Gone (Gone 1)

He went to the table. He touched the tabletop, right where the laptop had been, as though to reassure himself he wasn’t imagining things.

Then he noticed the open drawers. The open cabinets. The food hadn’t been taken, just tossed around, some of it ending up on the floor.

He bolted for his room. The light was still there. His weak attempt at camouflaging it had been torn down.

Someone knew. Someone had seen.

But it didn’t stop there. In his mother’s bedroom the drawers and the closet had been ransacked.

His mother kept a locked, flat, gray metal box in her closet. Sam knew because she’d pointed it out to him on more than one occasion. “If anything ever happens to me, this is where my will is.” She was very serious, but then she’d said, “You know, in case I get hit by a bus.”

“We don’t have any buses in Perdido Beach,” he’d pointed out.

“Hmm. I guess that explains why they’re never on time,” she’d said, and then laughed and hooked him in for a hug.

Holding on to him she had whispered, “Sam, your birth certificate is in there, too.”

“Okay.”

“It’s up to you whether you want to see it.”

He had stiffened against her embrace. She was offering him a chance to know what it said on the birth certificate. There would be three names listed: his, his mother’s, and his father’s.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” he had said.

She held him tightly, but he gently disengaged and stood apart from her. He wanted then to say something. To apologize for what had happened to Tom. To ask her whether he had also, somehow, scared off his true father.

But his was a life with secrets. And even though his mother had made the offer, Sam knew she didn’t want him to violate the code of secrecy.

For months Sam had known about the box. Known where he could find the key.

Now the box was gone.

He had very little doubt who had taken it, who had searched the house.

By now, Caine knew that Sam had the power.

He retrieved his bike. Right now he wanted desperately to be with Astrid. She would make sense of everything.

Most kids now got around on bikes—not always their own—or skateboards. Only the prees walked. And as he crossed through the plaza on his way to Astrid’s home there was a procession of them walking right across the street. Brother John was in the lead. Mother Mary was pushing a two-seat stroller. Some girl in a Coates uniform was carrying a toddler on her hip. Two other kids, drafted for the day, were shepherding the line of some thirty or so preschoolers. They were solemn for a group of little kids but there was at least some horseplay, enough that Mary had to yell, “Julia and Zosia, get back in line.”

The twins, Emma and Anna, brought up the rear. Sam knew them fairly well, having actually gone out with Anna on a date once. Emma had a single stroller, and Anna was pushing a Ralph’s grocery store cart loaded with snacks and diapers and baby bottles.

Sam stopped and waited for them to cross the street. They stuck to the crosswalk, which, he supposed, was a good thing. Best for the prees to learn to cross the street like there might be traffic. Some kids had

been doing some driving, often with bad results. Caine had the rules on that too, now: no one was allowed to drive, except for some of Caine’s people and Edilio, who theoretically might have to drive the ambulance or the fire truck. If he ever figured out how.

“T’sup, Anna?” Sam asked politely.

“Hi, Sam. Where have you been?”

He shrugged. “Fire station. I kind of live there now.”

Anna pointed at the littles marching ahead of her. “Baby duty.”

“Drag,” Sam said.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind it.”