Fear (5 page)

The deep lair changed. Weeks ago the floor—the very bottom limit of the barrier—had changed. It was no longer pearly gray. It had turned black. He noticed that the black-stained barrier under his feet felt different, not as smooth.

And he noticed that the parts of the gaiaphage that rested on the barrier were also becoming stained black. So far the stain had spread only a little into the gaiaphage, like the gaiaphage was some sort of spread-out, radioactive green sponge and the stain was spilled black coffee.

Drake had wondered what it meant, but he had not asked.

Suddenly Drake felt the gaiaphage’s mind jolt. Like someone had shocked him.

I feel…

“Nemesis, master?” Drake asked the green-glowing cave walls.

Lay your arm upon me
.

Drake recoiled. He had touched the gaiaphage a few times. It was never a pleasant experience. The mind-to-mind awareness of the gaiaphage was horribly more powerful when he made physical contact.

But Drake lacked the will to refuse. He unwrapped the ten-foot-long tentacle from around his waist. He moved to a large clump of the seething green mass, a part he couldn’t help but picture as the center, the head of that centerless, headless creature. He laid his tentacle gingerly across it.

“Ahhh!” The pain was sharp and sudden and knocked him to his knees. His eyes flew open, strained to open wider still, until he felt like he was peeling his own face back.

Images exploded in his mind.

Images of a garden.

Images of a lake with boats floating calmly.

Images of a beautiful girl with dark hair and a wry half smile.

Bring her to me!

Drake had spoken little in months. His throat was dry, his tongue awkward in his mouth. The name came out in a harsh whisper.

“Diana.”

Quinn was not happy as he pulled at the oars, heading away from shore with his back to the dark horizon and his worried gaze on the mountains where the sun would soon appear.

None of his crews were happy. Normally there was good-natured grumbling, old jokes, and teasing. Usually the boats would call out cheerful insults to one another, denigrating one another’s rowing technique or prospects or looks.

Today there was no teasing. The only sounds were the grunts of effort, the creak of oars in the oarlocks, the musical trickle of water along the sides and the lap, lap, lap of tiny wavelets slapping the bow.

Quinn knew the crews were angry about Cigar. All agreed that Cigar had screwed up in a monumental way. But what was Quinn supposed to do? The other kid had swung first. If Cigar hadn’t struck back, Jaden might well have killed him.

They were prepared to see Cigar pay a fine, endure some lockup, maybe even a few minutes of Penny to teach the boy to take it easy in the future.

But a whole day under mental assault from that creepy girl… That was too much. Cigar had all the fears any normal kid had, and given a whole day to work her evil Penny would find them all.

Quinn wondered if he should say something. It distressed him, this sullenness, this worry. But what could he say? What words of his were going to make these kids stop worrying for poor Cigar?

He was worried, too. And he shared some of their anger at himself and at Albert. He had hoped Albert would step in. Albert could have if he’d chosen to. Everyone knew that Caine could call himself king but Albert was the emperor.

The boats moved away from one another as the pole fishers went one way and the net casters went toward the barrier. A school of blue bats had been seen there the day before, skimming along a hundred yards from the barrier.

Quinn signaled a halt and motioned to Elise to ready the nets. His boat crew today was Elise, Jonas, and Annie. Elise and Annie were weaker on the oars than Quinn and Jonas, but they were nimble with the nets, casting them out in perfect circles, and sensing when the weights had dragged the net down before closing the trap.

Quinn sat at the stern now, using an oar and the rudder to keep the boat stable while the girls and Jonas hauled in two blue bats and a nondescript seven-inch fish.

It was wearying work, but Quinn was used to it, and he handled the oar and rudder on automatic. He gazed off to see the other boats take up their own positions.

Then, hearing a splash, he turned toward the barrier to see a flying fish—not great eating, but not inedible—take a short hop.

But that wasn’t what made him narrow his eyes and squint in the faint morning light.

Elise and Annie were getting ready to cast again.

“Hold up,” Quinn said.

“What?” Elise demanded. She was cranky in the morning. Crankier still on this morning.

“Jonas, grab an oar,” Quinn said.

While Elise neatened her net, pulling out bits of seaweed, the boat crept toward the barrier. Twenty feet away they shipped oars.

“What is that?” Jonas asked.

The four of them stared at the barrier. Up above it became an illusion of sky. But straight ahead it was pearly gray. As always. As it had been since the coming of the FAYZ.

But just above the waterline the barrier was not gray but black. The black shadow rose in an irregular pattern. Like a roller coaster’s curves.

Quinn glanced away to see the sun just peeking over the mountains. The whole sea went from dark to light in a few swift minutes. He waited until the sunlight touched the water between him and the barrier.

“It’s changed,” Quinn said.

He pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it onto the bench. He fumbled in the locker for a face mask, spit into it, wiped the spit around with his fingers, slipped it on his head, and without another word dived off the side. The water was cold and instantly blew the last of the morning cobwebs out of his head.

He swam gingerly to the barrier, careful not to touch it. Six feet down the barrier was black.

Quinn surfaced, took a deep breath, and went down again. He wished he had fins; it wasn’t easy pushing his buoyant body downward. He reached maybe twenty feet before letting himself float back up.

He climbed back into the boat with an assist from Jonas.

“It’s like that all the way down as far as I can tell,” Quinn said.

The four of them looked at one another.

“So?” Elise asked. “We have work to do. The fish won’t catch themselves.”

Quinn considered. He should tell someone. Caine? Albert? He didn’t really want to have to deal with either of them. And they had blue bats right under the boat just waiting to be caught.

Either Caine or Albert might easily tear into him for sloughing off on work just to report something that might be meaningless.

Not for the first time he wished it was still Sam he had to report to, not the other two. In fact, if there was anyone he really wished he could tell, it was Astrid. Too bad no one had seen her. She might well be dead. But Astrid was the only one who would look at this and actually try to figure out what it meant.

“Okay, let’s get back to work,” Quinn said. “We’ll keep an eye on it, see if it changes by the end of the day.”

FOR ALL
OF
his five years Pete Ellison had lived inside a twisted, distorted brain. No longer.

He had destroyed his dying, diseased, fever-racked body.

Poof.

All gone.

And now he was … where? He didn’t have a word for it. He had been freed from the brain that had made colors scream and turned every sound into a hammering cymbal.

He drifted now in a silent, blissful place. No loud noises. No too-bright colors. No brain-frying complexity of overwrought sensation. No blond sister with her bright yellow hair and stabbing blue eyes.

But the Darkness was still there.

Still looking for him.

Still whispering to him.
Come to me. Come to me
.

Without the cacophony of his brain Pete could see the Darkness more clearly. It was a glowing blob at the bottom of a ball.

Pete’s ball.

That realization surprised him. But yes, now he remembered: such noise, people screaming, his own father in panic, all of it like hot lava poured into Pete’s skull.

He had not understood what was happening, but he could see clearly the cause of all the panic. A green tendril had reached for and touched long glowing rods, caressed them with a greedy, hungry touch. And then that arm of the Darkness had reached for minds—weak, malleable minds—and demanded to be fed the energy that flowed from those rods.

It would have meant a release of every sort of light, and everyone except the Darkness would have been burned up.

Meltdown. That was the word for it. And it had already begun and it was too late to stop it by the time Pete’s father was rushing around and Pete was moaning and rocking.

Too late to stop the reaction and the meltdown. By normal means.

So Pete had made the ball.

Had he known what he was doing? No. He looked back at it now with a feeling of wonder. It had been an impulse, a panic reaction.

He had never meant a lot of things to happen that did happen.

He was like that guy Astrid used to have in the stories she read to him. The one called God. The one who said, “Poof, make everything!”

Pete’s world was full of pain and disease and sadness. But hadn’t the old world been that way, too?

He no longer had his handheld game. He no longer had his body. He no longer had his old, miswired brain. He no longer balanced atop the sheet of glass.

Pete missed his old game. It had been all he had.

He floated in a sort of haze, a world of vapors and disconnected images and dreams. It was quiet, and Pete liked quiet. And in this place no one ever came to tell him it was time to do this or do that or go here or hurry there.

No sister’s loud yellow hair and stabbing blue eyes.

But as time passed—and he was sure it must be passing, somewhere if not here—he could picture his sister without feeling the mere image overwhelming.

It surprised Pete. He could look back at that day in the power plant and almost look on the confusion and screeching sirens and panic without feeling panic himself. It still all seemed like too much, way too much, but no longer so much that he would lose all self-control.

Was it that memories were quieter? Or that something had changed in him?

It had to be that second thing, because Pete’s mind no longer felt the same. For one thing he felt as if he could think about himself for the first time in his jangled life. He could wonder where he was and even who he was.

The one thing he knew was that he was bored with this disconnected existence. For most of his life the only peace and pleasure he had found had been within his handheld game. But he had no game to play here.

He had wished for a game.

He had gone looking for a game, but there was nothing like his old handheld. Just avatars that seemed to drift by. Avatars, symbols with curlicues inside. They formed into groups or clusters. Or sometimes they went off alone.

He sensed there might be a game, but with no controls, how could the game be played? Many times he had watched the shapes, and sometimes it almost seemed they were looking at him.

He peered closer at the avatars. They were interesting. Little geometric shapes but with so much twisted and coiled inside them so that he had the impression that he could fall into any one of those avatars and see a whole world within.

He wondered if it was one of those games you just … touched. It felt wrong and dangerous. But Pete was bored.

So he touched one of the avatars.

His name was Terrel Jones, but no one called him anything but Jonesie. He was just seven, but he was a big seven.

He was a picker working an artichoke field. It was hard, hard work. Jonesie spent six hours a day walking down the rows of chest-high artichoke plants with a knife in his gloved right hand and a backpack on his back.

The larger artichokes were higher up on the plant. Smaller ones lower down. The up-chokes—picker slang for the higher ones—had to be a minimum of five inches across. The ankle-chokes—the lower ones—had to be at least three inches. This was to make sure the pickers didn’t wipe out the whole crop at once.

No one was exactly sure if this rule made sense, but Jonesie didn’t see any reason to argue. He just moved along the row cutting with practiced ease and tossing the chokes over his shoulder to drop into the backpack. Up one row and down the next was all it would take to fill his pack. Then he would sling it off and dump it into the old wagon—a big, ramshackle wooden thing that rested on four bald car tires.

And that was all Jonesie had to worry about. Except that right now he was finding it more and more tiring. He felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath.

He reached the end of the row carrying no more than the usual weight of chokes, but staggered to the wagon. Jamilla, the wagon tender, had that relatively soft job because she was only eight years old and small. All she had to do was pick up the stray chokes that might fall to the ground, and carefully rake the chokes in the wagon into an even layer, and check in each backpack load on a sheet of paper for Albert so that the daily harvest could be accounted for.