Fear (Gone 5)

She saw the edge of the field.

She saw Cigar frozen in a twisting fall.

He was in the field.

She heard the greedy mouths burrowing into him. A sound like hungry dogs eating.

“Petey! Petey! Help him!”

Cigar said, “Oh,” in a small, disappointed voice.

And the only sound in the darkness was the relentless feeding of the worms.

She sat there listening, no choice but to hear. Tears flowed. She sat with her knees together, head in twisting hands, crying.

How much time passed until the worm sounds were finished she couldn’t know. The stink … that remained.

She was alone now. Completely and absolutely alone in a darkness that seemed almost like a living thing, as if she had been swallowed whole and was now in the belly of some indifferent beast.

“All right, Petey,” Astrid said at last. “No choice, huh, brother? The crazy behind door number one or the crazy behind door number two. Show me what you have to show me, Peter.”

She saw him. Not him, not like there was light, but something, like the darkness had warped around itself. A suggestion of a shape. A little boy.

“Are you there?” she asked.

Something cold, like someone had slid an icicle through her scalp and through her skull and pushed it deep inside her brain. No pain. Just a terrible cold.

“Petey?” she whispered.

Peter Ellison did not move. He stayed very, very still. His hand touched her on the head, but only just, just barely, and he stayed very still.

The avatar that was his sister had within it an amazing complexity of lines and designs, signs inside of mazes inside of maps that were part of planets and…

He pulled himself back. Inside her was a game of such beautiful complexity.

This was what it was to be the girl with the yellow hair and the stabbing blue eyes. It took his breath away. Or would have if he had breath and body.

He mustn’t play with those complex swirls and patterns. Each time he had tried he’d broken the avatar and it had come apart. He couldn’t break this one.

It’s me, Petey, he said.

The avatar shuddered. Patterns twisted around his touch, feeling for him like tiny light-snakes.

“Can you fix it, Petey? The FAYZ. Can you make it stop?”

He could hear her voice. It came straight up through the avatar, words of light floating to him.

He wondered. Could he fix it? Could he undo the great and terrible thing he had done?

He felt the answer as a sort of regret. He reached for the power, the thing that had made him able to create this place. But there was nothing there.

It was in my body, he said. The power.

“You can’t end it?”

No.

No, sister Astrid, I can’t.