Caine made his way down to the dock. The answer was obvious: if he was going to survive, he had to get to the island. Out of here. Away from Gaia. Not that Gaia couldn’t find him there, but as he’d told Diana, the trick wasn’t to live forever, but to be the last to die.
And to never suffer that pain again. He couldn’t think about it; he couldn’t or he would feel an echo of it, and even that was agony.
There was a kid on guard, one of Quinn’s people, posted there to make sure no one tampered with any of the fishing boats.
Caine didn’t hurt him, just used his power to smack him against the wooden planks until he stopped yelling. Then he tied him up and stuffed a rag in his mouth to keep him quiet. Gaia would find him, too, and kill him in due course. But his death might come a bit later just because he was incapacitated.
Hey, that was a good thing. Right?
Caine saw the boats that had been reserved for emergency use. There should still be a little gas left. It wouldn’t be much—they’d been running on fumes just a few days ago when Caine had been king.
The memory brought a grim smile to his lips. King Caine. Things changed, didn’t they? Now he was ready to try and creep away to hang on to a another few hours of life. Run away.
King Caine to Rat Caine in a heartbeat.
Well, Penny had already knocked the crown off his head, hadn’t she? He recalled the humiliation of waking up to find his hands cemented and a crown stapled to his scalp. Pain, too. But he’d had pain, he knew pain, and while staples in your scalp were no picnic, they were nothing to compare with the agony of having that hard concrete chipped slowly away with a hammer.
Yeah, that had been bad. Change-your-whole-outlook kind of bad. Still, the humiliation of powerlessness had been worse.
But not worse than what Gaia had done to him. Nothing to what she had done.
In his arrogance he had thought he was free of the gaiaphage. But he never would be, would he? As long as that monster existed, it would have a back door into his brain and could make him crawl and cry and beg for death . . .
He made a whimpering noise. Like a scared child. Well, he was a scared child, wasn’t he?
He hopped down into the boat. There was no gauge on the tank, so he looked around for a while, wishing he had Sam’s power of light. It took him a few minutes to find what he needed, something thin enough and long enough to stick in the fuel tank and check the amount. It was a broken piece of fishing pole, a one-foot length of dark fiberglass. It came back up showing about an inch of gas sloshing in there.
Out in the ocean Caine saw something large going by—a tanker, maybe, carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of gas.
“Must be nice,” he said.
“What must be nice?”
She had snuck up on him without his seeing or hearing her. Diana, a dark shadow above him, outlined by stars.
He started to say something to her, but nothing came. She was on the dock. He was in the boat below her.
Diana.
Finally he said, “What are you doing here?”
“Finding you,” she said. “You took off.”
“You didn’t find much,” he said bitterly, and immediately regretted it. It sounded self-pitying. Well, it was, wasn’t it?
“This is where we landed, coming from the island,” she said.
“Yes. In triumph. The conquering hero,” he said. “King Caine. I was just remembering that.”
“With that monster in my belly,” Diana said.
“Not your fault,” he said tersely. “Not mine, either.”
“I wonder.”
“We had . . . Listen, we made love, right? Isn’t that what we’re calling it? No one warned us we were conceiving a body for the gaiaphage.”
“Did we make love?” Diana asked him.