Fear (Gone #5)(22)

Patrick heard him and set up a loud and sustained barking.

Quinn knocked even though it seemed superfluous. The peephole went dark. The door was opened by Sanjit.

“It’s Quinn,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Come on in, man.”

Quinn stepped in. In the weird glow of a small Sammy sun the transformation of Lana’s room was shocking: it was clean.

Really clean. With the bed made and the coffee table clear. The usual overflowing ashtray was nowhere to be seen—or smelled.

Even Patrick looked as if he’d been bathed and brushed. He ran over and began rubbing himself against Quinn, probably looking to pick up some pleasant fish smell to replace all the odors that had been rudely shampooed away.

Sanjit, a slim Indian-looking kid with an infectious smile and long black hair, noticed Quinn’s surprise but said nothing.

Lana came in from the balcony. She at least had not changed much. She still had a huge semiautomatic pistol stuck in a thick belt. She still had the same pretty but not beautiful looks. And her expression was still somewhere between vulnerable and forbidding, like she might just as easily break down in tears or shoot you in the stomach.

“Hi, Quinn, what is it?”

There was nothing embarrassed or ill at ease in her tone. If she knew that Quinn was feeling jealous she gave no sign of it.

Not what I’m here for, Quinn told himself, feeling guilty to be letting his own feelings gain any hold when the picture of poor Cigar was still so fresh in his mind.

“It’s Cigar,” Quinn said. “He’s at Dahra’s.” He quickly told her what had happened.

Lana nodded and grabbed her backpack. “Don’t wait up,” she told Sanjit.

Quinn swallowed hard on that. Sanjit was actually living with Lana? In the same room? Was Quinn misunderstanding this? Because that was sure what it sounded like.

Patrick fell in beside Lana, sensing an adventure.

Down the hallway, then down the stairs to ground level, Lana led the way through the pitch-black lobby and out into the night, bright by contrast.

“So,” Quinn said, letting the word hang there between them.

“I got lonely,” Lana said. “I get nightmares. It helps having someone there sometimes.”

“It’s not my business,” Quinn muttered.

Lana stopped and faced him. “Yeah, it’s your business, Quinn. You and I…” She didn’t quite know how to finish that, so she just shifted to a gruffer tone and said, “But it’s no one else’s business.”

They walked on quickly.

“Who would I tell?” Quinn asked rhetorically.

“You ought to have someone to tell,” Lana said. “I know. Sounds weird coming from me.”

“A little bit.” Quinn was trying to nurture his resentment, but the truth was, he liked Lana. Had for a long time. He couldn’t stay mad at her. Anyway, she deserved some peace in her life.

“It still reaches me sometimes,” Lana said.

Quinn knew she meant the Darkness, the thing that named itself the gaiaphage.

“What does it want from you?” Quinn asked. Even talking about the gaiaphage cast a shadow on him, made his breathing heavy and his heartbeat too loud.

“It wants Nemesis. It’s looking for him.”

“Nemesis?”

“Man, you don’t get any of the good gossip, do you?”

“I’m mostly hanging with my crews.”

“Little Pete,” Lana explained. “Nemesis. It wants him night and day, and sometimes it’s like that voice is screaming in my head. Sometimes it’s bad. Then I need someone to, you know, bring me back.”

“But Little Pete’s dead and gone,” Quinn said.

Lana laughed a hard, pitiless laugh. “Yeah? Tell the voice in my head, Quinn. The voice in my head is scared. The gaiaphage is scared.”

“That’s probably a good thing. Right?”

Lana shook her head. “Doesn’t feel good, Quinn. Something big is happening. Something definitely not good.”

“I saw…” He winced; he should be telling Albert first. Too late. “The barrier. It seems like it’s changing color.”

“Changing color? Changing to what color?” Lana asked.

“Black. It may be turning black.”





NINE

35 HOURS, 25 MINUTES

SO FAR PETE had experimented only a little with his new game. It was a very complicated game with so many pieces. So much he could do.

There were avatars, about three hundred of them, which was a lot. They hadn’t seemed very interesting until he looked very close at them and saw that each one was a complex spiral, like two long spiral ladders joined together, then twisted and compressed so that if you looked at the avatar from a distance you didn’t see anything but a symbol.

He had touched a couple of the avatars, but when he did that they blurred and broke and disappeared. So maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do.

But the real question was: what was the point of the game? He didn’t see any score.

All he knew was that it was all inside the ball. The game did not see outside the ball. It was all inside, and there was the Darkness glowing at the bottom, and the ball itself, and neither of them was affected by the game. He had tried to move the Darkness but his controls had no effect on it.