Light (Gone 6)

At Sheridan Avenue a group of kids broke and ran from a house. Gaia cut them down.

Sam turned his palms inward, toward himself. He couldn’t turn them far enough to aim for his own head or internal organs. His only chance was to use the light to cut through a leg artery and bleed to death.

Better than watching his power be used to mu

rder.

“If there really is a God, forgive me,” he said, and clamped his palms to his thighs and . . .

The pain was searing. The beams of light burned into his thighs.

Gaia was on him in a flash. She twisted his hands away as Sam roared in pain.

Had he done it? Had he cut an artery? Could it be over now, please, please could it be over now?

“No, no, no, I don’t think we can have that,” Gaia said.

Sam struggled against the chains, struggled against her grip on him, but his strength was nothing compared to hers.

Gaia slapped him hard, a backhand blow that sent him reeling into a state that was neither conscious nor unconscious. He was vaguely aware of Gaia rewinding the chain, this time tightly binding his hands together so that they were palm to palm. This left his shoulders free, but he had missed his only chance.

He began to cry. He had failed. Finally, permanently, he had failed. And hadn’t he always known he would? Wasn’t that why he had resisted for so long becoming the leader? Wasn’t that why he’d been relieved, finally, to turn much of it over to Edilio?

He wasn’t a hero. He never had been. School Bus Sam, the great myth that had caused kids to turn to him at first, that hadn’t been heroism: it had just been quick thinking and self-preservation.

Everything he had done, it wasn’t courage: it was all just a desperate effort to stay alive, wasn’t it? In the end wasn’t that all it was?

And now, failure.

Failure, and he would watch them all die, one by one, die because he had chosen life over heroic sacrifice.

Gaia had tired of levitating him before her as some kind of prize. She was angry now. She threw him twenty feet down the highway. He landed on his back and smacked his head against the concrete.

She ran up to him, laughing, and kicked him, crushing ribs and sending him rolling down the highway, chains clanking, crying like a baby, beaten.

“Aaaaahhhh!”

People running. Sam could barely see them through the smoke. Three girls who had never been anything important in the life of the FAYZ, three regular kids, Rachel, Cass, and Colby, three sisters who had never fought, never been in on any of the battles, had just kept their heads down and done what work they were given, now rushed madly, hopelessly, at Gaia with tire irons and clubs.

Gaia seemed startled. She raised one hand and froze them in place. “Look at this,” Gaia marveled. “Are they brave or stupid, Sam Temple?”

Sam blinked tears from his streaming eyes.

“Let them—” he started to say, but began to cough.

“I couldn’t quite hear that,” Gaia taunted.

Sam closed his eyes. Through his eyelids he saw a flash of green light. There were no cries. Just the wet-sandbag sound of bodies hitting the ground.

“Open your eyes, Sam Temple,” Gaia said. “I cut them in half. With your light. With your power.”

She pushed him with her foot to send him rolling.

“On to the rest. On to—” She fell silent suddenly. He opened one soot-streaked eye and saw that Gaia was looking around, nervous. Like she felt someone watching her.

“Where is the whip hand with my hostage?” she asked aloud. Then to Sam, as if he might have the answer: “Where is Drake with the sister of Nemesis?”

“Astrid!” Sam gasped.