Plague (Gone 4)

The barrier was close at hand. So even if the helicopter could ever be flown—and Sanjit couldn’t imagine what the point would be—it would take a lot of luck not just to fly it straight into the barrier.

The barrier was a trickster. At ground level it was opaque, while suggesting translucence.

Higher up it was sky. But when you were up there it wasn’t like you could see beyond the barrier. If you tried, the barrier was just opaque again.

Tricky tricky. Like a street magician’s sleight of hand, Sanjit thought.

He realized Virtue was talking again.

“ . . . once Bowie’s completely better. Maybe Caine isn’t totally unreasonable. I mean, he was starving before and that would make anyone unreasonable.”

“Choo,” Sanjit said. “Caine is pure, distilled essence of evil. What are you even talking about?”

“Okay, even if he’s evil, maybe we can work out some kind of deal.”

“You don’t even believe that,” Sanjit said.

Virtue slumped back, deflated. “Yeah.”

“We are not going back to the island, my brother. We’ve been voted off. This is our home now.”

Virtue nodded. He looked like a kid who had just gotten the news that he would be shot at dawn.

“Cheer up, Choo,” Sanjit said. “There are a lot of good things about this place.”

“You heard about the zombie, right? The one they’ve got locked in a basement? Half the time it’s this nice Christian girl. And the rest of the time it’s a psychopath with a whip for an arm?”

Sanjit made a thoughtful face. “I do believe I heard something about that. But really, Choo, it’s not like a basement-dwelling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde zombie is all that unusual.”

Despite himself Virtue very nearly smiled. “Fine. Be that way, Wisdom.”

“Don’t use my slave name.” It was an old joke between them. Sanjit had been born Sanjit, a homeless Hindu street kid in Buddhist Bangkok. When the actors Jennifer Brattle and Todd Chance had adopted him, they’d given him an aspirational name: Wisdom.

It never had fit. Wisdom meant . . . well, wisdom.

“You’re not looking at the bright side, Choo,” Sanjit said. He had in fact just spotted the bright side.

“Bright side? There’s no bright side. What bright side?”

“Girls, Choo,” Sanjit said, smiling hugely. “You’ll understand in a few years.”

Lana had come around the back of the hotel and was throwing a tennis ball to her dog. They were outlined against the faint glow of western horizon, and illuminated by the light of the moon just coming from behind the hills.

“I’m going to refuse to do puberty,” Virtue grumbled. “It makes you stupid.”

Sanjit barely heard him. He was walking toward Lana.

“Hi.”

“What are you doing here?” Lana snapped. “No one comes to Clifftop without me saying so.”

Sanjit said, “You missed a beautiful sunset.”

“It’s an illusion,” Lana said. “It’s not the real sun. None of

it’s real. The moon, the stars, all of it.”

“Still beautiful, though.”