Light (Gone 6)

Water began seeping in through the screwdriver holes as air leaked out. Water came in from all directions, like some kind of awful multihead shower. Soon there was an inch of water in the bottom, and when Drake tried to curse, it was lake water that he sucked up into his severed throat.

The descent seemed to take forever. Then: a bump as the cooler landed on the lake bottom.

It took ten minutes for the box to fill completely with water as it rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and finally swirled his hair.

But he was not dead.

Tiny fish, guppies, came sneaking in through the holes. They nibbled at him, but stopped once they’d had a taste. Still, they swirled around him, faintly luminescent in the dark water, like dull fireflies.

They looked into his ears. They poked curious heads into his nose. They swam up into his esophagus and from there up into his mouth.

They were still there when Drake began screaming without sound as he changed into Brittney.

The idea of facing Taylor without a cigarette was bothering Lana quite a bit. Not that she was addicted to cigarettes, she told herself; it wasn’t anything like that. Only a very weak person would become addicted, and she was not weak.

The fact that she’d been shaking and even more snappish than usual all day absolutely did not prove that she was addicted. Neither did the fact that she’d spent much of the day searching for smokes or cursing Sanjit.

And yet she was thinking of cigarettes even as she turned the key in the lock. The old electronic key system at the hotel didn’t work, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to leave Taylor free to just walk away—like she could anyway—so Lana had told Sanjit to screw a lock onto the door. He was handy that way. It was almost a pity she would have to shoot him.

Strange the idea of locking Taylor up. Before her recent—well, it wasn’t quite a mutation; no one knew what it was—anyway, before all this, she’d had the power to teleport. To “bounce,” as she called it, from one place to the next with just a thought. Maybe she still could, but she’d have a hard time standing up when she got wherever she was going.

Lana slid open the bolt.

“Taylor. It’s me.”

She opened the door. No one had ever closed the curtains in the room, so it was bright with the slanting rays of the setting sun. Different light now. Hard to say what made it different; it just was. The old sky and the old sun had had a seasonless sameness to them. This sun—the real sun—set a little earlier, and a low cloud bank out beyond the barrier bent the light into shades of yellow and gold.

It was a different gold than the gold color of Taylor’s skin: Taylor was more metallic. Almost as if she really was made of actual gold. She sat propped up in the hotel bed, leaning on her one stump arm, the other complete arm in her lap. Her legs had been placed on the bed with her, but one had fallen off and was on the floor.

Taylor was completely nude, but it didn’t matter. She had none of the signs of gender. She was a golden Gumby with one arm and a long, green, reptilian tongue.

The best theory anyone had was that it had been done by Little Pete. Little Pete was not thought to have done it maliciously—Petey was incapable of malice. Or any intention, really. He might be the most powerful person in the FAYZ but he was still, despite it all, a five-year-old autistic kid. Couldn’t blame him. He’d probably just been playing. A heedless, unaware little god.

With great power comes great responsibility, Lana thought, recalling the line from the Spider-Man movie. But Little Pete had all kinds of power and no responsibility.

“Let’s try the hand again, Taylor,” Lana said. “Where is it?”

Maybe Taylor understood what she was saying, maybe not. Her ears looked normal, but who knew what went on down inside them? And who knew what went on in her brain? Or if she still had a brain?

Lana couldn’t find the hand, which was disturbing. She’d had no evidence that Taylor could move off her bed. Then she found it all the way across the room and behind the permanently off television. Were the parts moving on their own? Once, Brianna had told Lana that Drake could do that: reassemble. As if the parts had lives of their own. Was Taylor the same sort of thing Drake now was? Or at least similar?

No. Drake still looked like Drake. Taylor . . . well . . . But maybe there was some kind of similarity. It was a puzzle. A creepy, creepy puzzle.

Lana carried the cold thing back and pressed it against Taylor’s stump. She focused her thoughts on healing the stump. Had Taylor been a regular human, it might well have worked. It wouldn’t be the first appendage Lana had reattached. But it wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t worked on earlier efforts.

“What do I do with you?” Lana asked Taylor. “What are you? You’re sure

not human. Or even mammal, obviously. Or . . .”

A thought struck her. Was she sure Taylor was even an animal?

A second more perverse thought popped into her head: what would happen if she dragged Taylor out to the balcony to wave to the lookers out there? Hey there, tourists, check this out! That should keep your nightmares fresh for a while.

She wondered how much The Powers That Be in the FAYZ—Sam, Caine, Edilio, and Astrid—had thought about the outside world’s view of what was going on. The reality in the FAYZ was way weirder than the lookers could imagine. This wasn’t just a bunch of kids trapped in a bubble; it was an unprecedented event in the history of the planet. The barrier wasn’t the only thing separating inside from outside—things could happen here that just flat could not exist out there.

For example: a girl able to heal with a touch.

“Yeah, let’s not even start thinking about that,” she told herself. She looked at Taylor, a pretty girl with dead eyes and golden skin and black hair like a sheet of rubber. “Are you more like a plant?”