“Absolutely,” Sanjit said. Virtue followed him out of the room.
“He’s lying about something,” Caine said in a low voice to Diana.
“Most people lie,” Diana said.
“But not you, Diana. Not to me.”
“Of course not.”
“He’s hiding something,” Caine said. But then Sanjit and Virtue came back carrying a serving tray loaded with cans of peaches, and a box of graham crackers with big tubs of jelly and peanut butter. Unimaginable luxuries, worth so much more than gold.
Whatever Sanjit was hiding, Diana thought, it was nowhere near as important as what he was giving them.
They ate and ate and ate. Not caring that their stomachs cramped. Not caring that their heads pounded.
Not even caring when weariness and exhaustion caught up with them and one by one their eyes drooped.
Penny slid from her chair, like a passed-out drunk. Diana glanced blearily at Caine to see if he was going to react. But Caine just put his head down on the table.
Bug was snoring.
Diana looked at Sanjit, her eyes barely able to focus. He winked at her.
“Oh,” Diana said, and then crossed her arms on the table and lay her head down.
“It’s going to be really bad when they wake up,” Virtue said. “Maybe we should kill them.”
Sanjit grabbed his brother and pulled him close for a quick hug. “Yeah. Right. We’re a pair of desperate killers.”
“Caine may be, though. When he wakes up…”
“The Ambien I gave them should keep them asleep for a while at least. And when they wake, they’ll be tied up. And we’ll be gone,” Sanjit said. “At least, I hope. The way it sounds, we’d better take some time to get food stowed away first. Which means a lot of climbing up and down and up and down.”
Virtue swallowed. “You’re actually going to do it?”
Sanjit’s smile was gone. “I’m going to try, Choo. That’s all I can do.”
THIRTY-FIVE
1 HOUR 27 MINUTES
SAM WAS FINALLY where he’d known all along he would end up. It had taken him all day to get there. The sun was already sinking toward the false horizon.
The Perdido Beach nuclear power plant was eerily silent. In the old days it had kept up a constant roar. Not from the actual nuclear reactor, but from the giant turbines that turned superheated steam into electricity.
Things were as he’d left them. A hole burned into the control room wall. Cars smashed here and there by Caine or by Dekka. All the evidence of the battle that had taken place a few short months ago.
He went in through the turbine room. The machines were big as houses, hunched, coiled metal monsters turned to so much scrap.
The control room, too, as Caine and he had left it. The door ripped from its hinges by Jack. Dried blood—Brittney’s, most of it—formed a flaky brown crust on the polished floor.
The ancient computers were blank. The warning lights and indicator lights were all dead, except for a fading pool of illumination cast by a single functioning emergency beam. The battery would be exhausted soon.
No wonder Jack had refused to come back to this place. It wasn’t fear of radiation. It was fear of ghosts. It hurt Jack deep down inside, Sam thought, to see machines rendered useless.
Sam’s steps echoed softly as he walked. He knew where he was going, where he had to go.
There was a badge on a desk, one of the warning badges that turned color when radiation levels were high. Sam picked it up, looked at it, not sure whether he cared.