Gone (Gone 1)

“He’s one, too,” Quinn accused. “A freak.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Astrid said.

“That’s not exactly reassuring,” Quinn snapped. “What’s his trick? He shoot missiles out of his butt or something?”

Astrid smoothed her brother’s hair down with her hand and let her fingers trace the side of his face. “Window seat,” she whispered. Then, to the others, “‘Window seat’ is a trigger phrase. It helps him find a calm place. It’s the window seat in my room.”

“Window seat,” Little Pete said unexpectedly.

“He talks,” Edilio said.

“He can,” Astrid said. “But he doesn’t much.”

“He talks. Great. What else does he do?” Quinn demanded pointedly.

“He seems able to do a lot of things. Mostly we’re good, the two of us. Mostly he doesn’t really notice me. But once, I was doing his therapy, working with this picture book we work on sometimes. I show him a picture and try to get him to say the word and, I don’t know, I guess I was in a bad mood that day. I guess I was too rough taking his hand and putting his finger on the picture like you’re supposed to do. He got mad. And then, I wasn’t there anymore. One second I was in his room, and then all of a sudden I was in my room.”

There was a dead silence as the four of them stared at Little Pete.

“Then maybe he can zap us out of the FAYZ and back to our folks,” Quinn said finally.

Silence fell again. The five of them stood in the middle of the road, the humming, bright-lit power plant behind them, a dark road descending ahead.

“I keep waiting for you to laugh, Sam,” Quinn said to Sam. “You know: say ‘gotcha.’ Tell me it’s all some trick. Tell me you’re just goofing on me.”

“We’re in a new world,” Astrid said. “Look, I’ve known about Petey for a while. I tried to believe it was some kind of miracle. Like you, Quinn, I wanted to believe it was God doing it.”

“What is doing it?” Edilio asked. “I mean, you’re saying this stuff was happening before the FAYZ.”

“Look, I’m supposedly smart, but that doesn’t mean I understand any of this,” Astrid admitted. “All I know is that under the laws of biology and physics, none of this is possible. The human body has no organ that generates light. And what Petey did, the ability to move things from one place to another? Scientists have figured out how to do it with a couple of atoms. Not entire human beings. It would take more energy than the entire power plant produces, which means that, basically, the laws of physics would have to be rewritten.”

“How do you rewrite the laws of physics?” Sam wondered.

Astrid threw up her hands. “I can just about, barely, follow AP physics. To understand this, you’d have to be Einstein or Heisenberg or Feynman, on that level. I just know that impossible things don’t happen. So either this isn’t happening, or somehow the rules have been changed.”

“Like someone hacked the universe,” Quinn said.

“Exactly,” Astrid said, surprised that Quinn had gotten it. “Like someone hacked the universe and rewrote the software.”

“Nothing but kids left, there’s some big wall, and my best friend is magic boy all of a sudden,” Quinn said. “I figured, okay, at least whatever else, I still have my brah, I still have my best friend.”

Sam said, “I’m still your friend, Quinn.”

Quinn sighed. “Yeah. Well, it isn’t exactly the same, is it?”

“There are probably others,” Astrid said. “Others like Sam and Petey. And the little girl who died.”

“We have to keep this quiet,” Edilio said. “We can’t be telling anyone. People don’t like people they think are better than they are. If regular kids find out about this, it’s going to be trouble.”

“Maybe not,” Astrid said hopefully.

“You’re smart, Astrid, but if you think people are going to be happy about this, you don’t know people,” Edilio said.

“Well, I won’t be the one blabbing about it,” Quinn said.

Astrid said, “Okay, I think probably Edilio’s right. At least for now. And especially we can’t let anyone find out about Petey.”

“I’m not saying anything,” Edilio confirmed.