“In his dreams . . . in his dreams the world . . . Everything is so . . .” She formed her hands as if trying to make a shape out of something that defied definition.
“Sam’s dreams?” Caine demanded, half skeptical, half angry.
Orsay looked sharply at him. “No. No, not Sam. Sam’s dreams are easy. There’s no magic in them.”
“Then tell me about them. That’s what I sent you to find out.”
Orsay shrugged. “He’s . . . I don’t know. Like, worried. He’s distracted,” she said dismissively. “He thinks he’s screwing up and, anyway, he just wants to get away from it all. And of course, he thinks about food a lot.”
“Poor baby,” Diana said. “All that power. All that responsibility. Boo-hoo.”
Caine laughed. “I guess being the boss isn’t what Sam thought it would be.”
“I think it’s exactly what he thought it would be,” Diana argued. “I don’t think he ever wanted any of this. I think he just wanted to be left alone.” That last sentence she spoke pointedly.
“I don’t leave people alone when they screw with me,” Caine said. “Useful information, Diana.”
He stood up. “So. Sam is running scared. But not scared of me. Good. He’s worried about his silly job as mayor of loserville. Good.” He tapped the top of Orsay’s head. “Hey. Anything about the power plant in Sam’s dreams?”
Orsay shook her head. She was off again, off in some zombie trance reliving some strange hallucination of her own or maybe someone else’s.
Caine clapped his hands together. “Good. Sam isn’t obsessing over the power plant. The enemy,” he said with a grand flourish, “is looking inward, not outward. In fact, we could strike at any time. Except.”
He stared hard at Diana.
“I’ll get him,” she said.
“I can’t do it without Jack, Diana.”
“I’ll get him,” she said.
“You want Jack? I’ll get him,” Drake said.
Caine said, “You’re thinking of the old Jack, Drake. You have to remember that Jack has powers now.”
“I don’t care about his powers,” Drake snarled.
“Diana will give me Jack,” Caine said. “And then we will turn off the lights and feed the—” He stopped very abruptly. He blinked in confusion.
“Feed?” Drake echoed, puzzled.
Caine almost didn’t hear him. His brain seemed to trip, to skip a step, like a scratch in a DVD when the picture pixilates for a moment before starting up again. The familiar grounds of Coates Academy swam before his eyes.
Feed?
What had he meant?
Who had he meant?
“You can all go,” he said, distracted.
No one moved, so he made it clear: “Go away. Go away and leave me alone!”
Then he added, “Leave her.”
With Diana and Drake gone, Caine knelt before Orsay again. “You saw him, didn’t you? You felt him there. He touched your mind. I can tell.”
Orsay didn’t deny. She met his gaze, unflinching. “He was in the little boy’s dreams.”
“The little boy?” Caine frowned. “Little Pete? Is that who you mean?”
“He needed the little boy. The dark thing, the gaiaphage, he was . . .” She searched for a word, and when she found it, it surprised her. “He was learning.”
“Learning?” Caine gripped her arm tightly, squeezing meaning from her. She flinched. “Learning what?”
“Creation,” Orsay said.
Caine stared at her. He should ask. He should ask what she meant. What would the Darkness create? What would he learn from the mind of a five-year-old autistic?
“Go inside,” Caine whispered. He let go of her arm. “Go!”
Alone, he searched his mind, his memory. He stared into the trees at the edge of the campus as though the explanation might be hiding there in the early morning shadows.
“And then we will turn off the lights and feed the—”
He had not just misspoken. It wasn’t just . . . nothing. There had been a definite idea there, something tangible. Something that needed doing.
Hungry in the dark.
It felt like someone had a rope wrapped around his brain. Someone he couldn’t see, someone standing far off in the dark, invisible. The rope disappeared into gloom and mystery, but at this end it was attached to him.
And out there, the Darkness held the other end. Yanked it whenever it liked.
Like Caine was a fish on a hook.
He crawled up onto the step. The granite was cold. He felt exposed and ridiculous sitting there, almost doubled over, beads of sweat forming on his brow.
It still had its hook in him. It was playing him, letting the line go slack, letting him think he was free, then yanking back hard, making sure the hook was still set, wearing him out.
Playing him.
Caine flashed on a memory almost forgotten. He saw his “father,” seated in a deck chair with salt spray darkening his tan jacket, holding the long, supple pole, sawing it back and forth.
Caine had gone fishing that one time, with his “father.” It hadn’t been a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn kind of experience. Caine’s father—the man he’d grown up calling his father—was not a man for small, intimate moments, for worms in a bucket and bamboo poles.
They were on a trip down to Mexico. Caine’s “mother” had been left to shop in Cancún, and Caine had been granted the high privilege of accompanying his father on what amounted to a business trip disguised as a father-son fishing trip.