Fear

Edilio wept as it kept moving.

Astrid aimed her revolver at the creature’s heart, just behind the shoulder, and fired. The gun kicked in her hand and a small, round, red hole appeared and began leaking red.

She fired again, hitting the creature in its canine neck.

It fell over. Blood pumped from the thing’s neck and formed a pool in the sand.

Once again, the avatar broke apart.

Pete had tried to play with the bouncy avatar and it had broken apart, changed color and shape, and stopped.

He had tried to play with another avatar and it had melted into something different.

Was this the game?

It wasn’t very fun.

And he was beginning to feel bad when the avatars fell apart. Like he was doing a bad-boy thing.

So he had imagined the avatars all back the way they started.

Nothing happened. But things always happened when Pete wanted them really hard. He had wanted the terrible sirens and screams to stop and the world not to burn up and he had created the ball he now lived in.

He had wanted other things and they had happened. If he wanted something badly enough it happened. Didn’t it?

Well, now he was feeling sick inside and he wanted the avatars to go back and be right again. But they didn’t.

No, Pete corrected himself. He’d always been afraid when the big sudden things happened. He couldn’t just wish them and make them happen. He’d always been scared. Panicked. Screaming inside his overloaded brain.

He wasn’t afraid now. The frenzy that used to take him over couldn’t touch him now. That was the old Pete. The new Pete wasn’t scared of noises and colors and things that moved too fast.

The new Pete was just bored.

An avatar floated by and Pete knew it. Even without the stabbing bright blue eyes, without the shrieking voice. He knew her. His sister, Astrid. A pattern, a shape, a coil of strings.

He felt very lonely.

Had he ever felt lonely before?

He felt it now. And he longed to reach out, and with just the smallest touch, to let her know he was here.

But, oh, so delicate, those avatars. And his fingers were all thumbs.

The joke made him laugh.

Had he ever laughed before?

He laughed now. And that was enough for a while, at least.

Albert had made the decision early on to play Caine’s ridiculous game of royalty. If Caine wanted to call himself king, and if he wanted people to call him “Your Highness,” well, that didn’t cost Albert a single ’Berto.

The truth was Caine did keep the peace. He enforced rules, and Albert liked and needed rules.

There had been very little shoplifting at the mall, the ironically named stalls and card tables that were the market outside the school.

There had been fewer fights. Fewer threats. Albert had even seen a decline in the number of weapons being carried. Not much of a decline, but every now and then you could actually see a kid forgetting to carry his nail-studded baseball bat or machete.

Those were good signs.

Best of all, kids showed up for work and they put in a full day.

King Caine scared kids. And Albert paid them. And between the threat and the reward, things were running more smoothly than they ever had under Sam or Astrid.

So if Caine wanted to be called king…

“Your Highness, I’m here with my report,” Albert said.

He stood patiently while Caine, seated at his desk, pretended to be absorbed in reading something.

Finally, Caine looked up, affecting an expression of unconcern.

“Go ahead, Albert,” Caine said.

“The good news: Water continues to flow from the cloud. The stream is clean—most of the dirt and debris and old oil and so on has been washed away. So it’s probably drinkable down at the beach reservoir as well as directly from the rain. Flow rate is twenty gallons an hour. Four hundred and eighty gallons a day, which is more than we need for drinking, with enough left over to water gardens and so on.”

“Washing?”

Albert shook his head. “No. And we can’t have kids showering in the rain as it falls, either. Kids are washing their butts in what will end up being drinking water once we open the reservoir.”

“I’ll make a proclamation,” Caine said.

There were times Albert almost couldn’t resist the impulse to laugh. Proclamation. But he kept a straight, impassive face.

“Food is not as good,” Albert went on. “I made a graph.” He drew a nine-by-twelve poster board from his briefcase and held it so Caine could see it.

“Here’s food production over the last week. Good and steady. You see a drop today because we have nothing from the fishing crews. And this dotted line is the food supply over the next week, projected.”

Caine’s face darkened. He bit at his thumbnail, then stopped himself.

“As you know, Cai—Your Highness … sixty percent of our vegetables and fruit comes from worm-infested fields. Eighty percent of our protein comes from the sea. Without Quinn we have nothing to feed the worms. Which means picking and planting basically stop. To make matters worse, there’s a crazy story going around about one of the artichoke pickers being turned into a fish.”

“What?”

“It’s just a crazy rumor, but right now no one is harvesting artichokes.”

Caine cursed and shook his head slowly.

Albert put away the graph and said, “In three days we’ll have major hunger. A week from now kids will start dying. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous things get when kids get hungry.”