A massive gravel hand reached in and missed Drake’s head by inches.
Drake fired blindly at the hole.
Then he turned and ran.
THIRTY-SEVEN
01 HOUR, 6 MINUTES
THE JEEP BLEW through the gate. Edilio drove straight to where a shaken, bruised, and seriously angry Dekka was picking herself up off the concrete.
“What happened?” Sam demanded, leaping from the front seat.
The adrenaline was finally kicking in. But even now he felt strangely disconnected. Even now, rushing toward trouble. Like it wasn’t really his trouble. Like it was some other part of him that was doing this.
“I tried to fly,” Dekka said in a low growl. She shook her head and bent over to squeeze her knee. “Ow.”
“We heard something louder than gunfire,” Edilio said. “Like thunder. Or like an explosion.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t noticing thunder,” Dekka said.
Orc came loping over from one direction and Howard from the other.
“Orc, man, that was a seriously cool move,” Howard enthused. He ran to his friend and slapped the monster on the shoulder repeatedly.
“I owe you, Orc,” Dekka said.
“What just happened?” Sam repeated.
Howard answered. “Drake, man. He took a shot at Dekka. Dekka goes zooming up. Then, bam, comes down hard. Orc, man, Orc snatches up this motorcycle, right? He yanks the wheel off it and throws it at Drake. Like a Frisbee.” Howard actually clapped his hands in glee. “Right through the hole you burned in the wall, Sammy. Like sinking a full-court shot.”
“Gonna cost you,” Orc grumbled.
“Oh yeah,” Howard seconded. “Gonna cost. Orc doesn’t save the day for free.”
“No one else heard a really big sound?” Edilio pressed.
“We kind of had guns going off, Edilio,” Dekka snapped.
“You okay, Dekka?” Sam asked.
“I’ll live,” she said.
“Dekka: what do you think would happen to a cave or a mine shaft if you turned off gravity?” Sam asked.
“Is this a quiz?”
“No.”
Dekka nodded. “Okay. I guess if I hit it a few times, on-off, on-off, like that, I guess it would start to crumble. Probably collapse.”
“Yeah.” Sam put his hand on her shoulder. “I have to ask you to do something.”
“I’m going to guess that you want me to crash a cave or a mine shaft. So?”
“So it’s not just some mine shaft,” Edilio said darkl
y. “There’s a thing inside it. It’s…I don’t know how to explain it. It gets inside you. It makes you scared.”