Emma disappeared.

Anna screamed.

The other older kids took notice, the littles, too.

“Oh, my God!” Anna cried. “Emma. Emma. Oh, God!”

She grabbed Sam’s hands and he held her tight.

The prees, some of them, caught the fear. Mother Mary came over. “What’s going on? You’re scaring the kids. Where’s Emma?”

Anna just kept saying, “Oh, my God,” and calling her sister’s name.

“Where’s Emma?” Mary demanded again. “What’s going on?”

Sam didn’t want to explain. Anna was hurting him with the pressure of her fingers digging into the backs of his hands. Anna’s eyes were huge, staring holes in him.

“How far apart were you born?” Sam asked.

Anna just stared in blank horror.

Sam lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “How far apart were you born, Anna?”

“Six minutes,” she whispered.

“Hold my hands, Sam,” she said.

“Don’t let me go, Sam,” she said.

“I won’t, Anna, I won’t let you go,” Sam said.

“What’s going to happen, Sam?”

“I don’t know, Anna.”

“Will we go to where our mom and dad are?”

“I don’t know, Anna.”

“Am I going to die?”

“No, Anna. You’re not going to die.”

“Don’t let go of me, Sam.”

Mary was there now, a baby on her hip. John was there. The prees, some of them, watched with serious, worried looks on their faces.

“I don’t want to die,” Anna repeated. “I…I don’t know what it’s like.”

“It’s okay, Anna.”

Anna smiled. “That was a nice date. When we went out.”

“It was.”

For a split second it was like Anna blurred. Too fast to be real. She blurred, and Sam could almost swear that she had smiled at him.

And his fingers squeezed on nothing.

For a terribly long time no one moved or said anything.

The littles didn’t cry out. The older kids just stared.

Sam’s fingertips still remembered the feel of Anna’s hands. He stared at the place where her face had been. He could still see her pleading eyes.

Unable to stop himself, he reached a hand into the space she had occupied. Reaching for a face that was no longer there.

Someone sobbed.

Someone cried out, other voices then, the prees started crying.

Sam felt sick. When his teacher had disappeared he hadn’t been expecting it. This time he had seen it coming, like a monster in a slow-motion nightmare. This time he had seen it coming, like standing rooted on the railroad tracks, unable to jump aside.

TWENTY

131 HOURS, 03 MINUTES

“IT JUST HAPPENED,” Drake announced.

Caine sat in his over-large leather chair, the one that had formerly belonged to the mayor of Perdido Beach. It made him look small. It made him look very young. And to make matters worse, he was chewing on his thumbnail, which made it almost seem that he was sucking his thumb.

Diana was on the couch, lying back reading a magazine and barely paying attention. “What happened?”

“The two girls you had me following. They both just took the big jump. They poofed, as that idiot Quinn says.”

Caine jerked to his feet. “Just as I predicted. Just like I said.” Caine did not seem to be happy to have been proven right. He came around from behind his desk and to Drake’s great enjoyment, snatched the magazine out of Diana’s hand and threw it across the room. “You think maybe you could pay attention?”

Diana sighed and sat up slowly, brushed a piece of lint from her blouse. “Don’t get pissy with me, Caine,” she warned. “I’m the one who said we needed to start collecting birth certificates.”

Drake had made time to check out Diana’s psych file the day after the FAYZ came. But her file had been missing by then. In its place she had left Drake’s file lying open on the doc’s desk and drawn a little smiley face beside the word “sadist.”

Drake had already hated her. But after that, hating Diana had become a full-time occupation.

To Drake’s disgust, Caine accepted Diana’s back talk. “Yeah. That was a good idea,” Caine said. “A very good idea.”

“Diana’s boy Sam was there,” Drake said.

Diana did not respond to the provocation.

“He was holding the one girl’s hand when she bugged,” Drake added. “Looking right into her eyes. See, the first girl goes and they all know what’s coming at that point. The second girl, she was weepy over it. I was too far off to hear what she said, but you could tell she was basically wetting herself.”

“Sadism,” Diana said. “The enjoyment of another person’s pain.”

Drake stretched his shark grin. “Words don’t scare me.”

“You wouldn’t be a psychopath if they did, Drake.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Caine said. He slumped back in the oversized chair and started biting his thumb again. “It’s November seventeenth. I have five days to figure out how to beat this.”

“Five days,” Drake echoed.

“I don’t know what we’d do if you bugged out, Caine,” Drake said. He sent Diana a look that said he knew exactly what he would do if Caine wasn’t around anymore.