Quinn knew she meant the Darkness, the thing that named itself the gaiaphage.

“What does it want from you?” Quinn asked. Even talking about the gaiaphage cast a shadow on him, made his breathing heavy and his heartbeat too loud.

“It wants Nemesis. It’s looking for him.”

“Nemesis?”

“Man, you don’t get any of the good gossip, do you?”

“I’m mostly hanging with my crews.”

“Little Pete,” Lana explained. “Nemesis. It wants him night and day, and sometimes it’s like that voice is screaming in my head. Sometimes it’s bad. Then I need someone to, you know, bring me back.”

“But Little Pete’s dead and gone,” Quinn said.

Lana laughed a hard, pitiless laugh. “Yeah? Tell the voice in my head, Quinn. The voice in my head is scared. The gaiaphage is scared.”

“That’s probably a good thing. Right?”

Lana shook her head. “Doesn’t feel good, Quinn. Something big is happening. Something definitely not good.”

“I saw…” He winced; he should be telling Albert first. Too late. “The barrier. It seems like it’s changing color.”

“Changing color? Changing to what color?” Lana asked.

“Black. It may be turning black.”

NINE

35 HOURS, 25 MINUTES

SO FAR PETE had experimented only a little with his new game. It was a very complicated game with so many pieces. So much he could do.

There were avatars, about three hundred of them, which was a lot. They hadn’t seemed very interesting until he looked very close at them and saw that each one was a complex spiral, like two long spiral ladders joined together, then twisted and compressed so that if you looked at the avatar from a distance you didn’t see anything but a symbol.

He had touched a couple of the avatars, but when he did that they blurred and broke and disappeared. So maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do.

But the real question was: what was the point of the game? He didn’t see any score.

All he knew was that it was all inside the ball. The game did not see outside the ball. It was all inside, and there was the Darkness glowing at the bottom, and the ball itself, and neither of them was affected by the game. He had tried to move the Darkness but his controls had no effect on it.

In some ways it really wasn’t a very good game.

Pete picked an avatar at random, and zoomed in on it until he could see the spirals inside spirals. They were beautiful, really. Delicate. No wonder his earlier moves had destroyed the avatars; he had just been scrambling up the intricate latticework.

This time he would try something different. And there, flitting magically from place to place, was the perfect avatar.

Taylor was enjoying the best of both worlds. Using her power she could “bounce” from the island to the town to the lake. All in all it was the most useful power imaginable. Brianna could keep her super-speed and her worn-out sneakers and the broken wrists she got when she fell, and the rest of it.

Taylor just had to picture a place where she’d been, and pop! There she was. In the flesh. So once Caine had arranged for Taylor to visit the island—San Francisco de Sales Island, formerly owned by Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance—she could bounce back anytime.

Which meant that Taylor slept in a fabulous bedroom in a fabulous mansion. She could have also worn Jennifer Brattle’s amazing wardrobe, but she was too small in a number of dimensions.

But if she ever got lonely, she could just picture Perdido Beach and be there.

It made her very useful. Which was how she ended up working for both King Caine and Albert. Caine wanted information on Sam and what was happening at the lake. And Albert wanted some of that, plus information on Caine.

Taylor owned the gossip of the FAYZ. She was the TMZ of the FAYZ.

Or maybe the CIA of the FAYZ.

But either way, life was good for a smart girl with the power to simply pop from place to place. And just as important: pop right back out.

At the moment she was lying in her bed. The room she was in had been called the Amazon room because of the leafy green color of the walls and the jaguar-print bedclothes. There were a lot of bedrooms in the mansion, and amazingly some still had clean sheets.

Clean sheets! The equivalent of living in a palace compared to life in the rest of the miserable FAYZ, where you were lucky to have a mattress no one had peed on recently.

She was in bed munching on slightly stale saltines—she had to be careful about raiding the pantry; Albert had inventoried it—and watching an old Hey Arnold! on DVD. The fuel for the generator, too, was controlled and very limited, but occasional electricity was part of her salary.

Suddenly Taylor had the feeling someone else was in the room. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Okay, who is there?”

No answer. Could it be Bug? She would know if Bug had been brought out to the island.

Nothing. She was letting her imagination—

Something moved. Right in front of her. For just a second the TV screen had blurred. Like something transparent but distorting had moved in front of it.

“Hey!” She was poised, ready to bounce out of here in a heartbeat. She listened to the room. Nothing. Whatever had been there was gone now. Or maybe had never been there to begin with; that was most likely. She was imagining things.

Taylor reached for the remote control and saw that her skin was gold. Her first reaction was that it was a trick of the light from the cartoon. But after a few seconds she decided, no. No, this was weird.