Lies (Gone #3)(43)

Taylor chose that moment to bounce in. She took a look at the body and yelped. She covered her mouth and looked away.

“He’s back,” Sam said.

“Taylor, get Sam out of here. Take him to Astrid,” Edilio ordered.

“But Sam and Astrid are—”

“Just do it!” Edilio roared. “And then haul your butt around and get the other members of the council over there. They want to know what’s going on? Fine. Then they can get up out of their beds.”

“It doesn’t go away,” Sam said through gritted teeth. “You know that, Edilio? It doesn’t go away. It’s always with me. It’s always with me.”

“Take him,” Edilio ordered Taylor. “And tell Astrid we need to talk.”





EIGHTEEN


15 HOURS, 57 MINUTES




“WE GO TONIGHT,” Caine said. Weak. So weak in every muscle. Sore. Panting just from climbing the stairs to the dining hall. Like he’d run a marathon.

Starvation. It did that to you.

He tried to count the exhausted, gaunt faces that turned toward him. But he couldn’t keep the number in his head. Fifteen? Seventeen? No more than that, certainly.

The last candle flickered on the table that had once been piled high with turkey loaf and pizza, Jell-O and limp salad, cartons of milk, all the usual school lunchroom fare.

This room had once been full of kids. All so healthy looking. Some thin, some fat, none as gaunt and hideous as what was left here now.

Coates Academy, the fashionable place for the well-off to send their troublesome kids. Kids who started fires. Bullies. Skanks. Druggies. Kids with psychological problems. Or just kids who talked back once too often. Or kids whose parents wanted them gone from their lives.

The difficult, the losers, the rejects. The unloved. Coates Academy, where you could dump your kids and not be bothered by them anymore.

Well, that was certainly working out well for all concerned.

Now, the desperate remnants of Coates. The ones mean enough or lucky enough to survive. Only four of them known to be mutants: Caine himself, a four bar; Diana, whose only power was the ability to gauge another mutant’s powers; Bug, with his ability to almost disappear; and Penny, who had developed an extremely useful power of illusion: she could make a person believe they were being attacked by monsters or stabbed with knives or on fire.

She had demonstrated it on a kid named Barry. Barry had been made to believe he was being chased around the room by spears. It had been funny watching him run in terror.

That was it. Four mutants, only two of which, Caine and Penny, were any good in a fight. Bug had his uses. And Diana was Diana. The only face he wanted to see now.

But she had her head down, resting it on her hands with elbows on her knees.

The others looked to him. They didn’t love him or even like him, but they still feared him.

“I called everyone here tonight because we are leaving,” Caine said.

“Do you have any food?” a voice cried pitifully.

Caine said, “We’re going to get food. We know a place. It’s an island.”

“How are we going to get to an island?”

“Shut up, Jason. It’s an island. Used to be owned by two famous actors you probably remember. Todd Chance and Jennifer Brattle. It’s a huge mansion on a private island. The kind of place they’d have stocked with lots of food.”

“The only way to get there is on a boat,” Jason whined. “How can we do that?”

“We’re going to take some boats,” Caine said with far more confidence than he felt.

Bug sneezed. He became almost visible when he sneezed.

“Bug knows about this place,” Caine said. “It’s famous.”

“So why didn’t we hear about it earlier?” Diana asked, mumbling at the floor.

“Because Bug is an idiot and it didn’t occur to him,” Caine snapped. “But the island is there. It’s called San Francisco de Sales. It’s on the map.”

He pulled a torn and crumpled paper from his pocket and unfolded it. It was taken from an atlas in the school’s library. “See?” He held it up and was gratified to see flickers of actual interest.

“We’re going to get boats,” Caine said. “We’re going to get them in Perdido Beach.”

That killed whatever faint enthusiasm there had been. “They got all kinds of freaks and guns and all,” a girl nicknamed Pampers said.

“Yeah, they do,” Caine admitted wearily. “But they’re all going to be too busy to deal with us. And if any of them get in our way, I’ll take care of them. Me or Penny.”

Kids glanced at Penny. She was twelve years old. She’d probably been pretty once. A pretty little Chinese-American girl with a tiny nose and surprised eyebrows. Now she looked like a scarecrow, brittle hair, gums red from malnutrition, with a rash that covered her neck and arms in a lacy pink pattern.

Jason said, “I think you’re nuts. Go through Perdido Beach? Half of us can’t even walk that far, let alone fight. We’re starving, man. Unless you have some food to give us, we’ll fall out before we reach the highway.”

“Listen to me,” Caine said softly. “We’re definitely going to need some food. Soon.”