Sanjit’s smile was gone. “I’m going to try, Choo. That’s all I can do.”

THIRTY-FIVE

1 HOUR 27 MINUTES

SAM WAS FINALLY where he’d known all along he would end up. It had taken him all day to get there. The sun was already sinking toward the false horizon.

The Perdido Beach nuclear power plant was eerily silent. In the old days it had kept up a constant roar. Not from the actual nuclear reactor, but from the giant turbines that turned superheated steam into electricity.

Things were as he’d left them. A hole burned into the control room wall. Cars smashed here and there by Caine or by Dekka. All the evidence of the battle that had taken place a few short months ago.

He went in through the turbine room. The machines were big as houses, hunched, coiled metal monsters turned to so much scrap.

The control room, too, as Caine and he had left it. The door ripped from its hinges by Jack. Dried blood—Brittney’s, most of it—formed a flaky brown crust on the polished floor.

The ancient computers were blank. The warning lights and indicator lights were all dead, except for a fading pool of illumination cast by a single functioning emergency beam. The battery would be exhausted soon.

No wonder Jack had refused to come back to this place. It wasn’t fear of radiation. It was fear of ghosts. It hurt Jack deep down inside, Sam thought, to see machines rendered useless.

Sam’s steps echoed softly as he walked. He knew where he was going, where he had to go.

There was a badge on a desk, one of the warning badges that turned color when radiation levels were high. Sam picked it up, looked at it, not sure whether he cared.

Safe or not, he was going to the reactor.

Sunlight shone through the hole Caine had blown in the concrete containment vessel. But it was faint: sunset reflected off the mountains.

Sam raised his hand and formed a ball of light. It didn’t reveal anything but shadows.

He reached the spot. Right here Drake had shown Sam that he could cause a chain reaction and kill every living thing in the FAYZ.

Right here Drake had named the price.

This was the floor where Sam had laid down and taken the beating.

Sam saw the wrapper of the morphine syringe that Brianna had stuck into him. Here, too, the floor was coated in a flaky brown scum.

A noise! He spun, raised his hands and shot brilliant beams of light.

Something cracked. He fired again and swept the killing beam from left to right, slowly around the room, burning anything it touched.

A catwalk ladder crashed to the floor. A computer monitor exploded like a burned-out lightbulb.

Sam crouched, ready. Listening.

“If someone’s there you’d better tell me,” he said to the shadows. “Because I’ll kill you.”

No voice spoke.

Sam formed a second light and tossed it high overhead. Now shadows crossed each other, cast by two competing lights.

Another light and another and another. He formed them with his will and hung them in the air like Japanese lanterns. He saw no one.

His beams had cut cables and melted instrument panels. But there were no bodies lying on the floor.

“A rat, probably,” he said.

He was shaking. The lights were still not enough, it was still too dark. And even if it were light, something could be hiding anywhere. Too many nooks and crannies, too many awkward machines providing possible concealment.

“A rat,” he said, without any conviction. “Something.”

But not Drake.

No, Drake was in Perdido Beach, if in fact he was anywhere outside of Sam’s overworked imagination.

The reactor chamber was only fractionally lighter than when he’d come in. He’d found nothing. He’d learned nothing.

“I blew the crap out of the place though,” he said.

And accomplished? Nothing.

Sam stuck one hand in the neck of his T-shirt. He touched the skin of his shoulder. He reached under his shirt and touched his chest and stomach. Reached around with both hands to run his fingers along his sides and back. New wounds, the still-fresh marks of Drake’s whip. But worse was the memory of old wounds.

He was here. He was alive. He was hurt, yes, but his skin was not hanging in tatters.

And he was very definitely alive.

“Well,” Sam said. “There’s that.”

He had needed to come back to this place because this place filled him with terror. He had needed to take possession of this place. This very place where he had begged to die.

But had not died.

One by one he extinguished the Sammy Suns, until only the faint, indirect rays of sunset lit the room.

He stood for a moment, hoping he was saying good-bye to this place.

Sam turned and walked away, heading toward home.

Brittney woke up facedown in the sand. For a terrible moment she thought she was underground again.

The Lord might ask anything of her, but please God, not that. Not that.

She rolled over, blinked her eyes and was surprised to see that the sun was still in the sky.

She was above the tide line, several body lengths from the thin lace of surf. Something, a soggy lump the size of a person, was between her and the water. Half in the surf, legs stretched onto dry land, like he’d been running into the ocean, tripped, and had drowned.

Brittney stood up. She brushed damp sand from her arms, but it stuck to the gray mud that coated her from head to toe.

“Tanner?”

Her brother was not near. She was alone. And now fear began to make her shake. Fear for the first time since she had emerged from the ground. It was a dark, soul-eating monster, this fear.