“In which case the boat doesn’t matter,” Caine said. “We survive here, on the island, or we die.” He cast a reptilian look at Bug. “Some of us sooner than others.”
“Which way do we go?” Penny wondered aloud. “Right or left?”
“Anyone have a coin we can flip?” Diana asked.
Caine stood up. He shaded his eyes and looked left. Then right. “The cliffs look lower to the right.”
“Can’t you just go all magic powers and levitate us up to the top of the cliff?” Paint asked and then giggled nervously, slobbering down his red-stained lips.
“I’ve been wondering just that,” Caine said thoughtfully. “It’s a long way up. I don’t know.” He looked down at the kids in the boat. Diana knew what was coming next. She wondered idly who would get the honor.
“Let’s go, Paint,” Caine said. “You’re about useless, might as well be you.”
“What?” Paint’s alarm was comical. Diana would have felt sorry for him another time. But this was life and death and right now.
And Caine was right: Paint didn’t exactly contribute anything vital. He had no powers. He was no good in a fight. He was a druggie moron who had long since fried whatever brain he’d had.
Caine raised his hands and Paint floated up from his seat. It was as if Caine was lifting him from the middle of his body because Paint’s feet dangled and kicked and his arms waved. His long, ratty brown hair drifted and swirled as if he was in a slow-moving tornado.
“No, no, no,” he moaned.
Paint floated out over the water.
“If you lowered him a little it would be like he was walking on water,” Penny said.
Paint moved closer to the cliff, still just a few feet above the water, now twenty or thirty feet away from the boat.
“You know, Penny,” Diana said, “it’s not all that funny. If it works we’ll all be going up the same way.”
Somehow that fact had not occurred to Penny. Diana felt a distant sort of satisfaction at the way sadistic pleasure turned to worry on the girl’s face.
“Okay, now for the altitude,” Caine said. Paint began to rise again, up the cliff face. It was almost bare, hard-packed soil dotted with extrusions of rock and a few scattered bushes that looked like they’d chosen a very precarious spot to grow.
Paint rose. Diana held her breath.
“No, no, no!” Paint’s voice floated back down, ignored. He was no longer kicking. Instead he was trying to twist around to face the cliff, arms straining outward, looking for something—anything—to grab.
Halfway up, the height of a five story building, Paint’s ascent slowed noticeably. Caine took a deep breath. He didn’t seem to be straining physically. His muscles were not taut; the power he had was not about muscles. But his expression was grim and Diana knew that in some unfathomable way he was exerting all his power.
Paint rose, but more slowly.
And then he slipped. Fell.
Paint screamed.
He came to rest just ten feet in the air.
“Let’s go get him,” Caine said. Tyrell lowered the outboard into the water and the boat moved toward the screaming, wailing boy.
Caine dropped him into the boat. He landed hard, fell onto his rear end and began sobbing.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Diana said.
Caine shook his head. “No. I guess it’s too far. I could throw him that far. I’ve thrown cars that far. But I can’t levitate him.”
No one suggested throwing Paint. Diana’s warning that whatever worked would be done to each of them in turn kept them quiet. Diana mentally measured the distance Paint had traveled. Maybe seventy, eighty feet in all. So. Now she knew how far Caine could reach. The day might come when it would be very good to know that.
THIRTY
10 HOURS, 28 MINUTES
SAM HAD NO idea what he was doing, or even why.
He had run in blind panic from Perdido Beach. That shameful fact filled his mind, driving out even hunger.
He had seen Drake and he had panicked.
Freaked.
Lost it.
After bumming a free meal off Hunter Sam had headed toward the power plant. The power plant was where it had happened.
The beating, the whipping, had been so bad that Brianna had found morphine in the medical supplies at the plant and jabbed the needle into him and even then, even after the painkiller flooded him, the pain was too awful to endure.
But he had endured. And he’d lived through the next nightmarish hours, the morphine hallucinations, the staggering, stumbling, needing-to-scream hours.
He had fought Drake again, but it was Caine who had finally killed the psychopath. Caine had thrown Drake down a mine shaft that then collapsed on Drake’s head. Nothing could have survived.
And yet, Drake was alive.
He’d coped since that day by knowing that Drake was dead, buried under tons of rock, dead, gone, never to be faced again. That fact had let him cope.
But if Drake was unkillable…
Immortal…
Would Drake always be a part of life in the FAYZ?
Sam sat on the edge of the cliff, just half a mile from the power plant. He had found a bike on the way there and ridden it until the tire blew out. Then he had walked down the winding coast road intending to return to the power plant, to that room where it had happened. The place where Drake had broken him.
That was the thing of it, Sam thought, as he looked out over the empty, sparkling sea: Drake had broken something inside him. Sam had tried to put it back together. He’d tried to go back to being Sam. The Sam everyone expected him to be.