Hero (Gone 9)

Domes

DOMES HAD PLAYED an outsized role in four of the lives of the newly enlarged Rockborn Gang.

Shade Darby had been sitting next to the PBA dome, the FAYZ. She’d been a kid of thirteen whose mother had been hired to add her own scientific expertise to the attempt to understand the dome.

Shade could still remember the first time she’d seen it on the news. On video the dome looked like a nothingness, an opaque, nonreflective, vaguely gray-colored dome, a perfect half of a sphere twenty miles in diameter. There had been ground-level video and helicopter video and drone video up on YouTube, and she had seen as much of it as her Google-fu would bring her.

Then she had seen it in person. No video could begin to convey the sheer size of the thing. Up close it wasn’t a dome; it was a gray wall, a gray wall that went up and up until it curved away many miles in the air, reaching so high that airliners had to divert to avoid smashing into it. It extended from horizon to horizon, incredibly large, dwarfing anything ever built by Homo sapiens.

The only way to show just how big it was on a video was to go to satellite imagery. From near-Earth orbit, it was a giant gray punctuation mark. It lay over land and sea, unperturbed by either. It was unnatural in every way, in the sense of something unfamiliar, in the sense of something too perfectly shaped to be a part of any natural landscape. Unnatural in that its existence defied the laws of physics. It was impossible; that was the unique thing about the dome, the thing that made it different and, yes, more interesting than anything anywhere, anytime, ever.

It was impossible.

And yet . . .

Shade had spent a couple of weeks with her mother in the army-slash-CHP-slash-media tent city that grew up where the northbound 101 came to an abrupt stop. Another few seconds on the 101 would have taken you to Perdido Beach, but Perdido Beach had lived up to its name. It was lost. It was gone. It had been covered by the dome.

Shade had gone back to Chicago for a while to attend a math camp that had entirely lost her interest. Then, back to the tent, truck, and trailer village to find everything changed. The dome had become transparent, completely invisible, and yet, just as impenetrable. What had been a blank wall became a sort of aquarium, or living diorama. And for the first time the world’s questions about the mystery, some of them at least, were beginning to be answered.

No, the dome was not solid like a big ball bearing.

Yes, there were people inside. Children, teenagers, all younger than fifteen at the start, 332 of them—minus some deaths.

Minus quite a few deaths.

Shade had never told Dekka, but she had seen Brianna, in person. The Breeze had been within ten feet of her. Brianna was in some ways Shade’s counterpart, another girl with extraordinary speed, but within the dome the rules had been different. Brianna had run as Brianna. No Watchers in her head. No protective insectoid morph. Brianna came to the edge of the FAYZ, to stand almost within arm’s reach. She would take questions written for her on posters and iPads and scrawl the answers on pieces of wallboard or in one case the white shell of a clothes dryer. Paper, obviously, was in short supply in the FAYZ.

So was soap. Clothing. Food. The kids huddled against their side of the barrier looked like abused puppies in a shelter: scared, wary, alert. Damaged.

The only thing not in short su

pply were weapons. So many weapons. Crowbars, sledgehammers, baseball bats with spikes driven through them, the steel bars of hand weights, maple table legs, knives, machetes, and guns. Far too many guns.

Shade had seen Brianna, and she had seen Caine, the infamous Caine, the self-proclaimed king of the FAYZ. He was a handsome devil, made more handsome in memory because he’d been played in the movie by an actor who was full-on Hollywood handsome.

She’d seen Gaia, too. Gaia who had every power. Gaia, the mad child, the creature from videos with hundreds of millions of hits, especially the one where she had ripped a person’s arm off and . . .

“They found a way to stop her,” Shade muttered. “Is Vector that much more dangerous?”

It had been meant as a rhetorical question, but now she considered it seriously. Gaia had been a murderous, monstrous creature, but though she’d had designs on a life outside of the FAYZ, she had been taken down with the dome.

Level One, some part of Shade’s mind said.

We are now on Level Two of this insane game. With how many more levels to go? And no spare lives?

“I’m tired of this game,” Shade said to no one.

Dekka had first seen the dome when she stepped out of Coates Academy and snuck into the gloomy pine forest to smoke a joint.

Coates was a school, but not a normal one. Coates was for the disappointing children of people who had means. Dekka’s family didn’t have money, but Coates had a scholarship for diversity, and Dekka—black and LGBTQ—was a twofer.

The way she had disappointed her parents had been by being herself. She had come out and made a mess of it, saying things wrong, words that did not form the way she’d have liked. Dekka had been arguing with her parents about something unrelated when she had blurted out the truth. Her mother had been going on about Dekka’s obligation to be able to make her own way in the world, to find a husband who would love her and with whom she would have babies. And Dekka—who had never been the most tolerant of human beings, by her own admission—said, “If I marry anyone, it’ll be a girl, Mom, and if there’s a grandchild in your future it’ll be adopted.”

Not, perhaps, her most diplomatic moment. She’d been just about to turn fourteen, an age when parents still harbor the illusion that their child is malleable, shapeable. Her parents dismissed the whole “lesbian thing,” and from there things went right downhill, her parents being stiff-necked evangelical Christians and Dekka being rebellious, sullen, increasingly irreligious, and above all, worst of all, though her parents would never quite admit it, a lesbian.

So much anger and pain, and I wasn’t even getting laid. Boy or girl.

They’d found out about the diversity scholarship at Coates, and Coates had found they had an honest-to-God black lesbian (ding-ding-ding!) and Dekka had been packed off, not even very upset, because after all, could it really be worse than home?