blast of light so intense it burned Shade’s retinas, blinding her temporarily. She rubbed her eyes and blinked, and when she could see again, both the dark-haired boy and bloody Gaia were ashes.

And suddenly Shade heard new sounds, from a new direction, from inside! Screams. Cries. Moans of pain and the gibbering of pure terror. She smelled the smoke of the burning forest at the far end of the FAYZ. She smelled the final, sickening excretions of the dead so near at hand. She smelled the brackish odor of freshly spilled blood.

A dead child sagged forward and lay across the line of the dome wall, hand outstretched, almost touching Shade.

The dome was . . . gone!

A panicked mob of the starved, filthy, ragged, scabbed, heavily armed inhabitants of the Perdido Beach Anomaly rushed heedlessly out into the world. Dozens of them clambered madly over their own dead and wounded friends. One in her panic kicked Shade’s head, stunning her. Shade tried to rise to avoid being trampled, and a girl, no more than ten or eleven years old, raced screaming by, swinging a machete at imaginary pursuers. The blade caught the side of Shade’s throat.

No pain, not at first, just shock as Shade pressed her hand to the wound and gaped as it came away red to the wrist.

She sank back on the ground, wanting to cry for help, wanting to call to her mother now, her mother who no longer cried her name.

Shade felt suddenly dizzy, woozy, feet and hands not working quite . . . She rolled onto her back and looked up at the cloudless sky. Strange. The sky. Blue. She felt the rhythmic pulsing of her lifeblood escaping the confines of her arteries.

She blinked. She thought the word Mom, and fell swirling down into unconsciousness.

Ten minutes later, Shade woke to find herself lying on a gurney, flashing lights everywhere, her vision blurred, head pounding, needles in her elbow, a blood-pressure cuff around her wrist, thick bandages around her throat. An EMT squeezed a bag of plasma to force the lifesaving fluid into Shade’s collapsing arteries. Shade, barely clinging to paralyzed, nightmarish consciousness, blinked furiously to clear her vision, and focused at last on a black plastic body bag. And on the gloved hand of the fireman pulling the zipper up.

Up and over her mother’s face.

1
|
THE MEET CUTE

“THE FIRST SUPERHERO was not Superman,” Malik Tenerife said to Shade Darby. “It was Gilgamesh. Like, four thousand years ago. Super strong, super smart, unstoppable in battle.” He raised a finger for each point.

“First name Gil, last name Gamesh?”

“That’s very cute, Shade. Pretty sure they were making that same joke four thousand years ago. Gilgamesh, baby: the first superhero.”

“Not going with Jehovah?”

“I don’t think gods count as superheroes,” Malik said.

“Mmmm. They do if they aren’t real gods,” Shade countered. “I mean, Wonder Woman is an Amazon, Thor is one of the gods of Asgard, and wasn’t Storm from X-Men some sort of African deity?”

Malik sat back, shaking his head. “You know, I kinda hate when you do that.”

“Do what?” Her innocent expression was not convincing and she didn’t really intend it to be.

“When you pretend not to know something and then kneecap me.” For a boy who supposedly hated it, he was smiling pretty broadly.

Shade laughed delightedly, something she rarely did. “But it’s so fun.”

His face grew serious and he leaned forward across the tiny table. “Are you really going to do this, Shade? You know it’s a felony, right? A federal crime? Worse, this is national security we’re talking about.”

Shade shrugged. They were at the Starbucks on Dempster Street, in Evanston, Illinois. It was busy, jammed with the usual early morning crowd—college kids, ponytail moms, two women in the fluorescent vests of road workers, high school kids like Shade, college kids like Malik, all breathing steam and tracking wet in on their shoes, all stoking the caffeine furnace.

It was noisy enough that they could talk without too much concern for being overheard, but Shade wished Malik had not used the word ‘felony’ because that was exactly the kind of word people had a tendency to overhear.

They sipped their drinks—grande latte for Malik, tall Americano with a little half-and-half for Shade—checked the time and left. Malik was a tall, lithe black boy, seventeen, with hair in loose ringlets that had a tendency to fall into his eyes, the endearing effect of which he was quite well aware. Those occasionally ringleted eyes were perpetually at half-mast as if to conceal the penetrating intelligence behind them. His expression at rest was benign skepticism, as if he was not likely to believe you, but would keep an open mind.

Shade was a seventeen-year-old white girl with auburn hair cut to give her the look of someone who might be inclined to curse, smoke weed and just generally be trouble. Only two of those things were true.

She had brown eyes that could range from amused and affectionate to chilly and unsettling—effects she deployed quite consciously. She was tall, five foot eight, and had the sort of bone structure that would have caused people to say, “Hey, you should be a model,” but for the impressive scar that ran just beneath her jaw on the right side and behind her ear and gave her a swashbuckling air. If there were ever a movie role for Blackbeard’s pirate niece, Shade would have been a natural for the part.

Shade was effortlessly charismatic, with a hint of something regal about her. But despite the charm and the cheekbones, Shade was not a popular kid at school. She was too bookish, too aware, too impatient, too ready to let people know she was smarter than they were. And beyond that, there was something about Shade that felt too old, too serious, too dark; maybe even something a bit dangerous.

Malik knew where that feeling of danger came from: Shade was obsessed. She was like some online game addict, but her obsession was with a very real event, with fear and death and guilt. And it was no game.

It was chilly out on the street, not real Chicago cold—that was coming—just chilly enough to turn exhalations to steam and make noses run. The little business section of Dempster—Starbucks, pizza restaurant, optometrist, seafood market, and the venerable Blind Faith Café—was just west of the corner with Hinman Avenue. Hinman—where Shade lived—was a street of well-tended Victorian homes behind deep, unfenced front lawns. Trees—mature elms and oaks—had already dropped many of their leaves, gold with green accents, on lawns, sidewalks, the street, and on parked cars, plastering windshields with nature’s art.

Shade and Malik walked together down to Hinman where the bus stop was. There were six kids already milling around.

“Well, I’ll see you, Shade,” Malik said. There was something off in the way he said it, a tension, a worry.

Shade heard that note and said, “Stop worrying about me, Malik. I can take care of myself.”

He laughed. He had an unusual laugh that sounded like the noise a hungry seal made. Shade had always liked that about him: the idiot laugh from such a smart person. Also the smile.

And also the feel of his arms and his chest and his lips and . . . But that was all past tense now. That was all over and done with, though the friendship remained.

“It probably won’t work,” Malik said.

“Are you rooting against me?” Shade asked archly.

“Never.” The smile. And a sort of salute, fist over heart, like something he’d probably seen on Game of Thrones. But it worked. Whatever Malik did it generally somehow worked.

“I’m going to do it, Malik. I have to.”

Malik sighed. “Yeah, Shade, I know. It’s called obsession.”

“I thought that was the name of a perfume,” she joked, not expecting a laugh and getting only a very serious look from Malik.

“You know you can always call me, right?”

Shade lifted her cup to tap his and they had a cardboard toast. “You should not be hitting on high school girls,” she said.

“What choice do I have? Northwestern girls aren’t dumb enough to buy my line of bullshit,” he said, and started to go, walking backward away from her toward the Northwestern campus just a few blocks north. “Anyway, you’ll be a college girl next year.”

He was six months older than her, always a year ahead.

“Also, wasn’t the Sandman basically a god . . .?” Shade called after him.

“I’m going to class now,” Malik said and covered his ears. “I can’t hear you. Lalalalala.”

But Shade’s focus had already shifted to the new kid at the bus stop. A Latino boy, she guessed. Tall, six-two, quite a good-looking kid.

Wait. Nope. Maybe not a boy exactly.

Interesting.

He or possibly she looked nervous, the new kid. His dark eyes were wary and alert. And made up, with just a little eyebrow pencil and a delicate touch of mascara.

The others at the stop were a pair of freshmen boys who looked like they should still be in middle school; a black kid named Charles or Chuck or something—she couldn’t recall—who had never yet been seen without earbuds; and two massive, muscular members of the football team, one white, one black, neither in possession of a definable neck.

“That is going to be trouble,” Shade muttered under her breath. Both of the Muscle Twins were eyeballing the new kid with a bored, predatory air.

No one spoke to Shade as she positioned herself a little apart, on the sidewalk, where she could watch. She sipped her coffee and waited, watching the football guys, noting the nudges and the winks. She could smell violence in the air, a whiff of testosterone, sweat, and pure animal aggression.

She noticed as well that the new kid was quite aware of potential trouble. His eyes darted to the football players, and when they moved behind him, Shade could practically see the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Evanston had always been the very epitome of enlightened tolerance, but a perhaps gay, perhaps trans kid and bored football players with their systems pumped full of steroids did not always make for a good mix. And lately Evanston had begun to change, to fray somehow, to fade a little as if it were a movie being shown on a projector with a dimming bulb.

“Hey, answer a question for us,” the white player said to the new kid. Shade saw the newbie flinch, saw him withdraw fractionally, but then, with a will, recover his position and face up to the player who was an inch shorter, but heavier by probably a hundred pounds of muscle.

“Okay.” It was a distinctly feminine voice. Shade cocked her head and listened.

“What are you?”

There was a split second where the new kid thought about evading. There was even a quick glance to plan an escape route. But he didn’t back down.

“My name is Cruz,” the kid said. He wore his black hair long and loose, almost to his shoulders, swept to one side. Shade shook her head imperceptibly, watching, analyzing.

“Didn’t ask your name, asked what you are.” This from the black player. “See, I heard you’re crazy. I heard you think you’re a girl.”

Shade nodded. Ah, so that was it. Shade was gratified to have an answer. She had never really talked to a trans person before, maybe she should make an effort to meet this new kid—assuming he survived the next few minutes.

Mental check: he or she? Shade made a note to ask Cruz which worked best for him. Or her. And decided in the meantime to insert female pronouns into her own internal monologue. Not that her internal monologue—or her pronoun choices—would matter to the kid who, from all indications, was seconds away from serious trouble.

Cruz licked her lips, glanced up the street, and sighed in obvious relief: the school bus was wheezing and rattling its way up the street. Thirty seconds, Shade figured. Cruz thought she was safe, but Shade was not so sure.

“I don’t think I’m a girl, and I don’t think I’m a boy, I just am what I am,” Cruz said. There was some defiance there. Some courage. Cruz wasn’t small or weak, but she was both when compared to the football players.

“You either got a dick or you don’t got a dick.” The white one again. Obviously a philosopher. Shade had the vague sense that his name might be Gary. Gary? Greg? Something with a G.

“You seem way too interested in what I have in my pants,” Cruz said.

Shade winced. “Mmmm, and there we go,” she said under her breath.

The bus rolled up, wheels sheeting standing water from the gutter. It was the black one (who Shade believed was named Griffin . . . or was she confusing her G names?) who shoved Cruz into the side of the still-moving bus.

Cruz lost her footing, staggered forward, and threw up her hands too late to entirely soften the impact of her face on yellow-painted aluminum. There was a definite thump of flesh-padded bone against aluminum, and the rolling bus spun Cruz violently, twisted her legs out from under her and she fell to her knees in the gutter.

The bus stopped, the door opened, and the gnome of a driver, oblivious, said, “Let’s move it, people.”

Earbud boy and the two frightened freshmen, as well as the two lumbering thugs, all piled aboard.

“There’s a kid hurt out here,” Shade told the driver.

“Well, tell him to get on-board, he can see the nurse when we get to school.”

“I don’t think she can do that,” Shade said.

Cruz sat on the curb. Blood poured from her nose, and hot tears cut channels in the red, all in all a rather gruesome sight.

Don’t think about a face covered in blood. Don’t go back to that place.

Shade made a quick decision, an instinctive decision. “Go ahead, I’m taking a sick day,” she told the driver. The bus pulled away, trailing vapor and fumes.

“Hey,” Shade said. “Kid. You need me to call 911?”

Cruz shook her head. Her breath came in gasps that threatened to become sobs.

“Come with me, I’ll get you a Band-aid.”

Cruz stood and made it most of the way up before yelping in pain as she tried her left ankle. “Go ahead, I’ll be fine,” Cruz said. “Not my first beating.”

Shade made a soundless laugh. “Yeah, you look fine. Come on. Throw an arm over my shoulders, I’m stronger than I look.” For the first time the two of them made eye contact, Cruz’s tear-filled, furious, hurt, expressive brown eyes and Shade’s more curious look. “I live just down the block. You can’t walk and you’ve got blood all down your face. So either let me call 911, or come with me.”

It was all said in a friendly, easygoing tone of voice, but much of what Shade said tended to have a command in it, like she was talking to a child, or a dog. Lack of self-confidence had never been an issue for her.

They nearly tripped and fell a few times—Cruz had to lean heavily on Shade—but in the end they made their way down the sidewalk and turned left onto the walkway that led through a gate, beneath the tendrils of an overgrown and fading panicle hydrangea bush, to Shade’s back door.

They entered through a kitchen much like every other kitchen in this well-heeled neighborhood: granite counters, a restaurant-quality six-burner stove, and the inevitable doublewide Sub-Zero refrigerator. Shade fetched a baggie, filled it with ice and handed it to Cruz.

“Come on.” They headed upstairs, Cruz holding the carved wood railing and hopping, with Shade behind her ready to catch her if she fell backward.

Shade’s room was on the second floor, walls a cheerful yellow, a gray marble bathroom visible through a narrow door. There was a queen-size bed topped by a white comforter. A desk was against one wall. A dormer window framed a padded window seat.

And there were books. Books in neat shelves on both sides of the desk, between the dormer and the southwest corner, piled around the window seat, piled on an easy chair, piled on Shade’s bedside table.

Shade swept a pile of books from the easy chair and Cruz sat. Shade stepped into her bathroom and came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, tissues, a yellow tube of Neosporin, a box of bandages and a glass of water.

“Put your leg up on the corner of the bed,” Shade instructed. Cruz complied and Shade laid the ice bag over the twisted ankle. “Take these. Ibuprofen, it will hold the swelling down and dull the pain.”

“You’re being too nice,” Cruz said. “You don’t even know me.”

“Mmmm, yes, that’s what everyone says about me,” Shade said with a droll, self-aware smile. “That I’m just too darn nice.”

Cruz carefully wiped blood away, using her phone as a mirror. Then, suddenly remembering, she pulled a small purple Moleskine notebook from her back pocket. It was swollen from curb water in one corner, but otherwise unharmed. Cruz stuck it in a dry jacket pocket with a sigh of relief as Shade fetched a trashcan for the bloody Kleenex.

“Shade Darby, by the way. That’s my name.”

“Cool name.”

“It’s something to do with the moment of my conception. I gather there were trees. Not the kind of thing I ask too many questions about, if you know what I mean. And you’re Cruz.”

Cruz nodded. “In case you’re wondering, I have a dick.”

That earned a sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing red and white smile from Cruz.

“Is that a permanent condition?” Shade asked.

Cruz shrugged. “I don’t have a short answer.”

“Give me the long one. I’ll tell you if I get bored.” She flopped on her bed.

“OK. Well . . . You know it’s all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there are people—most people—born either M or F and are perfectly fine with that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind, you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are in the wrong body. Me, I’m . . . more kind of neither. Or both. Or something.”

“You’re e), all of the above. You’re multiple choice, but on a True/False test.”

That earned another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. “Can I use that line?”

“I understand spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things,” Shade said, sitting up. “This is not Alabama, after all. Or it didn’t used to be. Our sex ed does not end with Adam and Eve.”

“You’re . . . unusual,” Cruz said.

“Mmmm,” Shade said.

“I like boys, mostly,” Cruz said with a shrug. “If that clears anything up.”

“Me too,” Shade said. Then with a small skeptical sound added, “In theory. Not always in reality.”

Cruz gave her a sidelong glance. “I saw you with that boy, the tall, dark and crazy-good-looking one?”

“Malik?” Shade was momentarily thrown off stride. She was not used to people as observant as herself.

“He likes you.”

“Liked, past tense. We’re just friends now.”

Cruz shook her head slowly, side to side. “He looked back at you, like, three times.”

“So, you’re a straight girl trapped in the body of a gay boy? Walk me through it.” Shade deliberately shifted the conversation back to Cruz, and she was amused and gratified to see that Cruz knew exactly what she was doing.

Smart, Shade thought. Too smart? Just smart enough?

“I am e), all of the above, trapped in a True/False quiz,” Cruz said. “You can quote me on that.”

“Pronouns?”

Cruz shrugged. “More she than he. I don’t get bitchy about it, but, you know, if you can . . .” Now it was Cruz’s turn to shift the topic. “You read a lot.”

“Yes, but I only do it to made myself popular.” The line was delivered flat and Shade could see that Cruz was momentarily at a loss, not sure if this was the truth, before realizing it was just a wry joke.

It took Cruz maybe a second, a second and a half, to process, Shade noted. Slower than Shade would have been, slower than Malik, but not stupid slow, not at all. Just not genius quick.

“I’ll call us in sick,” Shade said, and pressed her thumb to her phone.

“I don’t think you can do that.”

“Please.” Shade dialed, waited, said, “Hello, this is Shade Darby, senior. I’m feeling a little off today, and I’m also calling in sick for—” She covered the phone and asked, “What’s your legal name?”

“Hugo Cruz Martinez Rojas.”

“Hugo Rojas. Yeah, she’s hurt. A couple of our star football players roughed her up. Yes. No. Uh-huh.” Shade hung up. “See? No problem. The school is already dealing with the swastika incident. They don’t want any more bad publicity.”

“Swastika incident?”

“Spray paint on the side of the temporary building, the one they use for music. A swastika and the usual hate stuff, half of it misspelled. It’s two ‘g’s’ not one. One ‘g’ and it’s a country in Africa. Sad times when someone does that, sadder still when they can’t even spell it.”

Cruz had removed most of the blood from her face and neck, but Shade went to her, took a tissue and leaned in to wipe a fugitive blood smear from the corner of Cruz’s mouth.

The gesture embarrassed Cruz, who turned her attention again to the bookshelf beside her. “Veronica Rossi. Andrew Smith. Lindsay Cummings. Dashner. Marie Lu. Daniel Kraus.” Reading the authors’ names from the spines. “And Dostoyevsky? Faulkner? Gertrude Stein? David Foster Wallace? Virginia Woolf?”

“I have eclectic tastes,” Shade said. She waited to see what Cruz made of the rest of her collection.

“The Science of the Perdido Beach Anomaly.” Cruz frowned. “Powers and Possibilities: The Meaning of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. That sounds dramatic. The Physics of the Perdido Beach Anomaly. Way too math-y for me. Our Story: Surviving the FAYZ. I read that one myself—I guess everyone did. I didn’t like the movie though—they obviously toned it way down.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’re very into the Perdido Beach thing.”

Shade nodded. “Some would say obsessed.”

Some. Like Malik.

“And you like science.”

“My father is a professor at Northwestern, head of astrophysics. It runs in the family.”

“And your mom?”

“She’s dead.” Shade cursed herself silently. Four years of saying those words and she still couldn’t get them out without a catch in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” Cruz said, her brow wrinkling in a frown.

“Thank you,” Shade said levelly. She had the ability to place a big, giant “full stop” on the end of subjects she did not want to pursue, and Cruz got the hint.

“My father is a plumbing contractor,” Cruz said. “We used to live in Skokie, but, well, I had problems at the school. It was a Catholic school and I guess they like their students to be either male or female, but not all-of-the-above, or neither, or, you know, multiple-choice. I started out wearing the boys’ uniform and they didn’t like it when I switched to a skirt.”

“No?”

“It was a bit short,” Cruz admitted slyly, “but they don’t make a lot of plaid skirts in my size.”

“What do you do when you’re not provoking violence at bus stops?”

Cruz had a silent laugh, an internal one that expressed itself in quiet snorts, wheezes and wide grins, sort of the diametric opposite of Malik. “Are you asking what I want to be when I grow up? That’s my other secret. I’ve gotten to the point where I can mostly deal with the gender stuff, but writing . . . I mean, you tell people you want to write and they roll their eyes.”

“I’ll be sure to look away when I roll my eyes,” Shade promised.

“Yes, I want to be Veronica Roth when I grow up. You know she’s from here, right? She went to Northwestern.”

“What do you write about?”

Cruz shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. It’s probably just therapy, you know? Working out my own issues, but using fictional characters.”

“Isn’t that what all fiction writers do?”

Cruz did a short version of her internalized laugh.

Shade nodded, head at a tilt, eyeing Cruz closely. “You . . . are interesting.” Something in the way she said it made it a benediction, a pronouncement, and a small, gratified smile momentarily appeared on Cruz’s lips.

After that they chatted about books, ate chips and salsa, and drank orange juice; they watched a little TV, with Shade leaving the choice of shows to Cruz because, of course, Shade was testing her, or at least studying her.

Cruz actually is interesting. And . . . useful?

The day wore on, the swelling in Cruz’s ankle worsened until it was twice its normal size, but then began slowly to deflate like a balloon with a slow leak. The pain receded as well, beaten back by ibuprofen, ice, and the recuperative powers of youth.

All the while Shade considered. She liked this odd person, this e) in a True/False world, this person who tried to wear a skirt to Catholic school, this smart but not too smart, funny, self-deprecating, seemingly aimless creature who wanted to be a writer.

Person, Shade chided herself. Not creature, person. She was aware that she had a tendency to analyze people with the intensity and the emotional distance of a scientist counting bacteria on a slide.

Blame DNA.

Shade needed help, back-up, support, she knew that, and her only currently available choice was Malik, who would resist and delay and generally try to get in her way. Malik was a chronic rescuer, one of those boys—young man, actually, in Malik’s case—who thought it was their duty in life to get between every bully and their victim and every fool and their fate. Had he been at the bus stop he would have launched himself in between the two football players and gotten a beat-down, and it would be his blood she was wiping away, and him she was making ice packs for, and him here in her bedroom . . .

And that is not a helpful place to go, Shade.

They had been drawn to each other from the start, four years ago when Shade had returned to live with her father after the life-changing disaster at Perdido Beach. At first they’d been friends. He had visited her in the hospital after her second surgery, the one to repair the nerves on the right side of her face—she had not been able to feel her cheek. In later years they had become a great deal more, each the other’s first.

The break-up had been Shade’s decision, not Malik’s. He had wanted more of her, more commitment, more openness. But Shade liked her secrets. She liked her privacy, her control over her life.

Her obsession.

Now Shade reached a conclusion: time to pull the pin on the hand grenade, or light the fuse, or some such simile.

Fortune favors the bold, and all that.

“My father is actually doing some work for the government,” Shade said.

“Like for NASA?”

“Mmmm, well, not exactly. How are you at keeping secrets, Cruz?”

Cruz waved a languid hand down her body. “I’m a gender fluid kid who had been passing as muy macho until, like, six months ago. I can keep a secret.”

“Yeah.” Shade nodded, tilted her head, considered, careful to keep a gently amused expression on her face to conceal the cold appraisal in her eyes.

She owes me. I rescued her. She has no friends.

She’ll do it.

“My dad’s, um, tracking the path of what they’re calling an ASO—Anomalous Space Object. Several, actually. Seven to be precise, ASO-Two through ASO-Eight.”

Cruz lifted a plucked eyebrow. “What happened to ASO-One?”

“Oh, ASO-One already landed on Earth years ago. They think all eight ASOs are pieces from the same source, an asteroid or planetoid that blew up, sending some interstellar shrapnel our way. One of the pieces—ASO-One—managed to catch a ride on Jupiter’s gravity well and got here ahead of the rest. Just about nineteen years ahead. The other fragments took a longer route. But ASO-Two through Eight are scheduled to intercept Earth over the next few weeks.”

Shade saw that Cruz had not made the connection, not figured it out, and that was a little disappointing. But then a flicker and a frown, and Cruz made direct eye contact and asked, “Nineteen years ago? Wasn’t that . . .”

Shade nodded slowly. “Mmmm. Nineteen years ago ASO-One entered Earth orbit and slammed into a nuclear power plant just north of the town of Perdido Beach, California.”

That froze Cruz solid for a long minute. Her eyes searched Shade’s face, trying to see whether Shade was just kidding. Because this wasn’t some little secret like ‘I’ve got a crush on . . .’ This was a secret two high school kids who barely knew each other should not possess.

Cruz swallowed a lump. “You’re talking about the alien rock?”

“The rock that changed the world,” Shade confirmed. “The rock that rewrote the laws of physics. The rock that turned random teen sociopaths into superpowered killers. That rock.”

“And you’re . . . you’re saying there’s more coming?”

“According to my father’s calculations, and he is very good at his job. He’s tracking the rocks. One lands today off the coast of Scotland. That’s ASO-Two. Another, ASO-Three, hits in just a few days.”

Cruz shifted uncomfortably, obviously realizing that Shade was no longer making idle chitchat. A message was being delivered. A question hung in the air.

“It’s supposed to land in Iowa. Or it was,” Shade said. “Now, with some updated numbers, they think it will land in Nebraska. There’ll be a whole government task force there to grab it: HSTF-Sixty-Six—Homeland Security Task Force 66. Yes, they’ll be there with helicopters and police escort and various scientists. In Nebraska.”

The air between them seemed to vibrate.

“Nebraska,” Cruz said.

Shade nodded. “Uh-huh.” Time to go all-in, to trust her instincts. “But the truth is it will land in Iowa, as originally calculated.”

“So, um . . .”

“So . . . someone changed the inputs,” Shade said, her voice low and silky. “Someone with access to my father’s computer. My dad is a genius, but his memory for little things isn’t great so he sticks a Post-it to the bottom of his keyboard. You know, for his password.”

The play of emotion across Cruz’s face was fascinating to Shade. First Cruz thought she was hearing wrong. Then she thought Shade was teasing. And then finally, even before she asked, she knew Shade was telling the truth.

Cruz, Shade thought, should never play poker: her face revealed all. She could practically see the shiver go up Cruz’s spine.

Cruz said, “You.” It was not a question.

“I’m pretty good at math,” Shade said. “And Wolfram-Alpha helps.”

“You changed your dad’s calculations?”

Shade nodded, and tilted her head to the “quizzical” position. “The question is, Cruz, why did I change the numbers?”

It was a clear test, a clear challenge, and Cruz passed, saying, “You’re going to try and take the rock.”

“No,” Shade said. “I won’t try. I’ll succeed.” Then after a beat added, “Especially if you help me.”

2
|
DROPPING THE NAME TAG

“YOU KNOW . . . YOU look familiar,” the woman said, narrowing her eyes. She was a mother with a two-year-old in her shopping basket and a five-year-old tagging along and playing with the candy in the checkout rack.

“I get that a lot,” the cashier said.

“You’re one of those Perdido Beach people! The black one. The lesbian! That’s you! Oh my God, that’s you!”

Dekka Talent shook her head, putting on her tolerant smile, not easy in the face of being identified as “the black one,” and “the lesbian.” She tapped the Safeway name tag on her chest and said, “I’m Jean. But like I said, I get that a lot.”

“I can’t believe you’re working as a cashier! You don’t really look like the actress who played you in the movie.”

“Ma’am, did you find everything you wanted?”

“What? Oh, yes, except for the brand of orange juice my son . . . Wait, can I get a selfie with you?”

“Ma’am, if you’ll just push the green button there on the credit card machine . . .”

It had been a week since the last “recognition moment,” as Dekka Talent thought of it. Progress. If you graphed it out over the last four years since the end of the FAYZ—what most of the world still called the Perdido Beach Anomaly—the number of “recognition moments” had definitely declined. Declined, but not stopped entirely.

Dekka’s work shift ended without any selfies. She punched out, changed out of her faded blue smock into motorcycle leathers in the locker room, and exchanged a few pleasantries with other employees either coming on shift or going off. She politely refused an invitation to after-work drinks—she was still just nineteen years old, though people assumed she was older. And she was broke besides—she’d had to buy new tires.

There was a seriousness about Dekka, a metaphorical weight that people could feel, and that, along with her dark skin and dreads and general air of don’t-give-a-damn, left people seeing her as older. Older and tougher because, with some nonmetaphorical weight, with her powerful legs and shoulders, you might pick a fight with Dekka, but only if you were drunk or very stupid.

Dekka walked outside to the artificially bright, slightly chilly parking lot. Dekka’s pride and joy, her Candy Fire red and black Kawasaki Ninja 1000, waited under its transparent plastic rain cover. Dekka hated her job, but in decent weather the ride from the Strawberry Safeway, up the 101, across the San Rafael Bridge to the apartment she rented in Pinole, was the best part of her day. Unless it was raining, which was seldom in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dekka folded the rain cover and thrust it into one side of the hard plastic saddlebag, and a few groceries she’d picked up on the other side. She settled her helmet over her dreads, relaxed in the reassuring anonymity from the black visor, and was just about to fire up the engine when two very large black SUVs pulled into the mostly empty lot.

The SUVs came to a stop, forming a sort of loose V directly in front of her.

Dekka started the engine, feeling the familiar reassuring throb that vibrated all through her body, glanced left to make sure she could turn away, and the passenger window of the second SUV rolled down to reveal an identity card deliberately illuminated by a cell phone light.

“No, no, no, no,” Dekka said, but in a tone of resignation not fear. She sighed, killed the engine, and pulled her helmet off. “Really? After an eight-hour shift on my feet?”

Two men and a woman climbed from the second SUV, each showing ID. They were all dressed in Official Civilian Outfits: dark blue or black suits, ties for the men, an open collar for the woman. They might as well have had the word “Government” tattooed on their foreheads.

“Ms. Talent?” the woman asked. “Dekka Jean Talent?” She was middle-aged, stocky, with a wide, flat face that suggested Slavic roots.

“What’s this about?” Dekka asked, guessing at least part of the answer. They weren’t there about the damaged canned goods she may have on occasion taken without exactly getting specific approval. Nor were they there to collect for the speeding ticket she got rocketing down the Pacific Coast Highway south of Santa Cruz the week before.

“I’m Natalie Green,” the woman said, producing a brief spasm that might be a type of smile. “I’m with Homeland Security. This is Special Agent Carlson, FBI, and Tom Peaks.”

Dekka did not miss the fact that Tom Peaks was not identified by his affiliation, or that his identity card had been very quickly folded away before she could really see it.

“What?” Dekka asked.

“We would like a few moments of your time.”

“Why?” She was not yet worried—this was not her first encounter with authority. From time to time some branch of government would decide to question her, usually about one of the other Perdido Beach survivors. She had steadfastly refused to give any information at all—there were still those who wanted to prosecute some of the survivors, and Dekka would do nothing to help make that happen.

What happened in Perdido Beach stayed in Perdido Beach.

Well, aside from about two dozen survivor books, a movie and a TV series ‘inspired by’ what everyone else called the PBA, the Perdido Beach Anomaly, but what Dekka, like all who were there, would always and forever call the FAYZ.

Natalie Green shrugged, tried out her scary millisecond smile again and said, “Maybe not out in the open in a parking lot? If you would come with us . . .” She gestured toward the second SUV.

“Really?” Dekka asked again, sounding irritated—which was hardly unusual for her. Patience was never one of her virtues.

“Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops,” Natalie Green said. “We won’t leave the lot.”

Dekka cursed, not quite inaudibly, and said, “Whatever.”

The driver of the second SUV got out and came around like a well-trained chauffeur to hold a door open for her, and remained outside as Green and Peaks sandwiched Dekka into the middle of the back seat and agent Carlson took shotgun.

“Nice,” Dekka said, looking around at the posh leather interior. The dashboard glowed blue and red. The heater streamed air onto the windshield, holding a line of condensation at bay.

“Ms. Talent, first of all, it’s an honor to meet you,” Green said. “I’ve read most of the literature that came out of the PBA, and it’s clear that you were very important to the survival of those people, very central to stopping the worst excesses.”

“Uh-huh,” Dekka said, slow and guarded. “Don’t tell me you want a selfie.”

Blank stare.

“Okay,” Dekka said with mounting impatience. “Can you just tell me what this is about?”

“It’s been four years, well, a little more than four years.” It was the first thing Tom Peaks had said. He had an odd voice, too high to match the serious face. “You’re what, eighteen years old now, a legal adult?”

That voice could get grating pretty quickly.

“Nineteen, and who are you again?”

“Tom Peaks.”

“Yeah, I heard your name, but who are you?”

He was in his late thirties, wore moderately fashionable glasses, and parted his sandy hair on one side with military precision. His blue eyes were overlarge behind the glasses, intelligent, alert, and almost rude in the directness with which he stared at her. “I’m with DARPA. That’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”

“Okay.”

“Are you happy working at Safeway?” Green asked. She was annoyed by Peaks, thought he was pushing himself into what she, Green, should be managing.

Dekka gave Green an incredulous look. “No one is happy working at Safeway. It’s a minimum wage job. Half my income goes for rent.”

“You never went back to school? No plans for college?”

“I’m not very smart.”

Now it was the FBI agent’s turn, talking over his shoulder and watching her in the rearview mirror which he had tilted for that purpose. “All due respect, Ms. Talent, we have a pretty good idea of your IQ. You’re certainly bright enough to be doing something other than cashiering. You could take the GED.”

“Maybe I just love touching vegetables.”

“Or maybe you already got your GED, passed it in the seventy-fifth percentile, and were offered a full scholarship to Cal State San Fran and decided to turn it down and do various dead-end jobs: you delivered flowers, you worked at Toys R Us during Christmas, you temped . . .”

“And again: why are we talking? Why am I not on my way home to feed my cat?” Dekka was beginning to feel trapped. She glanced at the door handle and saw that it was not locked.

“We’ve done studies of the PBA survivors, especially the ones who acquired . . . powers, for lack of a better word,” Green said as Peaks and the FBI man watched. “Of the three hundred and thirty-two kids initially trapped in the PBA dome—”

“We called it the FAYZ,” Dekka interrupted.

“Of those three hundred and thirty-two kids, fifty-one developed one supernatural power or another. Most were relatively weak powers. Only nineteen of you developed major powers and survived. You were one. And of those nineteen, seven have since developed serious psychological disorders.”

“It was kind of stressful, what with the starvation and the violence and the forty percent death rate.” Dekka made no effort to tone down the sarcasm.

Peaks said, “Yes, there’s that, but we suspect there’s more to it. Some of you adjusted well to life outside the PBA . . . the FAYZ. You among them, even though your parents were not exactly enthusiastic about you rejoining the family. And yet you were among the most traumatized. Honestly, when I read about some of what you endured . . .” He shook his head in sincere wonderment. “Despite having a power, a significant power, and despite suffering terribly, and forming part of the leadership with all the additional stress of that, you seem to be well-adjusted.”

Emphasis on seem, Dekka thought. You’re not there when I wake up at three in the morning screaming with my bed damp from terror sweat, mister.

Or maybe they are, Dekka added, mentally scrolling through her memories, looking for any sign that the privacy of her little apartment had been violated. Not that the FBI would leave traces.

“Yes, I am a great big bundle of happiness and adjustment,” Dekka said. “Are we done?”

“Ms. Talent,” Peaks said, “May I call you Dekka?”

“Sure, Tom.”

“I would imagine you’ve tried to put all that behind you. You’re looking to get back to normal. Four years on, and you’re still trying to find normal.”

That was too close to the bone for a smart-ass response, so Dekka stayed mum, watching those intelligent, slightly lens-distorted eyes as they stared frankly at her.

“You are, in fact, among the least affected. Lana Lazar spent time in a mental health facility.”

“I know, she’s a friend of mine,” Dekka snapped. “She’s fine now.”

“Others, like Sam Temple, the supposed hero of the FAYZ, have had—”

“Hey!” Dekka’s finger was instantly in Peaks’s face. “Supposed hero? Screw you. You don’t disrespect Sam Temple where I can hear it.”

She reached across Green for the door handle and popped the latch.

“I apologize,” Peaks said quickly.

Shaking her head, as if disagreeing with her own choice, Dekka closed the door again and rounded on Peaks. “If you’d lived through one tenth of what Sam Temple lived through, you might start drinking too, if you ever nerved yourself up to crawl out from under the bed to start with.” Then in a calmer tone, “Anyway, he’s on the wagon. Sober for sixteen months.”

“Fifteen months, twelve days,” the FBI agent said from the front seat. Then in an actual moment of humanity, he added, “I’ve got nine years, four months and nineteen days myself.” He superstitiously rapped his knuckle on a piece of wood trim.

“So you people do still keep an eye on us,” Dekka accused.

The FBI agent Carlson and Homeland Security’s Green both nodded. Peaks said, “Of course the government keeps track of you. At one time you possessed extraordinary powers. You, Ms. Talent, were able—as a simple act of will—to cancel the effects of gravity. Incredible! Sam Temple could fire killing energy beams from his hands. There was a girl who had the power to move at speeds just short of breaking the sound barrier. And—”

“Brianna,” Dekka said softly. Then with a wistful smile, “The Breeze.”

“You were friends,” Green said, not quite a question.

But Dekka was no longer listening. She was seeing Brianna’s wild, reckless grin; hearing her fearlessly proclaim that she was off to this fight or that; feeling a sudden gust of wind and catching just a glimpse of ponytail standing straight back as Brianna blew past.

Other memories were there too, dark and awful images, but Dekka brushed those aside. Four years and she still could not think about Brianna without crying. It was an unrequited love, maybe a ridiculous love, but love just the same, and it still warmed Dekka. And sometimes it burned her.

Dekka took several deep breaths and cursed herself for the need to wipe at tears.

You were brave one too many times, Breeze.

“Our point is,” Peaks persisted, “you are almost uniquely normal, stable. No alcohol or drug issues aside from the occasional joint or beer. No psychological breakdown. No wild or reckless behavior—other than speeding violations on your motorcycle. Of all the people who gained—and then lost—these supernatural powers, and endured the PBA, the FAYZ, you, almost alone, seem to have avoided going . . . becoming . . .” He searched for the right word, so Dekka supplied it.

“Crazy. That’s the scientific term: crazy.” Dekka felt a sudden longing for her dinky apartment and especially its tiny shower. Four years on, the FAYZ left its marks: she ate too much, a common problem for people who’ve been close to starvation; she still had nightmares, though less frequently; and she took two long, hot showers—drought be damned—every single day, reveling even now in the luxury she’d been denied for that one-year lifetime in the FAYZ.

Peaks nodded, accepting the word. “You didn’t go crazy. There’s something about you, maybe genetic, maybe psychological, that made you particularly resistant to whatever the powers do to those who possess them.”

“It’s not about the powers,” Dekka said. “It’s all of us who were there. It was a whole lot of bad things we had to do to survive.”

“No,” Peaks said flatly. He shook his head by millimeters so that it was more a vibration than a back-and-forth. “The numbers don’t lie. Among survivors of the Perdido Beach Anomaly, who did not have any mutations, thirty-six percent have had serious psychological or behavioral problems. Among those with major powers? The number is closer to ninety percent.”

Dekka stared at him. Then at Green. And at the eyes of the FBI man watching her in the rearview mirror. “What is this? What is this about? What do you people want?”

“We will be happy to tell you.” Green again. She pulled out her phone and tapped the screen a few times. “There’s a document on this screen. Read it, sign it—thumb print will do—and we can tell you everything.”

Dekka took the phone and read, flicking down the page. “This swears me to secrecy.”

“Under penalty of law, and we are very serious about prosecuting unauthorized statements,” the FBI agent said without turning around.

“Yeah?” Dekka said with a short laugh. “Well, it’s been fun, folks, but I’m sweaty and I smell like the vanilla almond milk some brat spilled on me. So, goodnight.”

Again Dekka reached for the door and when Green didn’t move aside a hard look came over Dekka’s face.

Peaks leaned into her, to an intimate distance, an uncomfortable distance that conveyed just the hint of threat. “We need one of you, preferably you. But if you refuse, our next stop is Sam Temple. And I think we both know he’ll agree to help us.”

“Hey, Sam’s sober, and Astrid’s got her head screwed on straight, so leave them the hell out of this. Leave them both alone.” Peaks met her gaze, unflinching, and Dekka sighed. “Ah. So it’s like that.” She shook her head, realizing she was trapped. “You have any idea how many times that boy, that man, saved my life?”

“Many times.” Peaks again, and now the pitch was lower, lending an almost compassionate tone. “I’ve read all the published stories, Ms. Talent, and many unpublished statements. So I know as well that you saved him. Many times. I know that you were his strong right arm whenever things turned dangerous.”

Then Green spoke up, sounding disapproving. “You’re a lesbian, and black, and yet you’re inevitably referred to as the ‘strong right arm’ to a white male. Doesn’t that grate on your nerves? Aren’t we supposed to be past that—”

Dekka let go a snort and sat all the way back in her seat, willing herself to remain calm. “A white male?” she echoed, her voice vibrating with suppressed anger. “He’s not a white male, he’s Sam freaking Temple. You can read all the accounts you want, but you don’t know what he did, and how . . .” Tears threatened to well again. Dekka stabbed a finger at Green. “Every single person . . . every single one . . . who came out of that hellhole alive is alive because of him. Sam Temple’s strong right arm? You can chisel those words on my tombstone, lady, and I’ll be a proud and happy corpse.”

“We’d rather have you,” Peaks said, and took Green’s phone and held it out for Dekka. The document glowed up at her. “Press your thumb on the button.”

Dekka did it, because if she didn’t, Sam would. He would of course be furious if he found out she was protecting him. The thought brought a small smile to Dekka’s lips. Sam and Astrid didn’t need more of the FAYZ, they needed college and work and lives and hopefully, someday, a bouncing little baby that they’d name Dekka if she was a girl.

That was Dekka’s fantasy for them, anyway.

“Am I going back to work tomorrow?” she asked.

Tom Peaks shook his head.

Dekka unclipped the name tag with her cover name—Jean, her middle name—reached across, rolled down the window and tossed the tag out to clatter on the blacktop.

“Wherever you’re taking me, my bike had better get there too, and without a scratch. Oh, and fill the tank.”

ASO-2

ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT–2 struck planet Earth after its million-year trip, landing precisely where it was expected to land—in a section of the North Sea just off the coast of Scotland that had been surrounded by NATO ships—American, British and Dutch. Below the water one British and one US submarine were holding the perimeter around a French deep-sea exploration submersible. Ships from the Russian Navy and the Chinese Navy looked on from a barely discreet distance, their surveillance equipment all atingle.

But the meteorite played a trick on all of them. The seventeen-pound object hit perfectly in the target zone moving at about ninety thousand miles an hour, but like a rock slung sidearm toward a pond, it skipped.

The first skip carried it six miles.

The second skip carried it just two miles, but that two miles took it to the Isle of Islay where it struck a rock outcropping—still moving at fantastic speed—and broke apart.

Homeland Security Task Force 66 immediately diverted every resource at its disposal—the international naval force and their marines, land-based police and military forces—and turned the sleepy Isle of Islay—pronounced “eye-la” and best known for sheep and Scotch whisky—into something between a war zone and a bad action comedy. Within an hour the coast of Islay was beset by dangerous-looking ships, while helicopters buzzed around like bees who thought Islay was their hive.

All the activity brought the islanders out of their homes and fields and businesses to see what was going on. Once they had deduced that the military and police of several nations were all searching for a meteorite, out came the metal detectors and the sifters and the shovels. The locals might not know what the rock was, but they knew it had value.

Yet it was not greed that caused the biggest problem, rather it was kindness. It was young Delia Macbeth, fourteen, who saw her little brother, Sean, just three years old, playing with a chip of dark rock. The chip was oddly shaped, in that if you held it a certain way it looked a bit like Mickey Mouse. Sean was sucking on the rock and at first Delia did the proper big sister thing and took it from him. Then Sean started bawling, so Delia did the easy thing and gave it back.

After all, it was just a rock, and if Sean wanted it that badly . . .

Search teams swept the lower half of the island and eventually recovered sixty percent of ASO-2.

Sixty percent.

The other forty percent was scattered across fields and woods. And about three ounces of it was in the greedy fist and slavering mouth of a three-year-old with a notoriously bad temper.

3
|
THE COMMITTING OF CRIMES

DAYS PASSED. HOMEWORK was done. School was attended. But school had ceased to be the center of Cruz’s life.

They had dinner once with Shade’s father, Professor Martin Darby, just back from Scotland. He was a good-looking man, a silver fox type, formal by nature, but trying to be accessible. “Please, call me Darby, everyone does.”

He tried to play the cool dad, but his interest and attention were elsewhere. He seemed overly formal with Shade, and she returned it in kind. Not that there was any hostility; on the contrary, the affection and mutual respect were clear, and something Cruz envied terribly. But Professor Darby’s mind was not on his daughter, let alone his daughter’s new friend, who—even a distracted astrophysicist had figured out—was not a boyfriend.

Above all, Shade and Cruz planned. Which was to say, Shade planned with ferocious efficiency and relentless logic, as it began to dawn on Cruz that while the scheme might seem wildly improbable, even impossible, it was no such thing for her impressive new friend.

Cruz had never met anyone like Shade. Not even a little like Shade. It was as if there were two people living in that pretty, scarred body: a high school science nerd and a shark. Sometimes Cruz played a little game with herself, seeing Shade’s unblemished left side as representing an interesting but essentially normal high school girl; and the right side, the side with the scar, as the shark. The girl Shade Darby was funny and relaxed and even moderately empathetic; the predatory fish? Well, as the famous movie line went, the shark had “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.”

Yes, there were times when Shade frightened Cruz a little. But that frisson, that sense that she was dealing with a person far larger than could possibly fit within this girl, just added to Cruz’s growing infatuation. Writers—even unpublished ones—loved characters, and Shade Darby was definitely a character.

Was it the shark that kept Cruz from asking Shade why she was doing this? Was it the invisible but very real barrier that Shade erected around that question and around her past?

At the very least Cruz wanted to ask about the scar. It was not subtle; it was like something out of an old Frankenstein movie, a good six inches long and cross-hatched. Shade could have worn her hair in such a way as to hide it, but she didn’t. She could have worn turtlenecks, but she didn’t. She wore the scar proudly, it seemed to Cruz. Or was the right word “defiantly?” It had the odd effect of accentuating her prettiness, but at the same time it gave her an aura of toughness and mystery.

I don’t want to push her. I don’t want to lose her.

Cruz had thus far in her writing life stuck to short stories and the occasional bit of not-great poetry. But she had enough of the instincts of a writer to recognize that here was a story. Maybe a cautionary tale of obsession. Maybe a weepy rise-above-it tale in which Shade coped with the death of one parent and the emotional absence of the other. But that was certainly not how Shade saw herself, and when Cruz was with Shade she could not help being swept up in Shade’s determination. Shade was like an ebb tide sweeping Cruz out to sea, out to danger and yet . . .

And yet, you are willing to be swept, Cruz. Aimless and friendless, you are just so much flotsam on the river of life.

One thing had become clear: there was no more harassment from anyone at school, and somehow this was Shade’s doing, though Cruz had no notion of how her friend managed it. The student body simply seemed to have figured out that Cruz was under Shade’s protection, and that was all it took. Cruz did not become popular overnight; in fact, if anything she felt people avoiding her, but they did not hassle her, and for now that was enough.

Cruz sometimes wondered what Shade was like before losing her mother. Had she always had this split personality? Had she always had a gift for ruthlessness and the iron will to go with it? Had she ever just been a normal high school girl? Did whatever it was that took her mother’s life harden her? And was it the kind of hard that was only on the outside, or did it go all the way down?

Cruz had covered pages of her purple Moleskine with notes about her new friend. Her only friend. She had started by thinking Shade’s plan to steal the rock was fantasy, the kind of desperate nonsense a girl with delusions of grandeur or a simple hunger for adventure might come up with. That mistaken belief lasted only a very short while, for it was clear, absolutely, unmistakably clear, that Shade Darby meant to steal the rock.

That she meant to experiment with the rock.

And though Shade never quite said it, Cruz knew it was all connected to the absent, never-mentioned, but always somehow present Dr. Heather Darby, PhD.

Then, too suddenly, the date came. ASO-3 was on its long glide path to earth, orbiting once before it would begin its tumble into the atmosphere. And by then whatever doubts Cruz had became irrelevant.

Because the line was before them: and both girls knew they were going to cross it.

Shade drove a dull but sensible Subaru, a few years old, clean inside and out, in a color that could best be described as Forgettable Beige. It was so at odds with Shade’s personality that Cruz guessed it had been Shade’s mother’s car.

Cruz herself did not drive. She could have; she could easily pass the test, but she was not yet ready to face the trauma of something which was simple for everyone else: answering the question “Male or female?”

Yes or no, up or down, in or out, male or female, and no, there could be nothing that did not fit into a binary. Either/or, not some of this and some of that.

“Where’s my phone?” Cruz asked in sudden consternation, patting various areas of her body before vaguely remembering she’d left it in Shade’s room.

“I took it,” Shade said. “Look in that bag by your feet. There are two burner phones in there.”

Cruz looked as Shade pulled out of the driveway and turned in the direction of the freeway.

“These are crap. These aren’t even smartphones.”

“Cell phones—especially smartphones—are tracking devices,” Shade said, distracted by traffic. “They leave a record of your movements. First thing Sixty-Six will do when they see they’ve been robbed is look for cell phone signatures at the crash site. It wouldn’t be hard to connect my cell phone to my father, and burners are not exactly iPhones. We did discuss this, Cruz.”

“I just . . .” A heavy sigh. “I just didn’t think you meant it. We’re practically cave people now. I’m going to go into withdrawal.” Cruz pulled out her Moleskine and a pen.

“What are you writing?”

“I’m writing that a monster has kidnapped me and plunged me back into the twentieth century.”

“I thought writers enjoyed the chance to write, free of distractions.” A car sliced too close to their front bumper and Shade leaned on the horn. “Hey, asshole!”

Cruz did her silent laugh and for a while was lost to conversation, bent over her notebook, pen held in her left hand in an awkward-looking position.

“You stick your tongue out when you write,” Shade observed.

“I do not!”

“You get the tip between your teeth and it sticks out between your lips.”

Cruz made a rumbling sound of irritation, added a sentence to the Moleskine that ended with an unnecessarily emphatic exclamation point, and put her notebook away.

“You’re sure your folks won’t send cops to look for you?” Shade asked.

“I’m totally, absolutely hundred percent sure,” Cruz said grimly, then chided herself. No, no, don’t go to the bitter place, we’re having an adventure. We’re committing a federal crime.

Yay?

“You wouldn’t believe how little interest they have in where I am,” Cruz said, trying to inject some lightness into her tone. “And your dad?”

“I checked. He’s in Nebraska.”

Cool, calm, unruffled.

She must know this will put her father in a bad spot, Cruz thought. But she won’t stop.

Won’t? Or can’t? Obsession? And why am I going along? Am I really this desperate for a friend?

But of course Cruz knew the answer to that question. Yes, she was desperate for a friend. Yes, she enjoyed the odd status that came from being associated with Shade at school. But mostly, Cruz admitted, she herself had no goal, no plan, no clear idea of what she wanted to do. And Shade did.

I’m a puppy who hopes Shade will throw a stick I can fetch.

Traffic was awful as usual in Chicagoland, but in time they emerged from beneath low rain clouds to a sunnier suburbia west of the city and soon were moving along open interstate, penetrating the vast spaces of the American agricultural heartland.

It was autumn and the corn that extended for hundreds of miles around was being harvested. Giant, insect-like machines painted red or green powered slowly but relentlessly, stripping off the ears and leaving forlorn pale yellow stalks and mulch behind.

“How long is this drive to hell without apps?” Cruz asked.

“Four and a half hours. You know, Cruz, the human race survived for a million years before the first phone, let alone the first app.”

“Survived,” Cruz said, raising a finger. “Survived. But it wasn’t really living.”

“We have music.”

Cruz turned on the stereo and punched buttons until she came to the loaded files. She scrolled through Shade’s music, thinking it an opportunity to get some insight into her new friend’s soul. She found a number of things she didn’t recognize, experimental music, but also more familiar Reggae, Blues, Pop, Rock, Punk, even classical. If there was a coded message in Shade’s playlists the message was that she sampled widely and committed to no particular genre or artist. But there were a few things more accessible.

“Seriously?” Cruz asked. “Beyoncé? What else, Taylor Swift?”

“I suppose you’d like something more cutting edge?”

“Not really,” Cruz admitted. “Luis Malaga? Cantea?” Cruz peered at Shade, waiting for signs of recognition. “Nothing? OV7? Come on, Shade, they’ve been around forever.” She sighed. “What can I say, I move to the beat from south of the border.”

“Isn’t that all, like, accordions?”

“I am going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“Mmmm. To cover the awkwardness you could put on some of my music,” Shade said, batting her eyelashes.

Cruz had found the right song, the one with the most plays. “Yes, yes, this is definitely Shade Darby,” Cruz said and hit play. The guitar was twangy, and the voice was thin but strong.

Cruz sang the refrain with a small adjustment.

“Hey, baby, there ain’t no easy way out.

Hey, Shade, will stand her ground.

And she won’t back down.”

It was the shark who cast her a chilly, sidelong glance. Shade had a great sense of humor about lots of things, but not as much about references to her . . . her interest . . . to use a kinder word than obsession.

They listened to music for a while until something ska came on, which they both liked, and Cruz began to dance in place.

“You’re bouncing the whole car,” Shade said, sounding like someone’s mother.

“I know. Help me!”

Soon the Subaru was bouncing happily as they both danced in place, arms flailing, heads bobbing, shoulders twisting, Shade inevitably more controlled, more contained, less committed to the music than Cruz. But after three hours of corn, corn, the occasional freeway off-ramp, and still more unstoppable corn, they were both sick of music, hungry and needing to pee fairly desperately. They pulled off into a Wendy’s.

They peed then ate: a salad and fries for Cruz who was toying with vegetarianism without quite committing, and a burger for Shade who had no reluctance to eat animal flesh.

“You know, you attack your food,” Cruz observed. “You cut it in half like you’re the perfect little miss, then you go all Hungry, Hungry Hippo on it.”

“Did you just call me a hippo?”

Bellies full, they set off again, racing now toward the setting sun.

“We’re getting close.” Cruz indicated the GPS with her chin.

“Mmmm. We’re there, basically.” Shade switched to her instructional voice. “A degree of latitude is about seventy miles, a minute is a little over a mile, and a second of latitude is, give or take, a hundred feet. It works a bit differently with longitude, but if the calculations are correct, we’re looking for a rectangle about a hundred feet by eighty feet.”

“Ladies and gentlemen: the human Wikipedia. WikiShade.”

Shade pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, corn to their right, a fallow field of rich black Iowa topsoil across the road to their left. Shade pulled a smaller, portable GPS unit from her bag. “This will get us down to the seconds.”

She booted up the device and while she waited for it she deleted their destination from the car’s GPS.

“You’re kind of getting into this whole spy, cloak-and-dagger stuff, aren’t you?” Cruz teased.

“I kind of am,” Shade admitted, allowing herself a rare grin at her own expense.

The handheld GPS booted up and after a moment’s peering and muttering Shade said, “Okay, we go down that dirt road, go a half mile, and it shouldn’t be far.”

The sun was setting as they parked beside a wooden gate wide enough to admit trucks and harvesting combines. In fact there was a green John Deere combine parked maybe two hundred yards away, looking like some fantastic alien monster turned in for the night.

“Lucky timing,” Shade said. “Late enough the farmers won’t be working out here, and just an hour and a half to go.”

“An hour and a half?” Cruz whined. “People could be talking about me online and I wouldn’t even know.”

“Mmmm. And somehow you actually think that’s a bad thing.”

As early autumn darkness fell, they sat staring at the impact site—what Shade hoped and Cruz feared was the impact site—just an abstract rectangle within the larger rectangle of the unharvested cornfield. Cruz still harbored the secret hope that this was a wild goose chase, that Shade had made an error and the rock was going to land safely in Nebraska. Or somewhere.

But at the same time, despite her greater caution, Cruz had a second level of thought that whispered, It would be interesting though, wouldn’t it?

As if sensing Cruz’s ambivalence, Shade reached across to squeeze Cruz’s hand, something she had never done before. It was a little awkward, and at first it seemed forced or calculated—and with Shade you could never be sure—but Cruz squeezed back and they held that pose for a minute.

We are about to commit a felony, Cruz reflected, and all I’m thinking about is how that gesture is a girl-girl thing. How needy am I?

They sat in companionable silence as the sun disappeared and navy blue darkness stole over the field. The windows were down, it was not quite warm, but not cold either, and they heard a whole world of insect life, buzzing, droning, rising and falling like a stadium full of bugs doing the wave. High above a jet drew a coral line across the sky, picking up the sun’s dying brilliance.

“I hate to say it, but this is more fun than I’ve had in years,” Cruz said.

“I hate to say it, but me too.”

“If we don’t get arrested,” Cruz added.

“Ten minutes.”

“What if the calculations are off?”

“Then it won’t hit here. It will smash into some other field, maybe even a town. Could be miles away, could be on another continent.”

Shade touched the scar on her neck, drawing a finger along it, feeling the raised flesh, feeling the cross-hatching of the stitches. Cruz had noticed the gesture before, as she had noticed the faraway look that came with it.

They tried to stay cool and nonchalant, but the tension rose minute by minute. They made small talk, but it was pitiful, distracted stuff. They would start in on some teacher and lose the thread. They would start again on some fashion or celebrity, and again lose the thread.

Cruz asked her to dish on Malik: nope. Still, she did not ask the question her mind was screaming at her: Why are you doing this, Shade? What is the connection to the scar?

“This probably won’t work, not without the dome,” Shade said. It was the first negative thing she’d said, the first expression of doubt, and that tiny admission of worry, of fear, of vulnerability added new layers to Cruz’s affection.

Shade might be tough, determined, and at times perfectly ruthless, but there was a human in there.

“Or it will work,” Cruz said. “In fact, I bet it does.”

“Hope is the best form of torture,” Shade said dryly.

There was a persistent lump in Cruz’s throat that she could not swallow away.

“Three minutes,” Shade said, and there again Cruz saw the predator: the focus, the fearlessness, the hunger. No more stroking of scars, no more dreamy, faraway look.

Cruz felt herself teetering on the edge between hope and fear. That nervousness finally gave her the courage to ask. In a rush she blurted, “Shade, why are we doing this?”

Shade sighed and looked out through the windshield, more profile than detail in the gathering gloom. Finally, she said, “Like the man said who climbed Mount Everest, Cruz: because it’s there.”

“What’s there?”

Shade turned to look at her friend. The shark looked too. “Okay, you have a right to know. I was there the day the PBA barrier came down. I was right there, inches away. I saw that creature, the one they called Gaia. I saw what she did. It was . . . awful. The worst thing I’ve ever seen. You have no idea. People, little kids, cut up like pigs at a butcher’s shop. But the power . . . It was like watching a god, Cruz.” Then after a beat, she pointed at the scar. “It’s where I got this. A scared little girl with a great big knife.”

Cruz, confused and alarmed, said, “Wait, Gaia was evil, not a god.”

“Mmmm. They won’t be able to capture all the ASOs, Cruz. And if the rock has the same effects outside the dome . . . Well, the world may be about to become a very strange place. A very, very strange place. And what I saw that day . . . no one could stop that monster. No one could stop her but someone with an even greater power. Gods aren’t always good or kind. Some are monsters.”

“I’m not—”

“If it works there will be other monsters, Cruz. Other Gaias. And more people will be hurt. More people . . .” And for a moment Shade seemed unable to go on. Then her voice abruptly steely, said, “Thirty seconds.”

No, Cruz thought, that wasn’t quite the whole truth. It was related to the truth, but it was just the story Shade told herself.

“Time,” Shade announced, tension almost choking the word off. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

“I hope this works for you, Shade.”

“I know, Cruz. Four . . . three . . .”

And there it was in the night sky to their left, a spark, not very bright, like someone tracing a laser pointer across the sky. It was a tiny missile—the estimate was four kilos, just under ten pounds—moving at thousands of miles an hour, a shooting star come to bring them hope. Or to dash that hope.

“Two . . .”

For the first time since Cruz was a very little child, she wished upon a shooting star.

“One,” Shade whispered, and the meteorite hit the ground. There was no explosion, just a dull, flat sound, like someone dropping a big sandbag. A puff of gray dust rose, barely visible in the darkness, but just exactly where Shade expected it to land.

“Wow,” Cruz said.

“Mmmm,” Shade agreed. Her casual act was not even slightly believable.

They took a breath, then all at once piled out of the car. Cruz pulled a shovel from the back and raced to catch up to Shade who was galloping ahead.

The ground was plowed into furrows, which tripped Cruz repeatedly. And, too, there were the six-foot-tall stalks that snatched at her with Velcro talons and slapped her with heavy ears of corn. They come to a halt when they reached the first charred and broken cornstalks and advanced more slowly after that, as if sneaking up on someone. Then suddenly there it was, looking for all the world as if a rogue tractor had come through dragging a narrow plow. The rich black earth was gouged, with a mound of ejected clods marking the spot where the rock went subterranean.

“There! Dig there!” Shade ordered.

Cruz dug. And dug. She uncovered a narrow tunnel, like something a hefty gopher might have made. “Go that direction another ten feet,” Shade instructed, her voice ragged, in tenuous control of her emotions.

And then as Cruz slammed the blade into the ground, they heard the metallic impact of steel shovel on metallic rock.

They looked at each other, Shade and Cruz, and time seemed to stop.

“Okay,” Shade said at last, voice quavering. “Dig it up.”

It was metallic gray, the color of pencil lead, not much bigger than a softball, but more oval than round, with a pitted surface. To every appearance a regular, unimportant meteorite, like thousands that impact the Earth every day. Shade flicked the flashlight off and they were rewarded by a faint but vaguely sinister glow, slightly green. Shade reached for it.

“Don’t touch it!” Cruz cried. “It’s probably hot!”

“Actually, it’s more likely to be cold. It was a long, long time in absolute zero, and it spent just seconds in the atmosphere.”

Cruz shook her head in rueful amusement: of course Shade would have thought of that. Of course.

Shade touched the rock—touched it with the solemnity of a medieval Christian pilgrim touching a piece of the true cross. She ran her fingers over it, feeling its contours, gently exploring the pits and cracks, brushing dirt away almost tenderly.

“This is it,” she said. “I can’t believe . . .”

“We should probably get out of here,” Cruz said nervously. She carried the rock back on the shovel blade to the Subaru while Shade used cornstalks to obscure their tracks.

Cruz set the rock in the back of the car. Then, feeling transgressive, feeling that it wasn’t her right somehow, Cruz touched it, touched an object that had traveled an unimaginable distance. It was just a rock really, just a faintly glowing rock. But it had a power Cruz could feel, an attraction.

Frodo and the Ring, Cruz thought, and laughed nervously at the comparison, because the thought came with an extra question: Is Shade Frodo? Or is she Gollum?

“It won’t take Sixty-Six long to get here,” Shade said, brushing dirt from the knees of her jeans and kicking the clods from her shoes. “We can’t hide the fact we beat them to it, but we can confuse the scene a little, at least.”

“Not much we can do about the tire tracks, I guess.”

“No,” Shade agreed. “But as soon as we get back to the interstate we’re going to cut a divot into one of the tires. Just enough that if anyone ever checks it won’t be a perfect match.”

“Have you been watching CSI reruns?”

“I may be a criminal mastermind.”

Cruz said nothing.

Shade started the engine. And then they stopped for just a moment, staring at each other with solemn expressions.

“Wow. We did it,” Cruz said.

“Well,” Shade said, “we did the first part of it.”

4
|
BAD START, WORSE FINISH

THE SUBARU DRIVEN by Shade and Cruz pulled away and the young man climbed from the cabin of the parked green John Deere combine where he’d been waiting and watching.

Justin DeVeere turned to his girlfriend, Erin O’Day, and as he gave her his hand to help her climb down—not easy in the entirely inappropriate, skin-tight dress she was wearing—he said, “I wonder if I should have killed them and taken it.”

Justin DeVeere was nineteen and already in his junior year at Columbia where he studied art, but was not much of a student. He could paint or sculpt or assemble whatever he liked and so overawe his professors that they would hand him A’s merely for showing up. He was, people said, a prodigy. He was, people said, a young Picasso or Rothko. He was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing in the art world.

Justin DeVeere was brilliant and utterly devoid of a moral center. Extremely talented, sociopathic and maladjusted. A loner, an outsider, a predator awaiting the right prey.

Those were not the things Justin’s enemies said; it was what he knew about himself. Justin had taken IQ tests—152, which made him smarter than 99.9 percent of humanity. He had also taken the so-called ‘psychopath test’ and was unmistakably a member of that manipulative, ruthless, often charming tribe. A brilliant psychopath. A talented psychopath. A young monster.

That was how Justin DeVeere saw himself, how he knew himself to be: a brilliant, talented monster.

But he was no monster to look at, and he was quite aware of that as well. Justin always managed to look the part of the young artist, dressing in skin-tight black jeans and a series of T-shirts on which he silk screened bits of text in cuneiform or Sanskrit alphabets. Only he knew that the messages were either some version of “F— You” or a sexual reference.

He was not big, not as big as he’d have liked anyway, just five nine, white with straight black hair worn loose, down to his shoulders, pale gray eyes and, as another artist had once said while attempting unsuccessfully to seduce Justin: the face of God’s cruelest angel.

Justin’s partner-for-now, Erin O’Day, was twenty-eight, mother of a nine-year-old she had shipped off to the very best schools in Switzerland at age five and had not seen since. Justin was not supposed to know this about her, but he did—Justin was not a respecter of privacy. Erin was beautiful, sophisticated, fashionable, and sexy, but Justin had never had a problem attracting beautiful women and girls. What made Erin O’Day special was that she was the heir to a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at three hundred million dollars.

Sexy women Justin could find any day. Three hundred million dollars? That was quite rare.

Erin was part of New York society, moving effortlessly through glittering events, including the endless charity balls where she promoted young Justin. It was at one of these balls that she met Professor Martin Darby, who had been drinking and talking more than he should have. He had told her about tracking the Anomalous Space Objects and hinted that his work was top secret.

It never ceased to amaze Justin just what Erin could get away with merely by being blonde, beautiful, and poured into a dress with a plunging neckline, all of course enhanced by the kind of jewelry and fashion that screamed “money.” According to Erin, the professor had lost his wife and was clearly lonely for female companionship. And—again according to Erin—he didn’t get anything beyond some drinks and a dance or two.

Erin had had no real notion of what to do with the information, but Justin did. Justin had a friend who had a friend who was a serious hacker, and for just five hundred dollars of Erin’s money, Justin gained access to Martin Darby’s computer and learned the secrets of the Anomalous Space Objects.

Justin stood now gazing thoughtfully at the field, tilting his head, making slight adjusting motions with his hands, imagining a murder scene. Playing the part, pretending to actually think he should have killed the two because he knew full well it would turn Erin on. Erin had never known a person who could say I wonder if I should have killed them and mean it. It was viscerally exciting to her. It made her heart run mad, and sent chills of fear tingling up her spine.

Yes, Justin knew Erin O’Day and how to play her. And he remained faithful to her because while there were plenty of beautiful women in the art world, and fewer who were both beautiful and rich, he had only met one who was also excited by the darkness Justin knew lay at his core.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Erin said. She was irritable, not being a fan of cramped, chilly tractor cabins. “Our names are on flights from New York to Des Moines. We’ve left a trail.”

“Speaking of trails,” Justin said, “you wrote down their license plate number?”

Erin opened her phone, swiped a few times and held up a dark photo of an Illinois plate, fuzzy from a distance but readable.

Justin stirred restlessly, stamping his feet to warm himself while still self-consciously gazing at the dark cornfield. “I was just picturing how it would look, you know, when the sun came up, when they were found: blood splatters all over the cornstalks. I’d arrange the bodies so that . . .” He paused to consider, eyes narrow, hand drawing shapes in the air. “I’d make them strip naked first, just leave on one or two random bits—a sock, a scarf, something enigmatic that made it appear to be a clue, then bang, bang—” He mimed firing a handgun.

“No one would ever be able to make sense of it, but there’d be fifty conspiracy theories online in a week,” Erin said. Then adopting a more mature tone, she added, “But that’s not why we’re here.”

“Anywhere I am, I’m there for art,” Justin said, smirking to take the edge off his pomposity, and inwardly rolling his eyes at his own BS. “Come on, let’s see if they left us anything. Can you go get me the black light from my bag?”

“In these shoes?”

With a sigh Justin fetched the bag, unzipped it, pointed his phone light into the bag and withdrew a battery-powered wand that shone black light (more purple than black) in the hole he’d widened.

“Hah! Here’s a chip right here.” He held up a thin, sharp-edged fragment no more than an inch and a half long and a quarter of an inch thick.

“Is that enough?”

“Who knows?” Justin asked. “I guess we’ll find out. If it isn’t, we’ll track the license plates.”

“What do we do with it? Crush it and snort it?”

“In the PBA they were just exposed to the radiation. But I think that’s the slow and inefficient way,” Justin said. He frowned. “The bigger question is, where is the team of scientists who were supposed to be here? I was expecting helicopters and big trucks. So, who were those two, how did they get here, what did they take away, and what do they intend to do with it?”

“That’s four questions.”

Justin checked an app. “There’s an early flight to La Guardia, tomorrow morning. We can make it, easy.”

“Or we can make it right here,” Erin said with a leer.

“What, here?” he asked, faux innocent.

“I thought we were clear on who’s the boss . . .”

Justin grinned up at her and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

He was not in the mood, not really, much more interested in the Anomalous Space Object than the Predictable Female Object, but her desire for him, and his ability to feed that desire, were a vital parts of moving large chunks of money from her hands to his.

And there were worse ways to pass the time in an Iowa cornfield.

Afterward, they walked back to the rental car concealed off the main road in a little stand of trees. They drove to Des Moines, stopped at a Walmart en route, and checked into the DoubleTree hotel near the airport. Justin set up the mortar and pestle he’d purchased at the Walmart and ground the rock fragment to a powder.

Then he dumped it out onto the nightstand and used a credit card to form the powder into a line about six inches long.

“Want some?” he asked, holding out a straw he’d pocketed from the bar downstairs.

Erin considered, eyeing the gray line dubiously. But Justin knew she’d refuse. Erin liked others to take risks for her amusement; she didn’t take many risks with herself.

“That’s all for you, baby.”

Justin shrugged and snorted half the line. The rest he scooped up with the credit card and stirred into his vodka and orange juice.

“Feel anything?” Erin asked.

“It stings, that’s for sure.” He sneezed and wiped his nose, then drank the laced beverage in one long swig. “Well, I guess we’ll see. It may not work. You know, it only worked for some of the kids in Perdido Beach. There may be a genetic factor or something. And then there’s the question of the dome.”

“It’ll work for you,” Erin said with quiet complacency. Of course Justin knew she was pandering to him, flattering him. But he also knew she was conflicted, had been all along, wanting to hold onto Justin’s talent, wanting to maintain at least some control over him, enjoying the dangerous rush of his company, and even (probably) enjoying his love-making. But at the same time she was fascinated by the idea of her young prodigy acquiring powers. She wanted to see that, to be part of that.

The artist unbound.

At which point, Justin suspected, he might no longer need her money. Or her. The possibilities were endless.

They had a bare three hours of sleep before their respective phone alarms rang. They showered together with predictable results and took the shuttle to the airport. They caught the ten a.m. Delta flight and settled wearily into first-class seats, reclined their chairs and picked unenthusiastically at an early lunch of swordfish with crayfish garnish, before falling asleep.

Justin slept like only a nineteen-year-old can—deeply, totally, effortlessly, waking only in time to hear the captain on the intercom warning of strong crosswinds at La Guardia that, “might make for a bit of a bumpy landing, folks.”

As if on cue, the plane bucked, rising on a gust then falling too fast with the sickening sensation of a roller coaster hurtling down from the first big drop. Then just a few thousand yards from the runway, wheels already down, there came a powerful gust that shoved the plane sideways, knocking Justin’s head forward.

A startled cry that some might interpret as fear came from Justin’s lips, which he then twisted into an ironic smile in hopes that his nervousness would seem to be a joke.

It wasn’t a joke. The next swerve was positively terrifying, wild enough to cause the drinks cart to break free and slam into a bulkhead. A flight attendant seated in the rear-facing jump seat grabbed it and pinioned it with her feet.

Justin had no special fear of flying, but he had a very healthy fear of death, and a deep dislike bordering on phobia about being out of control. Adrenaline flooded his arteries. His muscles tensed. He gripped the armrests as if twisting the leather would let him steer the plane.

And then . . .

Suddenly Justin’s roomy first-class seat wasn’t so roomy. It was odd, he thought at first, an illusion, a psychological effect of nervousness. But yes, it was as if the seat was narrowing. Justin’s shoulders felt too large, and when he turned his head his chin actually scraped against a bulbous, massive swelling that rightly belonged on a whole different person, a much larger, much more muscular person.

“What the . . .?” Justin blurted. He was blowing up like an inflatable bed, muscles bulging at shoulders, thighs, arms, all of him growing. His seatbelt stretched and then snapped!

“What’s happening?” he cried, snatching at the broken seatbelt with fingers that were not right, not right at all.

He screamed.

The pilot fought the crosswind and the plane rocked from side to side as they skimmed above Brooklyn. The engines surged and faded, surged and faded. Justin caught a glimpse of a cemetery just below them.

“Justin!” Erin cried suddenly, staring at him, mouth open, shying away from him as far as her own seatbelt would allow. “You’re . . . you’re . . .”

“What? What?” he cried, and now it was his voice that was not right, not his voice at all! His voice had become this huge thing, deeper, more masculine, gravelly. He sounded like some weird cross between Vin Diesel and Darth Vader.

“Look at your face! Look at your face!” Erin practically screamed. But of course he couldn’t, he couldn’t look at his own face, but he could see that the rest of him was becoming something very different. It was almost impossible to believe that it was him.

Madness to look down at your own body, hands, feet and not recognize them!

“My God, it’s happening!” he said in that voice like truck wheels going over wet gravel. “It’s happening!”

“D-d-does it hurt, baby, does it hurt?” Erin squeaked. She looked ten years older with her face distorted by fear.

“Just so . . . Just . . . weird. I . . .” Justin said.

And still he grew, swelled, thickened, his legs masses of bunched muscle. His black jeans tore, rrrriiiiip, and exposed limbs that looked like armor, like naked bone, like . . . no, like shell, like the hard chitin that formed a lobster’s shell. Tiny pricks, wicked little rose thorns rose from the armor that covered his legs and now arms.

Snap! The armrest broke off.

Erin screamed, words all gone, in full panic now, and she yanked off her own seatbelt and fell on her rear end in the aisle, legs pistoning, trying to escape being crushed. The flight attendant seated in the rear-facing jump seat said, “Ma’am, return to your—” before she froze in mid-word, eyes bulging in horror, jaw trembling as she saw Justin.

They were seconds from touching down when the fingers of Justin’s still-human right hand melted together and he cried out in gibbering terror. His right hand no longer had fingers, no longer had a wrist. It was a spear, a sword, dirty blue and coral in color . . . and it was growing!

This is not what I wanted! I wanted to shoot light beams!

Even his terrified mind was ashamed of that juvenile complaint. It was working, he was morphing into something very different. He was becoming . . . art!

As the sword arm grew, his left hand thickened, and it split in half, split bloodlessly wide open between middle and ring finger, forming a hideous lobster-like pincer that swelled until it must have weighed fifty pounds all by itself. Justin whinnied in terror.

It ought to hurt, some small, still-aware part of his mind knew. It ought to be agony. But it was not painful, not really, just mind-bending, insane, impossible.

Impossible!

But all the while his right hand, the sword, kept growing, growing, the melted fingers flattening first into something like a boat’s paddle that thinned at the edges and glittered as it became, unmistakably, a blade. Now, with startling speed, Justin’s blade hand grew outward, longer and longer till the blade tip sliced straight through the side of the cabin, ripping the aluminum flesh of the plane just below the window as if it were no more substantial than a paper bag.

“Aaahh!” Justin’s bladder emptied into his ripped jeans, but that was the least of his concerns.

The window cracked and blew out. A hurricane of cold wind rushed in, grabbing inflight magazines and menus and whirling them around the cabin. And now came more screams, screams of disbelieving panic as everyone in the first-class compartment saw, and lurched up from their seats and backed away, toward the cockpit or down the aisle into coach, piling over each other while the jet shuddered and rocked violently. Everyone was in a panic, rushing to get away, staggering, slipping, shouting, everyone but the elderly couple seated just ahead of Justin and Erin who were either asleep or amazingly oblivious.

Justin tried to draw his sword hand back, but it was too long (Not my fault!), too long to fit inside the plane and, instead of retracting, that blue and coral blade sliced upward (Not my fault!), ripped effortlessly through the molded plastic and the aluminum outer skin of the plane, ripped up through the overhead luggage compartment, bisecting carry-on bags, and the plane lurched more wildly than ever, and an appalled Justin (Not my fault!) saw that the cut he’d made was widening. An inch. Two inches. Three! The plane was breaking apart, and in a few more seconds the rear seventy percent of the plane would break off and they would all die in a fiery crash.

And people will say it’s my fault, but it’s not—I didn’t ask for this!

The wheels touched tarmac with a rubber squeal, the plane bounded, slewed sideways, bounced again, screams and screams and screams all the while, and Justin screaming too, and Erin knocked into the now-empty seats across the aisle, staring at him with eyes so wide her pupils were just dots surrounded by white.

And then, miraculously, the plane was rolling on all three wheels, rolling down the tarmac, but the screaming did not stop because now they all knew that a monster was among them, a nightmare creature who rose from his seat, head scraping the ceiling. It turned heedlessly to look back at the passengers and swept his blade hand forward, slicing through the seat ahead and the elderly couple occupying those seats. (Not my fault!) The blade cut through their chests and the tops of their bodies, from mid-chest upward, toppled off, landing with a wet and heavy impact, like cattle in a slaughterhouse, nothing but slabs of meat. Blood and gore bubbled up from their torsos, and in pure panic now, seeing what he had done (Not my fault!), not knowing what else to do, Justin surged toward the exit door, but his blade swept on, slicing through the galley, through the bathroom, and through the back of the cockpit, and suddenly there were no controls, and quite likely (though Justin could not see for sure) no pilots either.

The plane was rolling too fast, the reverse thrusters had not been engaged, and with no one steering, the jet veered wildly off the runway, careening with unstoppable momentum toward the terminal building and fiery destruction.

It was then that Justin’s mind cleared enough to see what he must do.

He swept his blade upward, cutting through the ceiling, and continued on, cutting a jagged path around the circumference of the fuselage until, with a deafening screech of tortured metal, the front of the plane fell away. Justin saw the terrified eyes of the flight attendant still buckled into her jump seat as she was carried off with the cockpit section.

The cockpit section slewed right, tumbled madly, turned again and again, sparks everywhere, and was struck by the right wing which sheared off from the impact, spraying jet fuel over the runway. The right-side jet engine snapped off the broken wing and cartwheeled fantastically, bounding away like a living thing, still running on the last of its fuel.

The main body of the plane slumped hard to its right as the wheel on that side had been carried away with the wing. Erin tumbled into Justin and her wrist was stabbed by one of his thorns, but he caught her in the crook of his arm. The fuselage, now skidding on its side, bucked and vibrated with an end-of-the-world sound of ripping aluminum and carbon fiber, the lower edge chewing and sparking along the tarmac. The forward momentum that would have slammed them into the terminal at a deadly speed bled off, and the fuselage stopped suddenly, sending loose luggage and unbelted passengers flying forward.

Just above them, not fifty feet away, faces pressed to the glass of the terminal windows stared down with mouths open.

And then: silence. Silence as everything, including the remaining engine, stopped. Dust and smoke filled the air. The fuselage was cantilevered, the broken front down, the bent and twisted tail up, the entirety lying half on its right side with the remaining left wing soaring up and away at an angle.

Justin stood at the front of the plane, his now-massive shape filling the open circle where once the plane had had a front. His feet were the claws of a T. rex. His shoulders were chitin-armored boulders. His head was five times its normal size. His flesh was hard and shining dully. His hands—a massive pincer and an unwieldy blade—were blue and coral. His body where exposed was the sickly white of a trout’s belly.

“We have to get out of here!” Erin cried. She’d lost both her shoes, her hair was a mess, her face was smeared with tears and the blood and gore of the elderly couple. “Listen to me: we can’t stay here!” Erin screeched. “We have to get away! You’ve killed people!” Her hand gripped his thick, inhuman forearm then recoiled from touching him.

Justin could feel that his face—the face he had not yet seen—was not good at expressing emotion. He did not seem to have lips quite where they should be, and his tongue was like something you might cut out of an ox. He was scared, stunned, overwhelmed, but even in the midst of that flood of emotion, he sensed something . . . something dark and distant yet right there inside his brain, something that was . . .

. . . watching him.

He shook off that thought and forced himself to recognize and accept what Erin was saying. He had probably killed the pilots and the flight attendant. He had certainly killed the old couple. He hadn’t meant to (Not my fault!), but they were dead just the same and he was looking at their torsos, sagging ovals of exposed organs and hanging viscera, still buckled in.

Even now, even amid the rising chorus of screams joined by cries of pain, even in the swirling midst of his own impossible nightmare, some part of Justin wished he had a camera: there was a terrible, gruesome beauty to all of it. The bodies. The gore. The impossible angles. The swirling dust. Shirts and underwear, the contents of carry-on bags, draped over seat backs like some demented granny’s idea of doilies.

A beautiful annihilation.

A new note could be heard in the screams, the beginnings of rage to join the horror. Justin saw staring eyes, animal fear in bulging eyes, pointing fingers, mouths open in shock and disgust, and all of it turning to fury against him.

And there were cell phone cameras.

Justin grabbed Erin around her waist—careful, so careful with the pincer hand that looked as if it could snap her in two. He lifted her insignificant weight and hopped down to the tarmac. Effortless! His claw feet gripped the tarmac, sinking into it like bare toes in mud.

The smell of jet fuel was all around. The emergency slide unfolded from a rear door and in seconds the people on the plane would get free of the wreck. The people . . . and their cell phones.

“Lighter,” Justin said in that harsh, deep, reverberating voice.

“What?”

“Give me your lighter. Now!”

Erin fumbled in her clutch purse, spilled out a bottle of pills, a pack of foreign cigarettes, a tampon, and came up with the lighter, holding it out for him and he cursed, “My hand is . . .! You have to do it!”

“Do what?” she demanded, desperate just to get away, to run, to hide, to find a place that would serve her enough alcohol to somehow wipe the nightmare from her mind.

“Witnesses,” Justin said coldly.

And in his mind he felt an unsettling pleasure because now was his time. Now the clear, direct, emotionless reptile that had always been a part of him saw clearly what Erin could not. Or would not.

The first of the passengers was sliding down the inflated ramp. The ramp was at a too-steep angle and a woman fell off halfway down, landing bruised but alive on the runway.

It took Erin a few seconds to understand what Justin was saying, what he was demanding. “No, no, no, I . . . I can’t . . .”

Justin’s massive claw now closed again around her midriff and the message was clear. “Do it! Do it!”

With trembling fingers Erin flicked the lighter, a spark, a flame.

Justin used his massive claw to rip her dress, tearing off a long shred, which hung like a limp flag from his pincer. “Light it!”

Shaking so violently she nearly dropped the lighter, Erin set fire to the swatch of fabric.

A passenger saw and shouted, “No, you idiot, there’s jet fuel everywhere!”

“Yeah,” Justin rumbled. “I noticed.”

He tossed the flaming fabric into the shallow pool of fuel that edged toward his claw feet.

Jet fuel is kerosene, and kerosene does not catch fire as quickly as gasoline. The fabric burned blue as Justin threw Erin over one massive shoulder and turned to run, run, run, and behind them came the screams and shouts of, “Fire! Fire!”

Justin ran, great bounding leaps, twenty feet with each step, each impact ripping the concrete, ran away from the terminal and across the runway, kicking heedlessly through landing lights, passing beneath the nose of a taxiing Federal Express plane, racing in panic toward the fenced perimeter of the airport as the flame spread and the smoke billowed and the screams of the doomed chased him.

And the Dark Watchers laughed silently.

5
|
A PERFECT SPECIMEN

ARMO (A NAME formed by rearranging his true name, Aristotle Adamo) was a white male, seventeen, six foot five inches tall, muscular, blond, blue-eyed, with a jawline Michelangelo would have wished he could sculpt. By his own admission, Armo was not what you would call an academic sort (1.7 GPA). But neither was he a jock, despite being heavily recruited by his high school’s basketball team, football team and even water polo team.

He was also not a gamer, a surfer, a geek, a nerd or member of any other sort of group. Chess club? No. Math club? Hah! Armo’s math skills ended at long division and fractions. Cheese-tasting club? Definitely not.

Armo was not part of any clique because there was one, only one Armo at Malibu High School. MHS was neck-deep in the beautiful children of Hollywood, but still there was only one Armo. There was not a straight girl or gay boy at MHS who had not looked longingly after him. He was gorgeous, and worse than that, charismatic, and worst of all, he knew it, accepted it as natural, and didn’t care. His self-confidence went deep, down to the bone.

“ODD,” the counsellor read from the sheet of paper on his desk.

“Odd?” Armo asked.

“Oppositional Defiant Disorder. That’s what the shrink, the um, sorry, the psych eval said. You’re smart enough to manage at least a C-plus average without trying and a B if you worked at it. Maybe you won’t be going to Harvard, but you could go to a decent state school, make something of yourself.”

“I’m already something,” Armo said complacently.

The counselor, a sad brown mouse of a man, could not, despite his best efforts, avoid feeling himself to be something out of DNA’s recycling bin by comparison with the young god lounging in the too-small chair. The counselor sighed and thought, You may be a pain in the ass, but at least you’ll never lack for female and/or male companionship.

“Why don’t you take Spanish? You know you need a language credit to graduate.”

“I don’t want to take Spanish, I want to take Danish. My family is Danish.”

“We do not offer Danish as a language option.”

Armo shrugged.

The counselor said, “You understand that everyone in Denmark speaks English, right? Usually better than most Americans?”

A faint smile twisted the corner of Armo’s lips. “This is why it’s important to keep Danish alive. It’s my heritage.”

“Oooookay.” The counselor laid his hands palm down on his desk in a gesture that signaled surrender. “Okay, Armo. But you won’t graduate. And if you don’t graduate, you won’t go to college.”

“Yeah.”

“And that will make it very difficult for you to get a decent job.”

“Like school counselor?”

Armo’s face was blank, but there was a spark in his blue eyes, and despite the implied insult, despite the brick-wall refusal to go along with, well, anything, the counselor found himself smiling.

That shut him up, Armo thought.

“Can I take off now?” Armo asked, and thirty seconds later he was back out on campus, striding to the parking lot as the churning mass of students rushing between classes parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

The parking lot was a sea of BMWs, Mercedes and Teslas. There were also, at the other end of the spectrum, numerous Priuses and Leafs. But there was only one beat-up, orange and white 2003 Dodge Viper. Many of the cars of the rich kids at Malibu High were fast, but only one did zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds with a top speed of 189.5 miles per hour, and made the earth shake from the throaty rumble of the Viper’s enormous engine.

No one but an idiot gave a seventeen-year-old a car that fast, but fortunately for Armo his father was a former stuntman who had managed to become an action movie star. His father figured if fast-and-furious was good for him, it would surely be good for his son as well.

The Viper’s cloth top was down and Armo hopped smoothly over the door and dropped onto the cracked leather seat. This, this right here, this moment, when he was in his car, when he was done with school for the day, with the sun shining and the ocean sparkling, this was his favorite part of the day. He loved this moment. He looked forward all through the tedious day to this moment. The moment of escape.

Of freedom.

He keyed the accelerator and felt the 8.3 liter, 500 horsepower engine come to life, startling a pair of seagulls into dropping the French fry they’d been fighting over.

Armo roared down Morning View Drive, pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway and was hit so hard by a gasoline tanker truck that the Viper went airborne for fifty feet, spinning in mid-air as Armo thought, Uh-oh: that was a mistake.

The Viper landed on the far side of the PCH, bounced over the low metal railing that fronted the beach, and came to rest upside down on the sand, knocking a three-inch crack into Armo’s thick skull.

For a long time, a very long time, Armo saw, smelled, tasted and heard nothing.

Nothing. A very long nothing.

And then . . . a sound! Meaningless, but something rather than the nothing.

Two days after that single sound, Armo opened his eyes and saw blurry figures.

The next day he opened his eyes again and saw a man’s face. There was something familiar about the face, but he couldn’t place it, just vague, distorted memories of previous brief emergences into consciousness. His grip on awareness was still extremely weak, in and out, with no way to know how much time passed between each brief contact with reality.

The next day he opened his eyes again and said, “Water.”

“Your fluids are in your IV,” a male voice said. “You are in a medical facility. Your injuries are healing nicely.”

“Whuh?”

“I’m Dr. Park. You are safe, you are in a medical facility,” that blandly comforting voice said. Armo squinted and sort of saw the doctor, a plain-looking, middle-aged Asian man with graying hair. “You’re going to be all right.”

“A damn sight better than all right,” a female voice with a hint of the old south said, but he’d have had to turn his head to see her and found he couldn’t quite do that.

“Tomorrow we’ll get that neck brace off you and try some liquids,” Dr. Park said. And Armo went back to sleep.

The woman’s voice said, “One more day, Park. Then he’s mine.”

The next day Armo was feeling much better. He could see clearly, though the dull beige hospital room was nothing much to look at. He saw himself, most of himself, stretched out under a white sheet. He tried to move a leg and it moved. Tried to move the other leg and it ached, but it too was still attached. Hands? There they were, right in front of his face, and he could count to ten on his fingers.

“So, how are we today?” Dr. Park bustled into the room.

“Water?”

The doctor poured from a plastic jug into a paper cup and held it to Armo’s parched lips. The pleasure was exquisite.

“What happened to me?” Armo asked.

“Well, you had a disagreement with a tanker truck. Broken leg, broken collarbone, multiple contusions and abrasions, the most serious matter being a cracked skull.”

“Is my . . .” Armo pointed with awkward fingers at his crotch.

“Yes, your penis and testicles are undamaged.” Dr. Park rolled his eyes.

Armo sighed relief. “My car?”

“Totaled, I’m afraid.”

Armo fought back tears. “Is my mom or dad here?”

“We’ll talk about all that later,” Dr. Park said. He did something with a small toggle on the clear plastic line that ran into the veins of Armo’s wrist and a wave of weariness flooded him. Armo closed his eyes, but he did not lose consciousness—Dr. Park was not an anesthesiologist and gave him a dose that would put a normal-size person under, but Armo was not a normal-size person.

Armo listened as a second person walked in. He’d heard this voice before, the tense female voice out of the south. The last time it had said, A damn sight better than all right.

“How’s our patient?”

“Much better. The spinal fracture is almost completely healed. The skull fracture is knitting up well. His vitals are steady, in fact—”

“So he’ll recover completely?”

“He’ll likely have some memory loss,” Dr. Park said.

“So much the better.”

“I don’t think we—” Dr. Park began in a chiding tone, but the woman cut him off.

“It may well make him more manageable. Anyway, we’ll give him enough to fill whatever hole is in his memory.”

Armo heard the woman walk slowly around, from his right side to his left, then back. “You must admit, he’s a nearly perfect specimen. Big, strong and not overly bright.”

Armo frowned at that, but quickly resumed a blank, unconscious expression.

“I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Dr. Park said. “According to his school record he’s a rather difficult character.”

Colonel Gwendolyn DiMarco, US Army, laughed. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing he soon won’t be quite human.”

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