But this…

“What should I do?” Consuela whispered.

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Should I get Astrid? Or Sam?”

Perfectly reasonable questions. Edilio wished he had a perfectly reasonable answer. “Take off,” Edilio said. “Good job. Sucks you had to see this.”

She left, grateful to get away. And Edilio stared down balefully at the thing…the person…the body…that would be like a dagger in Sam’s heart.

In the months since the death of Drake Merwin, the defeat of the gaiaphage and the deal with the zekes, a tenuous order and calm had come to the FAYZ.

Edilio felt that tenuous structure, the system Edilio had worked so hard to build, the system he had just started to believe might last, coming apart in his hands now, like tissue paper in a rainstorm.

It had never been real. The FAYZ would always win.

Sam stood over the body. The sight of it rocked him. He took a stagger-step back.

Edilio grabbed him.

Sam felt panic welling up inside of him. He wanted to run. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was pounding in his chest. His veins filled with ice water.

He knew what had happened.

“Hey, Boss,” Edilio said. “You okay, man?”

Sam couldn’t answer. He took air in little gasps. Like a toddler on the edge of tears.

“Sam,” Edilio said. “Come on, man.”

Edilio looked from the mutilated body to his friend and back again.

He had been there. Sam knew the terrible wounds he was seeing. The body of a twelve-year-old boy named Leonard bore marks Sam knew and would never forget.

The marks of a whip.

The street was quiet. No one in sight. No one who could have borne witness.

“Drake,” Sam said in a whisper.

“No, man: Drake’s dead and gone.”

Sam, suddenly furious, grabbed Edilio’s shirt. “Don’t tell me what I’m seeing, Edilio. It’s him,” Sam yelled.

Edilio patiently pried Sam’s fingers off. “Listen, Sam, I know what it looks like. I saw you. I saw what you looked like that day. So, I know, all right? But man, it makes no sense. Drake is dead and buried under tons of rock in a mine shaft.”

“It’s Drake,” Sam said flatly.

“Okay, that’s enough, Sam,” Edilio snapped. “You’re freaking out.”

Sam closed his eyes and felt again the pain…pain like nothing he’d imagined could exist outside of hell. Pain like being burned alive.

The blows of Drake’s whip hand. Each one tearing strips of flesh…

“You don’t…You don’t know what it was like…”

“Sam…”

“Even after Brianna shot me full of morphine…you don’t know…you don’t know…All right? You don’t know. Pray to God you don’t ever know.”

Taylor chose that moment to bounce in. She took a look at the body and yelped. She covered her mouth and looked away.

“He’s back,” Sam said.

“Taylor, get Sam out of here. Take him to Astrid,” Edilio ordered.

“But Sam and Astrid are—”

“Just do it!” Edilio roared. “And then haul your butt around and get the other members of the council over there. They want to know what’s going on? Fine. Then they can get up out of their beds.”

“It doesn’t go away,” Sam said through gritted teeth. “You know that, Edilio? It doesn’t go away. It’s always with me. It’s always with me.”

“Take him,” Edilio ordered Taylor. “And tell Astrid we need to talk.”

EIGHTEEN

15 HOURS, 57 MINUTES

“WE GO TONIGHT,” Caine said. Weak. So weak in every muscle. Sore. Panting just from climbing the stairs to the dining hall. Like he’d run a marathon.

Starvation. It did that to you.

He tried to count the exhausted, gaunt faces that turned toward him. But he couldn’t keep the number in his head. Fifteen? Seventeen? No more than that, certainly.

The last candle flickered on the table that had once been piled high with turkey loaf and pizza, Jell-O and limp salad, cartons of milk, all the usual school lunchroom fare.

This room had once been full of kids. All so healthy looking. Some thin, some fat, none as gaunt and hideous as what was left here now.

Coates Academy, the fashionable place for the well-off to send their troublesome kids. Kids who started fires. Bullies. Skanks. Druggies. Kids with psychological problems. Or just kids who talked back once too often. Or kids whose parents wanted them gone from their lives.

The difficult, the losers, the rejects. The unloved. Coates Academy, where you could dump your kids and not be bothered by them anymore.

Well, that was certainly working out well for all concerned.

Now, the desperate remnants of Coates. The ones mean enough or lucky enough to survive. Only four of them known to be mutants: Caine himself, a four bar; Diana, whose only power was the ability to gauge another mutant’s powers; Bug, with his ability to almost disappear; and Penny, who had developed an extremely useful power of illusion: she could make a person believe they were being attacked by monsters or stabbed with knives or on fire.

She had demonstrated it on a kid named Barry. Barry had been made to believe he was being chased around the room by spears. It had been funny watching him run in terror.

That was it. Four mutants, only two of which, Caine and Penny, were any good in a fight. Bug had his uses. And Diana was Diana. The only face he wanted to see now.