Light (Gone 6)

It is the answer, Astrid. You know it.

She followed him out as far as the door—well, the wreckage of a doorway—and saw him rushing across the plaza to where a fire had caught somehow in a drifted pile of trash.

A couple of kids were already taking care of it, and Sam wasn’t necessary. The truth was, the cries of “Fire!” almost served as a distraction, something to—

The whip was around her throat. She screamed but no sound emerged. She tried to breathe, but nothing came.

She reached for a standing pillar of stone; her fingernails clawed at it. She kicked at a piece of wood, hoping it would make some sound to draw Sam’s attention. The buildings around the plaza

were supposed to be full of Edilio’s people: one of them must see!

Sam had only to turn around . . .

Astrid dropped, putting all her weight on the tentacle arm, hoping to pull him off balance. But he was too strong.

Drake drew her back into the shadows of the church. She was kicking, trying to scream, her lungs already burning from lack of oxygen.

“Hello, Astrid,” Drake said.

And she lost consciousness.

“We need a bucket brigade,” Sam said to Edilio. “There must be some kind of air current up high in the dome. It’s picking up sparks from the forest fire and dropping them all around.”

“I’ll get all my spare people on it right away,” Edilio snapped. Then, “Sorry.”

“I know you’re stretched thin, man.”

“Thin? I’m stretched invisible, Sam. There are maybe two, three dozen kids in the fields. I have maybe twelve left actually holding guns. And the rest? You know where they are.”

“It’s the waiting,” Sam said, looking to the northwest, the direction of the highway. “Why doesn’t she just attack?”

“Maybe she knows we’re panicking. Or maybe she’s waiting for the fire to do her work for her.”

Sam looked up. The sky was still afternoon blue, but there was a gray tint to the air. “If she’s out there to the northwest of town like we think, then she’s closer to the fire than we are. Maybe we’ll get lucky and—”

He stopped when he saw Edilio’s skeptical look.

“Yeah,” Sam said. Then: “I have to go after her. If I wait, then she uses my own power to kill kids. I have to try to take her down myself.”

Edilio spread his hands as if to say, But . . . There was no but. It was the truth, and they both knew it.

“The only other alternative is, you know, to, um . . . deprive her of my power. It may give me a chance, her needing to keep me alive. That may give me an edge.”

Again Sam was waiting to hear the counterargument. He was waiting to hear Edilio explain how wrong he was to believe that he had to die to stop Gaia. But that wasn’t what he heard, or what he saw in Edilio’s eyes.

“She’s stronger than you are, Sam. It’s like fighting yourself and Caine and Jack and Dekka, all at once.”

“Yeah.”

“Talk to Astrid about it.”

“I already talked to Astrid.”

“And she’s okay with a suicide mission? Because I’m not. You go out there, go to win, huh? Don’t go out there thinking you’re doing us a favor by getting killed.”

Sam sighed. “It’s the endgame, my friend.”

“Sam . . .,” Edilio began, but that was all he had, that one word, that one-word plea for a different solution.