Drake didn’t answer. His whip was ready to slash at her. But he hesitated, unsure if she was friend or foe.
“I’ve felt it since I got close,” Penny said, looking past Drake up at the path. “I was just wandering. Going nowhere. And then, little by little, I realized I was going somewhere.” She said this in a singsong voice. “I was going here.” Then, like a person waking out of a dream, she said, “It’s that thing Caine went to, isn’t it? The Darkness. The thing that gave you that Whip Hand.”
Drake said, “Would you like me to introduce you?”
“Yes. I would,” Penny said very seriously.
Diana had stolen tear-distorted glances at Brianna, who seemed content to let this go on, so long as it ate up more time. Now Brianna spoke. “I don’t think you two are going anywhere.”
She flew at Drake.
But Diana had been there at times when Brianna moved at top speed. When she moved at top speed you didn’t see her arms or legs; you didn’t see her draw her deadly machete. Diana saw those things now and knew that the Breeze had slowed.
But she was still fast.
The machete swung and Drake’s whip was cut in half. Five feet of flesh-colored tentacle lay in the dirt like a dead python.
Brianna spun, came back around fast, but with her eyes carefully down on the ground, cautious, distracted, and suddenly she cried out, skidded, leaped across something Diana could not see.
Penny had struck!
Drake picked up his severed tentacle and pushed the two stump ends together. He looked less furious than peevish. The injury was at worst a temporary inconvenience.
Brianna was jumping around like a crazy person, leaping from place to place, focused like mad on every move, arms windmilling for balance.
“What is she doing?” Drake asked.
Penny laughed. “Trying not to fall into the lava. And her friend, Dekka? The one she was expecting to show up? She’s out there somewhere....” She jerked her head back toward the night-dark desert. “Trying to get her little brain back to reality.”
Diana saw wary concern on Drake’s face. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps Penny might be more than he could handle. “Let’s go. The gaiaphage is waiting.”
“Do you think I’m cute?” Penny asked him.
Drake froze, stood stock-still, and now the look on his face was more than just wary.
“Yeah,” Drake said. “Yeah. You’re cute.”
His tentacle had grown back, the stumps melding quickly together, smoothing as if he was made out of clay and an invisible hand was pinching the edges together, then rolling the whole thing like a Play-Doh snake. He raised the whip high and snapped it in front of Diana’s face.
“Now move,” he said.
Diana watched Brianna, still leaping desperately, trapped in some illusion of danger.
And she saw the little boy, Justin, crawl ahead of her into the darkness.
Dekka lay sobbing in the darkness. She could barely see her hands in front of her face.
She didn’t know what had happened to her. Just that in an instant she had been frozen, completely immobile. Paralyzed.
She’d been covered in a translucent white goo, like clay or Silly Putty. And it had coated every single inch of her body. It had pushed its way into her ears. Like invisible fingers were poking it in there, filling her right up to the eardrums.
So that she could hear nothing but the beating of her own heart.
So that she could hear the gristle in her neck as she squirmed helplessly.
The white putty was pushed into her nose. So deep, up into her sinuses. She had to breathe through her mouth, but as soon as she opened her mouth the white stuff filled her mouth and pushed its way into the space between her teeth and her cheeks, under her tongue, then down her throat. She gagged but it didn’t matter; the stuff filled her mouth and throat and she could feel it cold and dense and heavy in her lungs.
She screamed but no sound came out.
In some panic-free corner of her mind, some small remnant of Dekka knew this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. She knew it was Penny who had done this, who had filled her mind with this vision.
But she could not breathe. Could. Not.
She was buried alive in it, buried alive, and her brain screamed in a way that her body no longer could.
Had to be an illusion. Had to be a trick. But did it really? Was she so sure it wasn’t real in this nightmare world?
She couldn’t breathe, but she realized, too, that she wasn’t dying. Her heart still beat. She was covered and filled with the white stuff, and she should be dying but she wasn’t.
Then she felt the white stuff harden. It wasn’t putty anymore but fast-drying clay. Already her teeth bit on something as hard as porcelain.
Then the bugs were inside of her.
The bugs.
Not real—she knew that in some tiny, cowering corner of her mind—couldn’t be real; the bugs had been eliminated. They’d been made nonexistent. So there was no way they could be inside her again, no way they could be swarming through her guts and no Sam to cut them out and let them out; she was trapped inside this porcelain tomb and they were inside her again.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
Suddenly, all of it was gone.
She was on dirt. Air was in her nose. Her eyes opened.
A girl had stood there and said, “That’s a new one for me. Did you like it?”
And Dekka, trembling like a leaf ready to fall, said nothing. Just breathed. Breathed.
“Don’t come after me,” Penny had said.