Taylor strained to visualize her room. Pushed back the pain for just a second … just…
Taylor bounced.
The hand was gone. Neatly cut off at the wrist. No blood, just a sudden ending. Taylor could not see her calf. Nor could she feel it.
She was not in her bedroom. She was on a car in the driveway of Clifftop.
On the car. Both of her legs were in the car, but she was on it, on the dusty roof of a Lexus. She had materialized with her legs sticking through the roof.
Taylor bellowed in pain and terror.
Her flailing caused her to topple over. The stumps of her legs didn’t do a very good job of holding her in place. She rolled once, fell the four feet to the pavement, landed on her chest.
Shaking with fear, she fumbled for and reached the door handle and used it to pull herself up into a seated position. Her legs ended in neat stumps, just above the knees. Just like her left hand.
No blood.
But so much pain.
Taylor screamed and fell back and lost consciousness.
Astrid had found the sight of a visibly pregnant Diana disturbing.
It was strange enough to see a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant in any context. In the FAYZ it was far more jarring. The FAYZ was a trap, a prison, a purgatory maybe. But a nursery?
Each week that had gone by from that first day, the number of kids alive in the FAYZ had gone down. Always down, never up. The FAYZ was a place of sudden, horrifying death. Not a place of life.
And who had changed all that? A cruel, sharp-tongued girl and a boy who had never been anything but evil.
Astrid had taken a life. Diana was bringing one into the world.
Astrid sat on the sticky plastic cushions around the houseboat’s tiny dining table. She put her elbows on the table and held her head in her hands.
Edilio came in, nodded at Astrid, and poured himself a glass of water from the jug on the counter. He was being discreet, not asking her questions, not wanting, probably, to scare her off.
“You like irony, Edilio?” Astrid asked him.
For a moment she thought she’d embarrassed him by using a word he didn’t understand. But after a long, reflective pause Edilio said, “You mean like the irony of an illegal from Honduras ending up being what I am?”
Astrid smiled. “Yeah. Like that.”
Edilio gave her a shrewd look. “Or maybe like Diana having a baby?”
That forced a laugh from Astrid. She shook her head ruefully. “You are the most underestimated person in the FAYZ.”
“It’s my superpower,” Edilio said dryly.
Astrid invited him to sit down. He laid his gun down carefully and slid into a seat opposite her.
“Who would you say are the ten most powerful people in the FAYZ, Edilio?”
Edilio raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Number one is Albert,” Edilio said. “Then Caine. Sam. Lana.” He thought about it for a moment longer and said, “Quinn. Drake, unfortunately. Dekka. You. Me. Diana.”
Astrid folded her arms in front of her. “Not Brianna? Or Orc?”