“You didn’t make me responsible. You don’t have that power. This”—he held up his hands, and light glowed from his palms—“this made me responsible. Having power made me responsible. I had the power and you had the brains. So we were chosen. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? People who can have to help those who can’t. The strong defend the weak from the strong. I don’t think you invented that, Astrid; all you did was make me see it. Well, I see it. There it is. The FAYZ gave me this light, and the FAYZ made it necessary. And now the light isn’t helping, is it? Now that monster is going to walk into town and kill people I care about and people I love.”
Astrid stood up. She was shaking. “I can’t . . .,” she said.
Sam stood and tried to hold her, but she pulled away. “If one of us is getting out of here, it has to be you, Astrid. If I get out, it’s trouble anyway, you know that. The world out there is waiting for a scapegoat.”
“You promised me,” she said. “You’ve always kept your promises to me, Sam. Keep this one. I’m holding you to it. You swore. You swore to me.”
From outside there came the sounds of yelling. Someone was crying, “Fire! Fire!”
“Go,” Astrid said, dismissing him. “And keep your word to me, Sam, or you’re a damned liar.”
He left, not sure how to respond to that. He was relieved to have something tangible to do.
It felt good to be running free down the beach. Lying in a box at the bottom of the lake Drake hadn’t expected to ever have it all back. A body. Not his, but his now, and it was in good shape and strong.
And so much more important, he had his whip. He had his whip hand!
Whip Hand!
No one was watching the beach. They were all huddled in terror in town. And the best thing was, they weren’t expecting him, were they? Astrid would have bragged all over town how she had looked down at a helpless Drake and laughed and laughed. She must have thought she was safe from him at last. No more Drake. All Drake’s threats were nothing now, hah hah.
What he would do to her.
The longing for that moment almost made him weak. He wanted it so badly. Had he ever wanted anything as badly as he wanted to hear Astrid beg for mercy?
But no, he couldn’t kill her. He had to keep her alive, which was better. Life meant pain. If there was one thing Drake had learned his entire life—well, at least since his mother had remarried—it was that life was pain. And there was such joy in causing pain.
He had seen the pleasure his stepfather had taken in beating Drake’s mother. And his mother must have almost enjoyed it, too, right? She kept doing things that pissed her husband off. Like she expected it. Like she wanted it. Law of the jungle, his grandfather told him once. The big and strong kill and eat the small and weak. And Drake knew his grandfather was speaking from experience. He could see it in the old man’s eyes. That old man had brought the pain in his life.
Drake climbed over the rocks that separated Town Beach from the much smaller Clifftop beach. He would climb the cliff, sneak past Clifftop, and come into town from the last direction Astrid would expect.
As he climbed, he felt the strength in this new body. He felt the power in his regrown whip hand as it lashed up, finding bushes and ledges and hauling him upward as swiftly as any rope.
Spider-Man! Hah!
Whip Hand!
As he climbed, he looked north and saw the fire. The fires of hell. Hah hah! Perfect. Let it all come down in pain and fire! He felt his ambitions broaden.
He was resurrected. He was resurrected to kill.
He was Jesus with a whip, an unkillable Satan coming with smoke and fire to destroy! In his mind it was a lurid comic-book panel: Drake Whip Hand, wreathed in fire, with Astrid and Diana cowering, whipped and begging for mercy.
And at some point he forgot all about Gaia.
TWENTY-SEVEN
1 HOUR, 29 MINUTES
ASTRID WATCHED SAM go and tried to calm the wild emotions she felt.
He wasn’t wrong. That was the hell of it. He wasn’t wrong. It would be his own light that killed. It was his light that had burned a hole in Brianna’s heart.
But this could not be the answer. Not after everything that had happened. This could not be the answer.
It is the answer, Astrid. You know it.
She followed him out as far as the door—well, the wreckage of a doorway—and saw him rushing across the plaza to where a fire had caught somehow in a drifted pile of trash.
A couple of kids were already taking care of it, and Sam wasn’t necessary. The truth was, the cries of “Fire!” almost served as a distraction, something to—
The whip was around her throat. She screamed but no sound emerged. She tried to breathe, but nothing came.
She reached for a standing pillar of stone; her fingernails clawed at it. She kicked at a piece of wood, hoping it would make some sound to draw Sam’s attention. The buildings around the plaza were supposed to be full of Edilio’s people: one of them must see!
Sam had only to turn around . . .
Astrid dropped, putting all her weight on the tentacle arm, hoping to pull him off balance. But he was too strong.
Drake drew her back into the shadows of the church. She was kicking, trying to scream, her lungs already burning from lack of oxygen.
“Hello, Astrid,” Drake said.
And she lost consciousness.
“We need a bucket brigade,” Sam said to Edilio. “There must be some kind of air current up high in the dome. It’s picking up sparks from the forest fire and dropping them all around.”