There wasn’t much, if anything, she could do about that except to warn the kids inside to start getting their stories straight. The local district attorney had soft-pedaled the matter of arrests and investigations, but other state officials were grandstanding, and Congress looked as if it would stick its nose in as well.
The idea that the kids inside should come through all they?
??d survived and then go to prison was intolerable. But with something like three hundred kids—fewer now—it would be child’s play for prosecutors to get some, at least, to testify against others.
And truth be told, didn’t some of those kids need to be locked up?
She pushed that thought aside, but the image of Sam with his deadly light blazing from his hands . . . the little girl he’d tried to kill . . . the other one he had incinerated . . . The fact that before all this ever started, he’d lashed out and burned the hand off her ex-husband, his stepfather . . .
She’d watched YouTubes of all the interviews with kids inside. Those that mentioned Sam described him as a leader, a fighter, someone who had saved them more than once. Inside the FAYZ he was a hero.
But one interview had stuck with her. It had been given by a young boy who called himself Bug and could almost disappear, or at least fade into the background to become nearly invisible. He’d said Sam was a killer.
He almost killed me once, Bug had said.
The stories of her other son, Caine, were much darker. Kids looked nervously over their shoulders when they talked about him.
But he’s not the worst, the super-speedy little celebrity who called herself the Breeze had said. He’s evil, absolutely. But he’s not psycho like Drake.
Yes, maybe some really would need to be locked up. Like rabid dogs or rogue tigers.
What could she do? Get a lawyer for Sam? She didn’t have that kind of money.
But wait, others would have that kind of money. Wouldn’t they? The kids in the FAYZ needed lawyers; they needed friendly politicians; they needed celebrities to speak for them. All that nonsense, they needed it. Public relations. Advisers.
All of which meant money. Lots of money.
Connie arrived back at the small trailer she’d shared with Abana Baidoo for almost a year. She found Abana sounding optimistic.
“I talked—well, you know, wrote notes to—another kid inside who said Dahra is loved by everyone. Running the hospital, a good girl.”
“Yes,” Connie said.
“Where have you been?”
Connie knew she should tell Abana that she had sent Dahra to the lake. But it would just worry her, probably needlessly. Most likely Dahra had not made it to the lake. Most likely she’d sent word or sent someone else or . . .
And she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell her friend she’d sent her daughter to a massacre.
“I went to the lake. I heard Sam was up there and I . . . I went up there.”
Abana looked closely at her, head tilted quizzically, sensing something wrong. “There’s some video of a crazy old woman saying she saw fires up there.”
Connie shook her head. “Not crazy. Something awful happened up there.”
That much she had to tell Abana. It would all come out anyway, but she didn’t have to tell Abana that she, Connie Temple, had sent Dahra there. So she told her what she had seen, and Abana started crying and then so did Connie.
They drank a fair amount of wine after that. The TV was on but muted. Connie saw a video of what they’d been talking about earlier on the radio: images of what was clearly a massive forest fire raging in the Stefano Rey and now spreading beyond it.
Then the news switched to long-range camera shots of the lake. The anchor was somber, obviously warning people that they were about to see something disturbing.
And then the picture shifted to a body floating facedown in the lake.
Abana was not looking at the TV; she was laughing over something funny that Connie didn’t really understand. So it was not then, not at that moment, that Abana would see her daughter, Dahra, floating facedown in the lake.
The sun rose and Edilio was still alive. It surprised him. He had spent the last part of the night on the steps of the town plaza. He’d gotten a little sleep, hunched over, head between his knees, but not much. He looked around owlishly, wondering how many of his people were still in place. How many had bailed? The thought of walking down to the barrier depressed him, because he was afraid he’d see all his soldiers there.
Albert was just striding up, looking peeved, which was more or less his regular expression.