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“So I’m supposed to stand aside and let Sam just walk in and take over,” Caine said. “That’s not—”

“Not me,” Sam interrupted. “Him.”

Caine looked in disbelief at Edilio. “What? The machine-gun wetback here?”

Sam stiffened at that, but Edilio with a small gesture waved it off. So Sam said, “There are exactly five people who are trusted by just about everyone. I’m one, but I kind of suck at running things—”

“True,” Toto said, and this time caught a hard look from Sam.

“Lana is trusted,” Sam went on, “but . . . well, she’s Lana, and she has a job. And Dekka is trusted, but also . . . well, she’d be the first to say she doesn’t want to run anything. The fourth person is Quinn.”

“I tried to get Quinn to do something more than fish,” Caine protested.

“I know,” Sam said. “The other person everyone trusts is Edilio.”

Caine barked out an incredulous laugh. “Are you seriously here to tell me you want Edilio to take over running Perdido Beach?”

“He’s already running the lake.”

“That’s . . .,” Toto began, hesitated, and said, “mostly true.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still king here,” Caine said. It sounded ridiculous, even to him. He pointed a finger at Toto. “No: don’t say it.”

Edilio said, “I can work well with Quinn. I get along well with Lana. I get along with Astrid and Dekka, who’ll stay at the lake. Sam trusts me. And the fact is, even you trust me, Caine.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” Edilio said.

“He believes it,” Toto muttered.

“You’re still Sam’s boy, Edilio.”

“Sam won’t be here, or at the lake. He’s going after your daughter.”

Caine chose not to argue that label, though it filled him with extreme and conflicting emotions. “Sam is going after Gaia and Drake alone? Hah. If I can’t do it alone, neither can he.”

“He believes this.”

“Not
alone,
” Edilio said.

It took Caine a few beats to get it. “No. Go kill yourself. Eat your own gun. No. No no no.”

“You’re happy here counting fish and nagging kids to work?” Edilio asked.

“He’s not,” Virtue said, beating Toto to the punch and earning an annoyed glance from Caine. “He’s only done it for two days since the battle, and he’s already bored.”

“Here’s the proposal,” Edilio said. He had shouldered his assault rifle. “I come to Perdido Beach, work with Quinn and Sanjit and of course Virtue. And maybe bring Computer Jack down, too. Lana, well, she’ll do whatever she wants to do, as usual.”

“Wait, I thought Jack was dead.”

“No. Lana got to him in time,” Sam said. “But he’s shook up, that’s for sure. He could use a change and something to keep his mind occupied.”

Caine shook his head no, but it wasn’t as firm as it might have been.

Sam leaned forward, elbows on knees, and said, “Caine, you’re not a king any more than I’m a mayor.”

“No, then what am I?” Caine demanded, hating the pleading tone in his voice.

“You’re a bully and a sociopath. You’re a thug and a killer. You’re also smart and powerful and you don’t scare easy.”

“True,” Toto affirmed.

“And you love Diana,” Virtue said.

“What? Shut up, Choo.”

All eyes turned to Toto, who nodded and said, “He does.”

“Probably the only person you ever did care for,” Edilio said. “And surely the only person who loves you. And you’re going to leave her out there? With Drake and that monster child of yours?”

Caine saw something then on Sam’s face. An emotion he was anxious to conceal. Guilt? Sam suddenly had the need to rub his face. Caine’s instinct was pinging, warning him of . . . well, he didn’t quite know what. And Sam kept his mouth shut, which meant Toto was no help.

Caine swallowed hard and looked helplessly at Edilio.

Edilio nodded, accepting Caine’s surrender.

“You know what?” Caine said. “You want Perdido Beach? It’s all yours, my friend: it’s all yours.”

And thus ends my brief reign, Caine thought mordantly.

He had to fight down the urge to grin. He drew a deep, satisfying breath. His eyes met Sam’s. Sam had a knowing smile, seeing and understanding, as no one else could, Caine’s relief at giving up power.

“This is only because I’m bored,” Caine said. “I’m not running off to rescue Diana. Or do the right thing or any of that.”

“That is not—” Toto began, but Virtue reached over and put a hand over the truth teller’s mouth.

Well, at least Diana would be grateful, Caine thought. And then smiled. Nah. She wouldn’t be.

THEY HAD
SOON
discovered that Gaia needed to eat. So did Diana, but Drake didn’t care about Diana: Diana could starve for all he cared. Diana could die a slow, painful death, hopefully caused by him, by Drake.

Gaia was a very different matter. Gaia could make him feel terrible pain, deep-down-inside pain. Drake’s body, his unkillable body that somehow shared space with Brittney’s, didn’t normally feel much. Only the most intense pain broke through.

What Gaia did to him when she was displeased—that broke through.

Anyway, it wasn’t like Drake could disobey Gaia. She might now look like a little girl, but Drake knew who and what she really was. Who else was he going to serve? He and Caine had parted ways. Caine had become weak. Drake had nowhere else to go if he wasn’t with Caine. And in the gaiaphage he had found someone much tougher, more demanding. More powerful. Someone who would never be weak.

His sharp eyes detected movement on a rock. A lizard. He unwrapped his reddish, ten-foot-long tentacle arm from around his waist. He took careful aim, snapped the bullwhip arm, and sent the lizard flying.

He scooped up the dead thing and dropped it into the canvas bag slung from his belt. He’d so far nailed maybe a half pound of lizards—about all there was to be found out here in the desert emptiness. Should he carry it back to Gaia? Was it enough? Or would she punish him for bringing too little?

On the one hand, even here, a mile away from her, Drake could feel her hunger. Her hunger was his hunger. His only hunger since he—whatever he was—no longer felt the need for food. Or water. Or air.

But pain? He could still feel that, at least the pain she gave him. If he brought her too little, there was the thing the gaiaphage could do to him, that twisting inner agony, that little visit to hell.

Just then he spotted a roadrunner. The bird was about a foot and a half long from sharp beak to the end of its long tail. Of course that was mostly feathers and bone. But maybe a few ounces of actual meat, too, and if he nailed it he could head back to Gaia in the certainty of a pleasant, or at least pain-free, welcome.

They were quick little birds, though. Not as fast as the cartoon Road Runner, but quick and dodgy.

The bird had its head cocked. One eye was aimed right at Drake. He froze. He needed to halve the distance before he could strike.

The bird darted half a foot and suddenly had a lizard in its mouth. The lizard was still alive, thrashing in the bird’s beak, and that distraction let Drake advance with, slow, silent steps.

Then: the unsettling feeling that presaged the emergence of Brittney. Since they had been buried together and resurrected they had shared . . . well, not a body, really. In fact they shared nothing except that they seemed to trade existences. He would be there, and then Brittney would emerge, and while she was present, he was simply gone.

“Not now!” he hissed, frustrated at the thought of losing his prey.

He snapped his whip arm, but it was already a foot shorter. The roadrunner was gone.

Brittney opened her eyes to see she was alone, in a very dry-looking place, nothing but brambles and sand and stone. She noticed the bag on her belt. Looking in she saw a wad of lizards, some in pieces.

The hunger that had motivated Drake filled her as well, the hunger of her god. The thought of Gaia eating well, growing stronger, made Brittney smile. What a miracle to have her god take on human form, become the baby Gaia! No, not a baby anymore, a beautiful little girl, and growing at an amazing rate. By the time Brittney got back to her, she could be a preteen.

Wouldn’t that be exciting!

Food. That was the first thing.

She saw a roadrunner dart into a thornbush. She wasn’t fast enough to catch the bird, but she wondered . . .

Brittney dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the bush. She got as low as she could and shielded her eyes from the glare of the true sun beating down very hard here near the center of the FAYZ.

It was shadier beneath the bush, but she could still see clearly, and there was her reward: a circular nest and in the center of that nest three small, white eggs, no more than an inch and a half in diameter.

Brittney carefully lifted the eggs from the nest and put them in her bag. She pulled apart a bit of the nest and used it to pack the eggs carefully so they wouldn’t break.

Now this would be a feast for Gaia!

She backed slowly, carefully, out of the thornbush, indifferent to the multitude of tiny cuts.

Brittney had no warning of the wire that went around her throat. No time even to flinch as the wire cut into her neck, severed the empty, bloodless arteries, and stopped tightening only when it had closed around her upper spine.

“Wish it was Drake, not you, Britt,” Brianna said.

Then Brianna put her foot on Brittney’s back and heaved as hard as she could. The wire sliced through cartilage and nerve tissue, making a sound like a knife cutting gristle, and suddenly Brittney’s head rolled free and landed in the dirt with a thump.

Brittney could not move her head, but she had rolled to an angle where she could see Brianna. Brianna was sweating from exertion. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand. The garrote—a two-foot-long piece of piano wire strung between steel grips that had once been part of someone’s home gym—hung from her free hand.

Brianna looked down at her, quite satisfied, and said, “Now I’m going to chop you into little bits and spread the pieces all over the place. See if you or Drake can reassemble yourself then.”

Brittney was not dead. Aside from no longer being attached to her body she didn’t feel any difference, just a dull pain in her neck. When she strained her eyes upward, she could see her body. The body was attempting to stand up all by itself.

But when Brittney tried to speak, she found she could only whisper, and the sound of her whisper was partly drowned out by the gasping noise of air sucked into her severed esophagus.

“You can’t kill us,” Brittney whispered.

“Maybe not. But I’m sure going to try.”

Brianna carried a sawed-off shotgun in her specially adapted runner’s backpack, and a machete, also slung over her back. She pulled out the machete and swung it so fast Brittney couldn’t see the blade move. She just saw the fact that her body was now minus a leg, which caused it to topple over.

Whump!

There was a whir of movement that raised the dust, and a sound of chopping, a rapid-fire
whap! whap! whap! whap!
and what had been Brittney’s body was in pieces—arms cut off and then cut in two. Legs off and then chopped into three pieces. Torso hacked into random chunks. There was no blood. It was as if Brianna were chopping up an embalmed corpse.

That thought bothered Brittney. How could she be alive with no blood? What was she?

“Want to watch?” Brianna asked.

She grabbed Brittney’s hair, lifted her up, and set her on a flat rock. The first effort failed, and Brittney’s head rolled off. But Brianna was finally able to settle Brittney’s head atop the rock so that Brittney could see her body lying in a couple dozen bloodless pieces.

The pieces were already twitching toward one another, extending tentacles, attempting to rejoin. And things that had been female were becoming male as Drake slowly reemerged to discover he was in very bad shape.

With a look of distaste Brianna began to pick the pieces up and toss them a distance away. “I can’t have you putting yourself back together, Brittney . . . Ah! Wait, is that Drake coming back?”

Brianna performed a short happy dance and stepped—perhaps accidentally—on a piece of flesh that Drake would miss.

“Perfect. So much better this way. Hello, Drake. So glad you could make it. I’m just going to start moving your pieces farther apart. Much farther apart. Then I’ll have Sam go around and fry each piece. And then I believe that’ll be it for you, Brittney slash Drake. I believe we’ll have seen the end of both of you. And your little whip, too.” She patted Drake on the head. Then she picked up a foot and a shoulder section, one in each hand. With a wink she was gone, leaving a trail of dust.

Quinn was rowing back to shore. It was a point of pride for him that he always carried his share of the hard work, in fact more than his fair share, because if you were boss, you started off by setting a good example. So even though he had gotten a hook caught in the back of his arm and had had to cut it out and as a consequence was bleeding through a salt water–soaked bandage held with a strip of duct tape, he pulled at the oars.

No one on his crews ever claimed Quinn was lording it over them or saddling them with too much work. Well, sometimes they did, but it was in the nature of long-running jokes.

“You’re pulling to your left, Captain,” Amber said.

“At least I’m pulling,” Quinn said, and the two of them lifted the oars, leaned forward, dipped the oars, and pulled in long-practiced unison.

“You know, if you’re feeling weak you could let Cathy take over,” Amber said, grunting with the effort. “What with your boo-boo and all.”

“I’d have to be missing an arm before I rowed as weak and spastic as Cathy,” Quinn teased.

For her part, Cathy, seated in the stern and guiding the tiller, said, “Just a good thing we didn’t catch much or we’d never make the marina.”

“Yeah, a good thing,” Quinn said, unable to keep the worry from his voice. “Barely enough to feed us, let alone the whole town.”

He glanced up at a cabin cruiser in the out there. He was a long way from getting used to the fact that he could see the outside. It was weird. Nothing had changed in his daily life except for the fact that he could now see out of his prison. Still a prison, but now the prison had a view.