Lies (Gone #3)(94)

“The girl, there was a girl here,” Astrid said.

“What’s going on, Astrid? I just—” She stopped talking long enough to cough ten, twelve times in startlingly rapid succession. “I just stopped Lance from beating some kid half to death. People all running around like nuts down on the beach. I mean, jeez, I take a day off to get over this stupid flu and suddenly it’s craziness everywhere!”

Astrid blinked, looked around, tried to make sense of way too much information. “It’s the game,” she said. “It’s the gaiaphage. It reached Petey through his game.”

“Say what?”

Astrid knew she’d said too much. Brianna was not the person to trust with the truth about Little Pete. “Did you see Nerezza?”

“What? The girl who hangs out with Orsay?”

“She’s not a girl,” Astrid said. “Not really.” She grabbed Brianna’s arm. “Find Sam. We need him. Find him!”

“Okay. Where?”

“I don’t know,” Astrid cried. She bit her lip. “Look everywhere!”

“Hey,” Brianna said, and then interrupted herself to cough until she was red in the face. She cursed, coughed some more, and finally said, “Hey, I’m fast. But even I can’t look everywhere.”

“Let me think for a minute,” Astrid said. She squeezed her eyes shut. Where? Where would Sam have gone? He was hurt, angry, feeling useless.

No, that wasn’t quite right.

“Oh, God, where?” Astrid wondered.

She hadn’t seen him since he had gone off to deal with Zil and the fire. What had happened to make him run away? Had he done something he was ashamed of?

No, that wasn’t it, either. He had seen the whipped boy.

“The power plant,” Astrid said.

“Why would he be there?” Brianna frowned.

“Because it’s the place that scares him most,” Astrid said.

Brianna looked doubtful. But then her frown lines relaxed. “Yeah,” she said. “That would be Sam.”

“You have to get him, Brianna. He’s Petey’s best piece.”

“Ummmm…what?”

“Never mind,” Astrid snapped. “Get Sam here. Now!”

“How?”

“Hey, you’re the Breeze, right? Just do it!”

Brianna considered that for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I’m outta—”

The “here” was lost in the wind.

Astrid handed the game player to her brother. He looked down at the ground, oblivious. He felt the game player for a moment, then dropped it.

“You have to keep playing, Petey.”

Her brother shook his head. “I lost.”

“Petey, listen to me.” Astrid knelt before him, held him, then thought better of it and let him go. “I saw the game. You showed me the game. I was inside it. But it’s real, Petey. It’s real.”

Little Pete stared past her. Not interested. Not even seeing her, maybe, let alone hearing her.

“Petey. He’s trying to destroy us. You have to play.”

She shoved the game at him. “Nerezza is the gaiaphage’s avatar. You made her real. You gave her a body. Only you have that kind of power. It’s using you, Petey, it’s using you to kill.”

But if Little Pete cared, or even understood, he showed no sign of it.



It was a panic run. Most of the population of Perdido Beach, all running and no one knowing quite why. Or maybe they all knew why but each had his own reason.

Zil loved it. Here at last was the total blind panic he’d hoped would result from the fires. Here was all order breaking down completely.

Kids on the beach stumbled in the sand. Some ran screaming into the water.

Drake, alive. Drake with his whip hand lashing at them, like he was driving cattle into the sea.

More kids sticking to the road, running parallel to the beach. Zil was with them, running with Turk beside him, looking for the freaks, seeing a kid whose only mutant power was the ability to glow brightly, harmless, but a freak and like all freaks he had to be dealt with.

Turk pulled up, raised his shotgun, aimed and fired. He missed, but the kid panicked and smashed facedown against the curb. Zil kicked him and kept running. He shouted in wild glee as he ran.

“Run, freaks! Run!”

But there were very few freaks in the mass of kids on the road. Too few real targets. But that was okay because the point right now was fear, fear and chaos.

Nerezza had told him it was coming. A freak herself? Zil wondered. He would hate to have to kill her, she was hot and mysterious and so much better than boring, pasty Lisa.

He spotted Lance ahead. Good old Lance, but he had lost his gun and his bat.

“I need a weapon!” Lance cried. “Give me something!”

Turk had a nail-studded stick. He tossed it to Lance. They took off again, a pack of wolves chasing down a terrified herd of cattle.

The older kids were pulling away. But the fat ones, the young ones, they were falling behind, worn out or simply unable to keep up on shorter legs.

They were all crammed onto the curved road that led to Clifftop.

Zil pointed. “That kid there. There! He’s a freak lover!”

Lance got there first and swung the nailed stick. The kid evaded it and hared off the road, tumbling down the slope into bushes and coming to rest against a cactus.