Villain (Gone 8)

In a world gone mad, how could anyone blame Justin DeVeere? Hadn’t he told them all that Knightmare wasn’t him but a whole separate person? Most of Justin knew this was nonsense, but enough of him was willing to at least pretend to believe it—when the lie was necessary. When accepting responsibility would leave him naked and defenseless in attempting to justify his actions.

“I have to believe in me even if no one else does.”

“Eh?” Tolliver asked. The tank man had better-than-human hearing.

“Nothing,” Justin said. “I was just—unh! Oh! Oh, shit!”

Justin had been on his rear end, sitting cross-legged, but now he writhed and rolled onto his side and slapped impotently at the pain chip still embedded in his neck, with wires tied directly to his spine.

“Pain chip?” Tolliver asked.

“Just a tap, not a . . . Ah! Dammit!”

“DiMarco,” Tolliver snarled. “Or whoever took over for her. A little reminder from the Ranch that you’re still their property.”

“I need to find a doctor to get it out of me,” Justin said. “It must work by satellite!”

The turtle woman—currently just a woman—said, “No, it’s the cell towers. Their system uses cell-phone signals, wi-fi, direct radio. You need to find a place where there’s no coverage.”

“Not far now,” Tolliver said. He pointed with his articulated mechanical arm.

Justin shook off the pain, which had been, as Tolliver suggested, just a quick tap, a reminder. He looked ahead and saw the glow of Las Vegas. There would be doctors in Vegas. There would be rich, lonely women looking for a handsome young . . . monster? No, no, artist. Artist.

Monster.

One of the truck passengers, a slight teenaged boy who’d been forced to take the rock along with a dose of hawk DNA, began to morph. The result was extraordinary, even with so little light. He had wings, which he kept folded. He was covered in feathers that ruffled in the stiff breeze. His face was still human, but dominated by oversized yellow eyes.

It was those hawk’s eyes he trained on the city ahead. In a hushed, awestruck voice he said, “There are things burning. Big fires, at least two.”

“Looks like they started the battle without us,” Tolliver said.

But Justin’s eye was looking elsewhere. At the moon, halfway up the sky in the east. A big yellow gibbous moon.

And the small, swift shadow that crossed it.

“Christ,” Dekka said. It was all taking place a few hundred feet below them, illuminated by Las Vegas’s eerie neon glow. Unbelievable scenes of innocent civilians crushed by tanks that had no other choice. Scenes of civilians tearing soldiers apart. In the middle of an American city.

Dekka saw Armo draw back, too sickened to watch.

Cruz watched it all, perhaps, Dekka thought, as a sort of grim penance for having come up with the idea of waiting to intervene. The smart move, but also the ruthless move, and Cruz had never struck Dekka as that kind of person. Sam had been that kind of person, as had Caine. The two great powers of the FAYZ had used that gift of ruthlessness in very different ways, but they had each been decisive. Cruz looked like she was shrinking into herself, wanting to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Dekka wondered if there was anything she could say to ease Cruz’s pain. But anything she said would sound condescending and false. That was the damned thing about making life and death decisions: they could eat you up inside, and no one could really do much to help.

Francis Specter watched quietly. She was the new kid, the untested one. Dekka wondered how her peculiar power would even be useful when they finally got into the battle.

Whenever that was.

Only Shade avoided the window and watched the TV coverage from the news helicopter, supplemented by dozens of unenslaved tourists aiming iPhones through hotel windows. All video shown on TV was sound-off as a precaution, so the gruesome pictures had as soundtrack only the horrified exclamations of TV anchors.

“They’re going around,” Shade called, wincing and closing her eyes as what looked like a child emerged from beneath tank treads, roadkill in a pink, spangled Disneyland T-shirt.

Shade opened her phone, clicked on the maps, and held it up for Dekka. “They’ll most likely come back around Treasure Island,” she reported. “That’s, like, a mile north.”

The same thought had obviously occurred to Dillon Poe, because the mass of his own army was now run

ning north. The news said the Triunfo was under his control. It was north, and his victims would have to run fast to get there before the army turned back toward the Strip and cut them off.

“Did you drop this?” Cruz asked Dekka, holding up a crumpled yellow Post-it note.

Dekka’s eyes went wide. She practically snatched the paper from Cruz and stuffed it deep in her pocket. “Thanks. Must be an old shopping list.”