And then there was the problem of Brittney. Had the gaiaphage told her what to do? Would she do it? Would she know how to find the way without the coyotes as guides?
“How am I supposed to feed you?” Drake demanded.
“Darkness say to coyote: don’t kill human. Did not say don’t eat dead human.”
Drake laughed with a certain delight. This Pack Leader was definitely a smarter animal than the original one. The gaiaphage had ordered the beasts not to kill humans for fear they might unknowingly kill someone useful: Lana, or even Nemesis. But Drake knew which humans were expendable.
“You know where I can find a human?” Drake asked.
“Pack Leader knows,” Pack Leader said.
“Okay, then. Let’s get you boys some dinner. Then we go get Diana.”
Astrid found Edilio just coming back down from the Pit. The Artful Roger and Justin, the little kid Roger looked after, were with him, but Edilio sent them both away when he spotted Astrid.
“I got that thing, that … whatever it was. Up under a tarp. You want to look at it now?” Edilio asked.
“No. I’m sorry you had to do that. It couldn’t have been very pleasant.”
“It wasn’t,” Edilio said flatly.
“Listen, it looks like the stain is accelerating. Sam wants me to check the frames early.”
“I saw it growing. Faster. A lot faster,” Edilio said. “But I understand if Sam wants more information.” He blew out a weary breath and drank from a water bottle.
“Don’t come yourself,” Astrid said. “Just send one of your guys.”
Edilio made an incredulous face. “And tell Sam something happened to you because I wasn’t there?”
Astrid treated it as a joke and laughed.
But Edilio didn’t join in. “Sam’s all we’ve got. You’re all Sam’s got. Come on, it’ll be a quick, easy walk without having to carry those frames.”
The plan had been to allow twenty-four hours before checking the frames. The idea had been that a frame that was 10 percent stain might grow to 20 percent stain and that then Astrid could calculate the rate of growth.
But now that the plan was revealed as absurdly optimistic. All the frames were 100 percent filled with black. There was no chance of an accurate calculation: it had grown too far, grown too fast. And the rate of acceleration could only be increasing exponentially.
She stood looking up, craning her neck to see the tallest black finger yet. It stretched three hundred feet up the side of the dome.
As she watched, it grew. She could see it moving.
Then, from a low point in the stain, a new black tendril shot up as fast as a car on the freeway. It just seemed to explode upward. Up and up, and she tilted her head back to see it, and up farther and farther.
The stain crossed the line between blank pearly gray and sunlight. Then it slowed. But that slim black finger violated the sky like graffiti on the Mona Lisa. It was vandalism. It was ugliness.
It was the future written clearly for Astrid to see.
FIFTEEN
22 HOURS, 16 MINUTES
MOHAMED HAD SET out from the lake on the tedious walk to Perdido Beach as soon as he could get a water bottle and a little food in his belly.
He carried a pistol and a knife, but he wasn’t really worried. Everyone knew he was under Albert’s protection. And no one messed with Albert’s people.
For most of the time since the coming of the FAYZ, Mohamed had lain low, stayed out of the way of all the big wheels who were busy killing and being killed.
As crazy as things were in the FAYZ, the smart move was to just do the minimum to get food and shelter. And not even shelter some of the time.
He was thirteen, a man. He was thin and starting to get taller, a growth spurt that had left his shorts too short and his shoes too tight. His family had just moved to Perdido Beach when his mother got a job at the power plant. The school was supposed to be better than the one he’d been at in King City. His dad still worked there, working ten hours a day at the family’s Circle K, selling gas and cigarettes and milk to a mostly Hispanic population. It was a really long commute, and some nights his dad hadn’t come home, which made everyone feel strange and abandoned.
But that was the way it was, his father had explained. A man worked. A man did what he had to do to take care of his family. Even if it meant he saw less of them.
Sometimes Moomaw—Mohamed’s paternal grandmother—would talk about going back to Syria. But Mohamed’s father would shut that down right away. He had left Syria when he was twenty-two and didn’t miss it at all, not even a little, no, sir. Yes, he’d been a medical student there and sold hot dogs to farmhands now, but it was still better.
Was it tough sometimes being the only Muslim at the Perdido Beach school? Yeah. He’d been pushed around by Orc a few times. Kids made fun of him for praying. For refusing the pepperoni pizza at lunch. But pretty soon Orc had lost interest and most kids didn’t even think twice about where his parents came from or how he prayed.
Fortunately Mohamed’s family had never been all that strict about the dietary laws. He hadn’t eaten pork since the coming of the FAYZ, but he would have in a heartbeat if anyone had some. He’d eaten rat, cat, dog, bird, and fish and slimy things he didn’t have a name for. He’d have jumped all over a pepperoni pizza if anyone had one. Staying alive was not a sin: Allah saw all; Allah understood all.
Someday this would all end; Mohamed was sure of that. Or tried to be. Someday the barrier would come down and his father and mother and brothers and sister would be waiting for him.