Someone was crying, loudly enough to be heard. Someone else shushed him.
“That’s okay. Cry if you want to cry, because I feel like crying with you.”
“Yes,” Toto said.
“You can be sad and you can be scared. But we built this place and kept ourselves going by hanging in there together. Right?”
No one answered.
“Right?” Sam demanded more insistently.
“Damn right,” a voice called back.
“So we hang together still. Edilio is here. You listen to Edilio.”
“But you’re the leader!” a different voice cried, and others seconded it. “We need you! Sam!”
Sam looked down, not pleased, really, but maybe a little gratified. At the same time, though, he was beginning to realize something. It took a few moments to form coherently in his mind. He had to check it against what he knew, because at first it seemed wrong.
Finally he said, “No. No. I’m a lousy leader.”
There was a pause before Toto said, “He believes it.”
Sam laughed, amazed that he really did believe it. “No, I’m a lousy leader,” he repeated. “Look, I mean well. And I have powers. But it’s Albert who kept people fed and alive. And up here it’s Edilio who really runs things. Even Quinn, he’s a better leader than me. Me? I get pissed off when you need me, and then I pout when you don’t. No. Edilio’s a leader. I … I don’t know what I am, except for being the guy who can make light shoot out of his hands.”
He stepped back, out of the direct glow of the Sammy sun, baffled by the unexpected turn his speech had taken. He had meant to tell everyone to stick together and be disciplined. He had ended up feeling like a fool, taking a momentous occasion to just make an idiot of himself.
Edilio spoke up. He had a softer voice. And still had a trace of his Honduran accent. “I know what Sam is. Maybe, like he said, he’s not a great leader. But he’s a great fighter. He’s our warrior; that’s what he is. Our soldier. So what he’s going to do, Sam, what he’s going to do is go out there into the dark and fight our enemies. Try to keep us safe.”
“He believes it,” Toto said unnecessarily.
“Yeah,” Sam whispered. He looked down at his hands, palms up. “Yeah,” he said louder. Then, still to himself: “Well. I’ll be damned. I’m not the leader. I’m the soldier.” He laughed and looked at Edilio, his face nothing but shadows in the light of the Sammy sun. “It takes me a while to figure things out, doesn’t it?”
Edilio grinned. “Do me a favor. When you find Astrid, repeat that to her, word for word, the part about how it takes you a while. Then remember her exact reaction and tell me.”
Then, serious again, Edilio said, “I’ll take care of these people here, Sam. Go find our friends. And if you run into Drake, kill that son of a bitch.”
The sky closed.
Darkness. Absolute, total darkness.
Astrid heard her own breathing.
She heard Cigar’s hesitant footsteps. Slowing. Stopping.
“We aren’t far from Perdido Beach,” Astrid said.
How strange what absolute black did to the sound of words. To the sound of her own heart.
“We have to try to remember the direction. Otherwise we’ll start walking in circles.”
I will not panic, she told herself. I will not let the fear paralyze me.
She reached for Cigar. Her hand touched nothing.
“We should hold hands,” Astrid said. “So we don’t get separated.”
“You have claws,” Cigar said. “They have poison needles in them.”
“No, no, that’s not real. That’s a trick your mind is playing on you.”
“The little boy is here,” Cigar said.
“How do you know?” Astrid moved closer to the source of his voice. She thought she was quite close to him. She tried to call on other senses. Could she hear his heartbeat? Could she feel his body warmth?
“I see him. Can’t you see him?”
“I can’t see anything.”
She should have brought something to use as a torch. Something she could burn. Of course, showing light out here in the open would make her visible to people and things she didn’t want seeing her.
It was just that the pressure of the dark—and that was how it felt, like pressure, like it wasn’t an absence of light, but like it was black felt or something hung in drapes all around her—was hemming her in. Like it was a physical obstruction.
Nothing had changed except that light had been subtracted. Every object was exactly where it had been before. But that wasn’t how it felt.
“The little boy is looking at you,” Cigar said.
Astrid felt a chill.
“Is he talking?”
“No. He likes quiet.”
“Yes. He always did,” Astrid said. “And darkness. He liked the dark. It soothed him.”
Had Petey made all of this happen? Just to get his blessed silence and peace?
“Petey?” she said.
It felt ridiculous. She was talking to someone she couldn’t see. Someone who probably wasn’t there. Someone who, if he existed at all, was not human, not anything physical or tangible.
The irony made her laugh out loud. She’d just given up talking to one perhaps unreal spiritual entity. Now here she was doing it again.
“He doesn’t like when you laugh,” Cigar said, shushing her.