Fear (Gone #5)(7)

Diana showed her ironic smirk. “You mean have I thought about what might happen if the baby can burn things like you can, Sam? Or has his father’s telekinetic power? Or any number of other abilities? No, Sam, no, I haven’t even thought about what happens when he, she, or it has a bad day and burns a hole in me from the inside out.”

Sam sighed. “He or she, Diana. Not it.”

He expected a wisecrack answer. Instead Diana’s carefully controlled expression collapsed. “Its father is evil. So is its mother,” she whispered. She twisted her fingers together, too hard, so hard it must be painful. “How can it not be the same?”

“Before I pass judgment,” Caine said, “does anyone have anything to say for Cigar?”

Caine did not refer to his chair as a throne. That would have been too laughable, even though he styled himself “King Caine.”

It was a heavy wooden chair of dark wood grabbed from an empty house. He believed the style was called Moorish. It sat a few feet back from the top stair of stone steps that led up to the ruined church.

Not a throne in name, but a throne in fact. He sat upright, not stiff but regal. He wore a purple polo shirt, jeans, and square-toed black cowboy boots. One boot rested on a low, upholstered footstool.

On Caine’s left stood Penny. Lana, the Healer, had fixed her shattered legs. Penny wore a sundress that hung limply from her narrow shoulders. She was barefoot. For some reason she refused to ever wear shoes since regaining use of her legs.

On his left stood Turk, supposedly Caine’s security, though it was impossible to imagine a situation Caine couldn’t deal with on his own. The truth was that Caine could levitate Turk and use him as a club if he chose. But it was important for a king to have people who served him. It made one look more kingly.

Turk was a sullen, stupid punk with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder and a big pipe wrench hanging from a loop on his straining belt.

Turk was guarding Cigar, a sweet-faced thirteen-year-old with the hard hands, strong back, and tanned face of a fisherman.

About twenty-five kids stood at the foot of the stairs. In theory everyone was supposed to show up for court, but Albert had suggested—a suggestion that had the force of a decree—that those who had work to do could blow it off. Work came first in Albert’s world, and Caine knew that he was king only so long as Albert kept everyone fed and watered.

At some time in the night a fight had broken out between a boy named Jaden and the boy everyone called Cigar because he had once smoked a cigar and gotten spectacularly sick.

Both Jaden and Cigar had been drinking some of Howard’s illegal booze, and no one was exactly clear what the fight had been about. But what was clear—witnessed by three kids—was that a fight had started and gone from angry words to fists to weapons in a heartbeat.

Jaden had swung a lead pipe at Cigar and missed. Cigar had swung a heavy oak table leg studded with big nails and he had not missed.

No one believed Cigar—who was a good kid, one of Quinn’s hardworking fishermen—had meant to kill Jaden. But Jaden’s brains had ended up on the sidewalk just the same.

There were four punishments in King Caine’s Perdido Beach: fine, lockup, Penny, or death.

A small infraction—for example, failing to show proper respect to the king, or blowing off work, or cheating someone in a deal—merited a fine. It could be a day’s food, two days’ unpaid labor, or the surrender of some valuable object.

Lockup was a room in town hall that had last imprisoned a boy named Roscoe until the bugs had eaten him from the inside out. Lockup meant two or more days with just water in that room. Fighting or vandalism would get you lockup.

Caine had handed out many fines and several lockups.

Only once had he imposed a sentence of Penny.

Penny was a mutant with the power to create illusions so real it was impossible not to believe them. She had a terrifyingly gruesome imagination. A sick, disturbed imagination. The girl who had earned thirty minutes of Penny had lost control of her bodily functions and ended up screaming and beating at her own flesh. Two days later she had still not been able to work.

The ultimate penalty was death. And Caine had never yet had to face imposing that.

“I’ll speak for Cigar.” Quinn, of course. Once upon a time Quinn had been Sam’s closest friend, his surfer-dude buddy. He’d been a weak, vacillating, insecure boy, one of those who had not handled the FAYZ very well.

But Quinn had come into his own as the head of the fishing crews. Muscles bunched in his neck and shoulders and back from pulling at the oars for long hours. He was the color of mahogany now.

“Cigar has never been any kind of trouble,” Quinn said. “He shows up for work on time and he never shirks. He’s a good guy and he’s a very good fisherman. When Alice fell in and was knocked out from hitting an oar, he was the one who jumped in and pulled her out.”

Caine nodded thoughtfully. He was going for a look of stern wisdom. But he was deeply agitated beneath the surface. On the one hand, Cigar had killed Jaden. That wasn’t some random act of vandalism or small-bore theft. If Caine didn’t impose the death penalty in this case, when was he ever going to?

He sort of wanted to.... In fact, yes, he definitely wanted to impose the death penalty. Maybe not on Cigar, but on someone. It would be a test of his power. It would send a message.

On the other hand, Quinn was not someone to pick a fight with. Quinn could decide to go on strike and people would get hungry in a hurry.