Sam stood paralyzed for a few seconds, just a few seconds—but later in memory it would seem so long. Too long.

***

  “Why are we here? This is Mose’s cottage.”
  “Because you’re too dangerous. No one at Coates wants you around until you get a grip on yourself.”
  He blinked at another returning memory. “I hurt someone.”
  “You thought Chunk was some kind of monster. You were yelling a word. Gaiaphage. Then you smacked Chunk through a wall.”
  “Is he okay?”
  “Caine. In the movies a guy can get knocked through a wall and get up like it’s no big deal. This wasn’t a movie. The wall was brick. Chunk looked like roadkill. Like when a raccoon gets run over and over and over and keeps getting run over for a couple of days.”

***

  "Are you okay?”
  “Sure. Why not? This morning I was responsible for 332 people. Now I’m only responsible for 331. And part of me is almost thinking, okay, one less mouth to feed.”

***

  Someone was tugging at Mary’s shirt from behind. She looked around and with a sinking heart saw a little boy named . . . named . . . she couldn’t remember his name. But the second little boy behind him she remembered was Sean. She knew why they were there. They had both recently had their fifth birthdays. The age limit for the day care was four. At age five you had to move out—hopefully to a house with some responsible older kids.
  “Hi, kids. What’s up?” Mary asked as she brought her face down to their level.
  “Um . . . ,” the first one said. And then he burst into tears.
  She shouldn’t do it, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself from putting her arms around the little boy. And then Sean started crying as well, so the embrace was extended, and John was in there, too, and Mary heard herself saying of course, of course they could come back, just for today, just for a little while.

***

  COATES ACADEMY WAS quite a bit the worse for wear. Battles had damaged the façade of the main building. There was a hole in the whitewashed brick so big, you could see an entire second-story classroom, a cross-section of the floor beneath it, and a jagged gap that didn’t quite reach to the top of the first-story window below. Most of the glass in the windows was gone. The kids had made an effort to keep the elements out by duct-taping sheets of plastic over the holes, but the tape had loosened and now the plastic and the tape hung limp, stirring with the occasional breeze. The building looked as if it had been through a war. It had been.

***

  Sam tried to sleep. Wanted desperately to sleep.
  He was in the spare bedroom at Astrid and Mary and John’s house. In the dark. On his back. Staring up at the ceiling.
  Downstairs, in the kitchen, there were a half dozen cans of food. He was hungry. But he had had his ration for the day. He had to set the example.
  Still, he was hungry, and the hunger didn’t care about setting an example.
  Food downstairs. And Astrid down the hall.
  A different kind of hunger, that. And there, too, he had to set a good example.
  I am nothing but good examples, he told himself gloomily.

***

  “What am I supposed to do? Tell three hundred kids spread out in seventy or eighty different homes that they can’t watch DVDs? Confiscate iPods?”
  “It’s not easy playing daddy to three hundred kids,” Astrid admitted.
  “I’m not anyone’s daddy,” Sam practically snarled. Another sleepless night, in a long string of them, had left him in a foul mood. “I’m supposed to be the mayor, not the father.”
  “These kids don’t know the difference,” Astrid pointed out. “They need parents. So they look to you. And Mother Mary. Me, even, to some extent.”
  Little Pete chose that moment to begin floating in the air. Just lifted off a foot, eighteen inches, hovered there, his arms floating, toes pointed downward.
  Sam noticed immediately. Astrid didn’t.
  “What the—”

***

  Astrid started to say something, but stopped herself. She took a couple of calming breaths. Then, in a more measured tone, she said, “Sam, I figured you had enough on your shoulders. I’m worried about you.”
  He dropped his hands to his sides. His voice dropped as well. “I’m fine.”
  “No, you’re not,” Astrid said. “You don’t sleep. You never have a minute to yourself. You act like everything that goes wrong is your fault. You’re worried.”
  “Yeah, I’m worried,” he said. “Last night we had a kid who killed and ate a cat. The whole time he’s telling me about it he’s weeping. He’s sobbing. He used to have a cat himself. He likes cats. But he was so hungry, he grabbed it and . . .”
  Sam had to stop. He bit his lip and tried to shake off the despair that swept over him. “Astrid, we’re losing. We’re losing. Everyone is . . .” He looked at her and felt tears threaten. “How long before we have kids doing worse than killing cats?”
  When Astrid didn’t answer, Sam said, “Yeah, so I’m worried.

***

  “You know, we should have hung out more, back in the old days,” Howard said to Albert.
  “You didn’t know I existed, back in the old days,” Albert said.
  “What? Come on, man. There’s, like, a dozen brothers in the whole school and I didn’t notice one?”
  “We’re the same shade, Howard. That doesn’t make us friends,” Albert said coolly.
  Howard laughed. “Yeah, you were always a grind. Reading too much. Thinking too much. Not having much fun. Good little family boy, make your momma proud. Now look at you: you’re a big man in the FAYZ.”
  Albert ignored that. He wasn’t interested in reminiscing. Not with Howard, for sure, not really with anyone. The old world was dead and gone. Albert was all about the future.

***

  Lana lay her hand against the gruesome hole.
  “Don’t want no more rock,” Orc repeated.
  The bleeding stopped almost immediately.
  “Does it hurt?” Lana asked. “I mean the rock. I know the hole hurts.”
  “No. It don’t hurt.” Orc slammed his fist against his opposite arm, hard enough that any human arm would have been shattered. “I barely feel it. Even Drake’s whip, when we was fighting, I barely felt it.”
  Suddenly he was weeping. Tears rolled from human eyes onto cheeks of flesh and pebbles. “I don’t feel nothing except . . .” He pointed a thick stone finger at the flesh of his face.
  “Yeah,” Lana said. Her irritation was gone. Her burden was smaller, maybe, than Orc’s.
  Lana pulled her hand away to see the progress. The hole was smaller. Still crusted with blood, but no longer actively bleeding.
  She put her hand back in place. “Just a couple minutes more, Orc.”
  “My name’s Charles,” Orc said.
  “Is it?”
  “It is,” Howard confirmed.
[...] “What were you guys doing going into the worm field?” Lana asked.
  Howard shot a resentful look at Albert, who answered, “Orc was picking cabbage.”
  “My name’s Charles Merriman,” Orc repeated. “People should call me by my real name sometimes.”

***

  “I have nightmares,” he said. “The battle. You know. The big battle.”
  “You were really brave. You saved those kids in the day care.”
  “Not all of them,” Quinn said shortly. He fell silent for a moment, back in the dream. “There was this coyote. And this kid, right? And . . . and . . . Okay, so I could have shot him, maybe, a little sooner, right? But I was scared of hitting the kid. I was so scared I’d hit that little kid, so I didn’t shoot. And then it was, like, too late. You know?”
  Lana nodded. She didn’t show any sympathy, and strangely Quinn thought that was a good thing because if it wasn’t you, and you hadn’t been there, and you hadn’t been holding a machine gun with your finger frozen on the trigger, and you hadn’t heard your voice coming out of your throat in a scream like an open artery, and you hadn’t seen what he had seen, then you didn’t have a right to be sympathetic because you didn’t understand anything. You didn’t understand anything.
  Anything.
  Lana just nodded and put her palm against his heart and said, “I can’t heal that.”

***

  “Diana will give me Jack,” Caine said. “And then we will turn off the lights and feed the—” He stopped very abruptly. He blinked in confusion.
  “Feed?” Drake echoed, puzzled.
  Caine almost didn’t hear him. His brain seemed to trip, to skip a step, like a scratch in a DVD when the picture pixilates for a moment before starting up again. The familiar grounds of Coates Academy swam before his eyes.
  Feed?
  What had he meant?
  Who had he meant?
  “You can all go,” he said, distracted.

***

  It felt like someone had a rope wrapped around his brain. Someone he couldn’t see, someone standing far off in the dark, invisible. The rope disappeared into gloom and mystery, but at this end it was attached to him.
  And out there, the Darkness held the other end. Yanked it whenever it liked.
  Like Caine was a fish on a hook.

***

  Edilio looked at the shocked faces of the kids around him. He had been seconds away from impatiently ordering them into the field. Most wearing sneakers. None with experience seeing what the zekes looked like.
  He’d been one hesitation away from ordering forty-nine kids to their deaths.
  “Get back on the bus,” Edilio said shakily. “Get back on the bus.”
  “What about lunch?” someone asked.

***

  She went out into the night looking for a kid who was very strong—and, she hoped, very weak.

***

  Dekka watched him go. “Edilio’s a good guy,” she said.
   “But?”
  “But, he’s a normal.”
  “There aren’t going to be lines like that, between freak and normal,” Sam said firmly.
  Dekka almost, but didn’t quite, laugh. “Sam, that’s a great concept. And maybe you believe it. But I’m black and I’m a lesbian, so let me tell you: From what I know? Personal experience? There are always lines.”

***

  The memories of the battle—those couldn’t even be called memories because weren’t memories something from the past? That day might have happened three months ago, but it wasn’t the past to Quinn, it was right here, right now, always. Like a parallel life happening simultaneously with this life. He was driving through the night and feeling the gun buck buck buck in his hands and seeing the coyotes and the kids, all mixed up together, all crisscrossing, weaving through the arcs of the bullets.

***

  The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public.

***

  “If there’s a God, I wonder if he’s sitting in the dark on the end of his bed wondering how he managed to screw everything up.”

***

  “And what are you, Astrid?” he shouted. “A smug know-it-all! You point your finger at me and say, ‘Hey, Sam, you make the decisions, and you take all the heat.’”
  “Oh, it’s my fault? No way. I didn’t anoint you.”
  “Yeah, you did, Astrid. You guilted me into it. You think I don’t know what you’re all about? You used me to protect Little Pete. You use me to get your way. You manipulate me anytime you feel like it.”

***

  He smiled, patted Drake’s gaunt cheek, and with a hint of his old swagger said, “We’re going to reshuffle the deck. Sam thinks he holds all the cards. But we’re going to change everything.”
  “We’re going to feed the monster who has his hooks in your head,” Diana said coldly. “Don’t try to dress it up. We’re feeding a monster and hoping it will show its gratitude by letting go of your leash.”
  “Let it go, Diana,” Caine said. The bluster was gone.
  Diana glanced to see that Drake was out of earshot. “Bug’s not coming back. You know that.”
  Caine chewed at his thumb. Jack had the unsettling thought that he might be hungry enough to eat his own finger.
  “You don’t know that,” Caine said. “He might have had trouble finding Orsay. He wouldn’t turn against me.”
  “No one’s loyal to you, Caine,” Diana said. “Drake is itching to take you down. No one at Coates is rushing to bail you out. You only have one person who actually cares about you.”
  “You?”
  Diana didn’t answer. “I know it has a hold on you, Caine. I’ve seen it. But that monster of yours isn’t loyal to you, either. It will use you and throw you away. It will be everything and you will be nothing.”

***

  “I’m going to deal with Caine. I have to stop him here.”
  “You don’t want to go at Caine and Drake by yourself,” Edilio objected. “No way. I’m not letting you kill yourself.”
  Sam forced a laugh. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Howard, as soon as you get to town, find Breeze if you don’t pass her on the way. If you don’t find Brianna, find Taylor. Tell them to send help. And tell them I need someone to let me know what’s going on with you guys at the mine.”
  “Maybe should have turned on the phones, huh?” Edilio said. He winced, realizing too late that it sounded like sniping.
  Sam said, “Yeah. Add that to the list of mistakes I’ve made lately.”
  “Yeah, here’s one not to make, Sam: don’t go in there by yourself.”
  “Didn’t I just say I wouldn’t?” Sam said evenly.
  Edilio looked him in the eyes. Sam looked down and said, “But in case anything happens to me, you all take orders from Edilio.”
  Dekka nodded solemnly.
  “Do not do that to me,” Edilio said. “Do not die on me, Sam.”