“We just tell them,” Astrid said.

“But we don’t know if it’s real or not,” Edilio argued.

Astrid shrugged. She stared at nothing and kept her features very still. “We tell them it’s all fake. Kids hate this place, but they don’t want to die.”

“How do we tell them if we don’t know?” Edilio seemed genuinely puzzled.

Howard laughed. “Deely-O, Deely-O, you are such a doof sometimes.” He put his feet down and leaned toward Edilio as if sharing a secret with him. “She means: We lie. Astrid means that we lie to everyone and tell them we do know for sure.”

Edilio stared at Astrid like he was expecting her to deny it.

“It’s for people’s own good,” Astrid said in a low voice, still looking at nothing.

“You know what’s funny?” Howard said, grinning. “I was pretty sure we were coming to this meeting so Astrid could rank on Sam for not telling us the whole truth. And now, it turns out we’re really here so Astrid can talk us all into becoming liars.”

“Becoming?” Dekka snarked with a cynical look at Howard. “Wouldn’t exactly be a transformation for you, Howard.”

Astrid said, “Look, if we let Orsay go on with this craziness, we could not only have kids stepping out on their fifteenth. We could have kids not wanting to wait that long. Kids deciding to end it right away and thinking they’d wake up on the other side with their parents.”

Everyone at the table leaned back at once, taking that in.

“I can’t lie,” John said simply. He shook his head, and his red curls shook, too.

“You’re a member of the council,” Astrid snapped. “You have to abide by our decisions. That’s the deal. That’s the only way it works.” Then, in a calmer voice, she said, “John, isn’t Mary coming up on her fifteenth before long?”

Sam saw the jab hit home. Mary was perhaps the single most necessary person in Perdido Beach. From the start she had stepped up and run the day care. She’d become a mother to the littles.

But Mary had her own problems. She was anorexic and bulimic. She ate antidepressants by the handful, but the supply was rapidly running out.

Dahra Baidoo, who controlled the medicines in Perdido Beach, came to Sam secretly and told him that Mary was in every couple of days, asking for whatever Dahra might have. “She’s taking Prozac and Zoloft and Lexapro, and these aren’t just nothing little meds, Sam. People have to go on and off these things carefully, according to the book. You don’t just grab whatever and mix them all up.”

Sam hadn’t told anyone but Astrid about it. And he’d warned Dahra to keep it to herself. Then he’d made a mental note to talk to Mary, and had forgotten to ever follow up.

Now, from John’s stricken expression, Sam could guess that he was far from certain that Mary wouldn’t give in to the poof and step out.

They took a vote. Astrid, Alberto, and Howard shot their hands up immediately.

“No, man,” Edilio said, shaking his head. “I’d have to lie to my own people, my soldiers. Kids who trust me.”

“No,” John voted. “I…I’m just a kid and all, but I would have to lie to Mary.”

Dekka looked at Sam. “What do you say, Sam?”

Astrid interrupted. “Look, we could do this temporarily. Just until we find out if Orsay is making this all up. If she came out later and admitted it was all fake, well, we’d have our answer.”

“Maybe we should torture her,” Howard said, only half kidding.

“We can’t just sit by if we think kids are going to be dying,” Astrid pleaded. “Suicide is a mortal sin. These kids won’t be getting out of the FAYZ, they’ll be going to hell.”

“Wow,” Howard said. “Hell? And we know this, how exactly? You don’t know any more than any of us do about what happens after a poof.”

“So that’s what this is about?” Dekka asked. “Your religion?”

“Everyone’s religion is against suicide,” Astrid snapped.

“I’m against it, too,” Dekka said defensively. “I just don’t want to be getting dragged into the middle of some kind of religious thing.”

“Whatever Orsay represents, it’s not a religion,” Astrid said icily.

Sam heard Orsay’s voice in his head. Let them go, Sam. Let them go and get out of the way.

His mother’s words, if Orsay was telling the truth.

“Let’s give it a week,” Sam said.

Dekka took a deep breath and blew it out all at once. “Okay. I’ll go with Sam on this. We lie. For a week.”

The meeting broke up. Sam was the first out of the room, suddenly desperate for fresh air. Edilio caught up to him as he was running down the steps of town hall.

“Hey. Hey! We never told them about what you and me saw last night.”

Sam stopped, looked toward the plaza, toward the hole they had refilled.

“Yeah? What did we see last night, Edilio? Me, I just saw a hole in the ground.”

Sam didn’t give Edilio the chance to argue. He didn’t want to hear what Edilio would say. He walked quickly away.

EIGHT

55 HOURS, 17 MINUTES

CAINE HATED DEALING with Bug. The kid creeped him out. For one thing, Bug had become less and less visible. It used to be that Bug would do his disappearing act only when necessary. Then he started doing it whenever he wanted to spy on someone, which was pretty frequently.