“I’m coming,” Lana said and started to trot back toward the plaza.
“Yeah. Wrong way and too slow,” Brianna said. “Give me your hand. You can heal yourself later.”
Brianna took off, dragging Lana, who instantly tripped. She dragged the Healer the rest of the way down the street, then down the length of the beach.
Dragging her, Brianna couldn’t do anything like full speed, but she could move faster than any human runner.
The Healer’s legs were scraped raw by the time Brianna yanked her to her feet at the end of the dock.
“Got her!” Brianna announced. Then, “What are you doing?”
Sam’s face was a mask of horror. He had sliced Dekka open from neck to pelvis. Dekka’s organs—a slaughterhouse mess—crawled with a dozen bugs, all swarming out of her.
Quinn snatched at the bugs and tossed them from the boat into the water. He was elbow-deep in blood.
“Lana, keep her alive,” Sam said.
Lana jumped down into the boat, which rocked madly back and forth.
Dekka was beyond speech, past even crying out.
Lana laid her hands on Dekka’s contorted face.
Brianna followed her into the boat, landed lightly, and pushed both Quinn and Sam aside. “I got this,” she said.
One by one she snatched the emerging creatures—some of which raced to attack Sam, others of which just ran like panicked cockroaches around the bottom of the boat—turned them on their backs, and blew them clear through the bottom of the boat with shotgun blasts.
Quinn tossed a rope over the dock cleat and pulled the sinking boat in. Sam and Quinn shoved and hoisted Dekka onto the dock where she lay split open like a burst orange.
Lana held Dekka’s head on her lap.
Sam, Quinn, and some strange-looking guy Brianna thought looked vaguely familiar stood watching, a circle of horrified fascination.
The boat sank. The blasted bodies of the insects floated.
Dekka’s mouth was moving but no sound came out. Her eyes were like marbles, rolling, searching without seeing.
“She’s trying to say something,” Quinn said.
“She should shut up and let me keep her alive,” Lana snapped. The Healer shot a malignant look at Brianna. “You owe me a pair of shoes.”
Again Dekka tried to speak.
“It’s you, Breeze,” Sam said. “She wants you.”
Brianna frowned, not sure Sam was right. But she knelt beside Dekka and put her ear close.
Brianna listened, closed her eyes for a moment, then stood up without saying anything.
“What did she say?” Quinn asked.
“Just thanks,” Brianna said. “She just said thanks.”
She turned and took off but not so quickly that she missed the strange new boy saying, “That’s not the truth.”
Chapter Forty-Two
3 MINUTES