“We’re a bunch of sheep waiting for the tiger,” Albert snapped. “There’s only one question: are any of us going to walk out of here alive?”
“Maybe you should run back to your island,” Astrid said with a vicious edge. She glanced up to see something she’d never seen before: Edilio, his face transformed by dark anger. She took a step back.
He said, “Talk, Astrid. Now.”
Astrid swallowed hard. She tried to think of something to say and failed. She was not strong enough to say no to him. She felt her resistance crumble. She felt her own surrender. The coolly logical part of her mind noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Okay. Little Pete is alive. I can’t explain it; believe me, I wish I could. When I was with Cigar, in the dark, waiting for the end, hearing Cigar scream from what Penny had done to him, Petey talked to me.”
“Your imagination?” Albert suggested.
Astrid shook her head. “I can feel him sometimes. Poor Cigar could see him, a little, at least.”
“Gaia sure thinks he’s alive,” Diana said. “She says he’s weaker being separated from a physical self.”
“So we need Little Pete to pull a Gaia, take a body,” Albert said. “Fine. How do we do that?”
Now it was Edilio’s turn to flinch. Astrid had already followed that line of reasoning to its obvious conclusion; he had not. And now that he understood it, he didn’t like it any more than she did.
Not surprisingly it was Diana, with some of her old snark back, who clarified. “So we’re saying Astrid should tell her little brother to go all exorcist on some sacrificial lamb, then get him or her to kill the kid I gave birth to.”
This was followed by another long silence.
Astrid almost didn’t dare to think, lest someone somehow read her thoughts. Because there was another way. If Caine and Sam should die . . .
She focused to see Edilio making eye contact with her. He gave the slightest of nods.
Yes. He had seen the other path.
The silence in the room was profound. The choices were sinking in. Find a sacrifice for Little Pete. Or kill Sam and Caine.
Still looking at Astrid, Edilio said, “Dekka, Quinn, come with me. I’m getting anyone who can shoot. I’ll put everyone who has a gun into a window or doorway around the town square. We’ll fight her here.”
“Without Sam and Caine and Brianna, too, you won’t win,” Diana said.
“Yeah.” Edilio nodded.
“Listen to me,” Albert said, placating, knowing he was speaking the unspeakable. “None of us likes these choices, but that’s what we have. Right? We have what we have.”
“Maybe,” Edilio said. “But there are things I’ll do, and things I won’t do. I’ll die trying to keep people alive. But I won’t do murder.”
He slung his rifle and marched from the room with Dekka and Quinn in his wake.
NINETEEN
25 HOURS, 29 MINUTES
SAM AND CAINE saw the school bus. It wasn’t a particularly unusual thing, really: the last of the gas was occasionally parceled out to get kids to this, the farthest out of the farming areas.
But there was something too silent about the bus and the field. If the bus had brought kids out here, then they should be seeing them.
They found the first body lying facedown, leg stretched out into the dirt, face on blacktop. Something very, very powerful had smashed the body and then ripped off one leg. The remaining leg wore a red sneaker.
“She’s not that far ahead of us,” Caine said. “She’s probably going straight down the highway.”
“If we run . . .,” Sam said, though he felt too tired to last long running.
“You go right ahead and run. I’ll take the bus,” Caine said.