Down in the dark basement a long, reddish tentacle reached for the gun.

Orc turned and ran.

Sanjit Brattle-Chance had not enjoyed his first week in Per-dido Beach. Virtue Brattle-Chance had enjoyed it even less.

“It’s like a giant lunatic asylum,” Virtue said.

“Yeah. It is, kind of,” Sanjit said. They had spent the afternoon inspecting the helicopter. Edilio had assigned them the job of reporting back on whether it was totally broken or just mostly broken.

So far it was looking totally broken. Both skids—the ski-like things it landed on—were crumpled. Part of the glass bubble canopy was shattered, just gone, and the rest of it was starred and cracked.

Night had fallen and that was the end of inspecting anything. Virtue had wanted to go straight home. Sanjit had stalled.

“Let’s just hang out and talk, Choo,” Sanjit said. “I mean, look, we’ve had all this stress, right? But now Bowie’s getting well—”

Virtue made a rude noise. “If you believe that so-called Healer.”

“I believe her completely,” Sanjit said.

The girl named Lana had come and laid her hand on Bowie. She’d barely spoken, had replied to polite inquiries with single-syllable answers or grunts. Or annoyed silence.

But Sanjit had been fascinated. He’d thought about little else ever since. After all, how could he not be attracted to a girl who could heal with a touch and yet walked around with a massive automatic pistol stuck in her belt?

His kind of girl.

He had learned that she lived up here at Clifftop. In fact Edilio had carefully and repeatedly warned Sanjit not to irritate her while he was checking out the helicopter.

His exact words had been, “For God’s sake, don’t get in Lana’s way.”

To which Sanjit had said, “Is she dangerous?”

Edilio had given him a strange look. “Well, she shot me once. But it was under the influence of the Darkness. Which she had tried to kill all by herself with a truckload of gas. And then she healed me. So I don’t know if that makes her dangerous. But if it was me, I would definitely not make her mad.”

So Sanjit and Virtue sat on the grass and watched the sun go down and the stars appear. And Sanjit secretly watched the hotel.

“Did you hear about the talking coyotes?” Virtue demanded. Like if there were such a thing, it was Sanjit’s fault.

“Yeah. Creepy, huh?”

“And the thing they call the Darkness?” Virtue shook his head dolefully. He’d always been gloomy. The cloud to Sanjit’s sunshine, the pessimist to Sanjit’s optimist. They were adopted brothers, from Congo and Thailand, respectively. From a desperate refugee camp, and from the tough streets of Bangkok.

“Yeah. I wonder what it is?”

“The gaiaphage. That’s the other word they use. ‘Gaia,’ as in world. ‘Phage,’ as in a worm or something that eats something up. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say I don’t think something that calls itself a ‘world eater’ is a good thing.”

“No?” Sanjit made an innocent face, deliberately provoking his brother.

“Fine.” Virtue pouted. “But have you seen the graveyard they put in the plaza? There’s, like, two dozen graves there.”

Sanjit twisted around to look back at the helicopter. It had saved them. It seemed a shame just to let it lie there dead. “I’d need some big wrenches. A ladder. Hammer. And then, you know, someone who actually knew what to do with all of it.”

“Fine, you don’t really want to talk.”

They had landed the helicopter—well, crashed it, anyway— behind Clifftop hotel. In some scruffy trees and bushes just past the parking area.

The barrier was close at hand. So even if the helicopter could ever be flown—and Sanjit couldn’t imagine what the point would be—it would take a lot of luck not just to fly it straight into the barrier.

The barrier was a trickster. At ground level it was opaque, while suggesting translucence.

Higher up it was sky. But when you were up there it wasn’t like you could see beyond the barrier. If you tried, the barrier was just opaque again.

Tricky tricky. Like a street magician’s sleight of hand, Sanjit thought.

He realized Virtue was talking again.

“ . . . once Bowie’s completely better. Maybe Caine isn’t totally unreasonable. I mean, he was starving before and that would make anyone unreasonable.”

“Choo,” Sanjit said. “Caine is pure, distilled essence of evil. What are you even talking about?”

“Okay, even if he’s evil, maybe we can work out some kind of deal.”

“You don’t even believe that,” Sanjit said.

Virtue slumped back, deflated. “Yeah.”

“We are not going back to the island, my brother. We’ve been voted off. This is our home now.”

Virtue nodded. He looked like a kid who had just gotten the news that he would be shot at dawn.

“Cheer up, Choo,” Sanjit said. “There are a lot of good things about this place.”

“You heard about the zombie, right? The one they’ve got locked in a basement? Half the time it’s this nice Christian girl. And the rest of the time it’s a psychopath with a whip for an arm?”

Sanjit made a thoughtful face. “I do believe I heard something about that. But really, Choo, it’s not like a basement-dwelling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde zombie is all that unusual.”