Fear (Gone #5)(23)

In some ways it really wasn’t a very good game.

Pete picked an avatar at random, and zoomed in on it until he could see the spirals inside spirals. They were beautiful, really. Delicate. No wonder his earlier moves had destroyed the avatars; he had just been scrambling up the intricate latticework.

This time he would try something different. And there, flitting magically from place to place, was the perfect avatar.

Taylor was enjoying the best of both worlds. Using her power she could “bounce” from the island to the town to the lake. All in all it was the most useful power imaginable. Brianna could keep her super-speed and her worn-out sneakers and the broken wrists she got when she fell, and the rest of it.

Taylor just had to picture a place where she’d been, and pop! There she was. In the flesh. So once Caine had arranged for Taylor to visit the island—San Francisco de Sales Island, formerly owned by Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance—she could bounce back anytime.

Which meant that Taylor slept in a fabulous bedroom in a fabulous mansion. She could have also worn Jennifer Brattle’s amazing wardrobe, but she was too small in a number of dimensions.

But if she ever got lonely, she could just picture Perdido Beach and be there.

It made her very useful. Which was how she ended up working for both King Caine and Albert. Caine wanted information on Sam and what was happening at the lake. And Albert wanted some of that, plus information on Caine.

Taylor owned the gossip of the FAYZ. She was the TMZ of the FAYZ.

Or maybe the CIA of the FAYZ.

But either way, life was good for a smart girl with the power to simply pop from place to place. And just as important: pop right back out.

At the moment she was lying in her bed. The room she was in had been called the Amazon room because of the leafy green color of the walls and the jaguar-print bedclothes. There were a lot of bedrooms in the mansion, and amazingly some still had clean sheets.

Clean sheets! The equivalent of living in a palace compared to life in the rest of the miserable FAYZ, where you were lucky to have a mattress no one had peed on recently.

She was in bed munching on slightly stale saltines—she had to be careful about raiding the pantry; Albert had inventoried it—and watching an old Hey Arnold! on DVD. The fuel for the generator, too, was controlled and very limited, but occasional electricity was part of her salary.

Suddenly Taylor had the feeling someone else was in the room. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Okay, who is there?”

No answer. Could it be Bug? She would know if Bug had been brought out to the island.

Nothing. She was letting her imagination—

Something moved. Right in front of her. For just a second the TV screen had blurred. Like something transparent but distorting had moved in front of it.

“Hey!” She was poised, ready to bounce out of here in a heartbeat. She listened to the room. Nothing. Whatever had been there was gone now. Or maybe had never been there to begin with; that was most likely. She was imagining things.

Taylor reached for the remote control and saw that her skin was gold. Her first reaction was that it was a trick of the light from the cartoon. But after a few seconds she decided, no. No, this was weird.

Taylor climbed out of bed and went to the window. In the moonlight her skin was still gold.

Crazy. Not real.

She searched in the dark and found a candle. She clumsily thumbed a lighter and brought fire to the wick.

Yes. Her skin was gold.

Carrying the candle, she went to the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror.

She was gold. From head to toe. Her black hair was still black, but every square inch of her skin was the color of actual yellow gold.

Then she leaned close to look at the reflection of her own eyes. And that was when she screamed, because the irises were an even deeper gold.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

Shaking, she switched out of her bed shirt into jeans and a T-shirt. Because maybe she was just hallucinating, so she needed to have someone else look at her.

Taylor pictured Lana’s hotel, the hallway.

She bounced.

The pain was instant and unbearable. Like nothing she had ever felt or imagined. Her left hand and the outer meat of her left calf felt as if they were pressed against red-hot steel.

Taylor screamed and thrashed and the pain only grew worse. She was hanging from her hand and her leg, just hanging, not standing on anything, just hanging from… She screamed again as she realized she was not at Clifftop. She was in the forest, hanging from a tall tree. Her left hand and the outer edge of her left calf had materialized in the tree.

In the tree.

She dangled, screaming, right arm and left arm reaching, grabbing, wild and out of control. Her golden flesh shining dully in the moonlight.

And the pain!

It had to be a dream. This couldn’t be real. She hadn’t bounced here. No, it was just a horrible nightmare. She had to bounce away, even if it was a dream, bounce back to her bedroom.

Taylor strained to visualize her room. Pushed back the pain for just a second … just…

Taylor bounced.

The hand was gone. Neatly cut off at the wrist. No blood, just a sudden ending. Taylor could not see her calf. Nor could she feel it.

She was not in her bedroom. She was on a car in the driveway of Clifftop.

On the car. Both of her legs were in the car, but she was on it, on the dusty roof of a Lexus. She had materialized with her legs sticking through the roof.