Fear

She would fail Drake. She would fail the gaiaphage.

Then: a flash of genius. Brittney almost laughed out loud.

She breathed, but she did not need to breathe.

Brittney began picking up small rocks and stuffing them in her pockets. She tied off the bottom of her shirt, as tight as she could make it, then dropped more rocks down the front of her shirt, using her arms to hold them all in like a pregnant woman’s belly.

Weighed down, she walked into the water. As the water rose around her she kept her gaze on the sailboat. She walked directly toward it, fixing the direction in her mind.

The water rose over her waist, over her chest, to her mouth and nose. And then it closed over her head.

She was almost completely sightless in the water. The only light was from the moon, and it seemed to reach only a few feet into the lake.

Brittney focused all her energy on walking in a straight line. The rocks controlled her buoyancy, but still she tended to float just a little, which made holding to a straight line very hard.

Freezing water filled her lungs. She could tell that it was cold, but the cold did not bother her. What did bother her was the certainty that she was off course. How many steps should she take? How far out was the sailboat? It had seemed like perhaps two hundred steps, but she had lost count after stumbling and losing some of the rocks that held her down.

No choice now but to surface. She opened the bottom of her shirt and let the rocks fall free. Her feet came up off the stony lake bottom and she floated upward.

It took a very long time. She was not very buoyant.

All the while she looked around and saw nothing until she was near the surface. Then she saw a rope slanting down into the darkness below.

She swam underwater, silent, no bubbles issuing from her mouth. She gripped the rope and began to pull herself upward, careful not to yank on that line.

She came up face-first. The twisted wires of her braces glinted with moonlight. A boat—a boat with a tall mast and what might be green trim—was directly above her.

Brittney wasn’t sure whether it was proper to say a prayer of thanks to the gaiaphage. Maybe that was just for her old God. But she smiled in the renewed belief that she had purpose, and that she was serving her master well.

TWENTY-ONE

15 HOURS, 12 MINUTES

ASTRID’S PLAN WOULD have been brilliant.

Except that in distancing herself from the road for safety she managed to get lost.

This quasi-desert was not her familiar woods. And the funny thing about a road was that from a distance you couldn’t actually see it at night unless you were seeing streetlights or car lights.

The FAYZ had neither.

So the gravel road disappeared from view, and although she was sure she was paralleling it, she seemed now to be in much less austere countryside than that which the road passed through.

The moon had set and the stars provided far too little light to see by. So she had gone slower and slower. And then she had tried to turn a sharp right angle to intersect the road. But the road was not there. Or if it was there it was much farther off than she had imagined.

“Stupid,” she told herself. So much for the newly competent Astrid. She’d managed to lose herself in just a couple of hours.

As much as she hated to admit it, the only wise movement now was to stand still and wait for dawn. If dawn came. That thought sent a thrill of fear through her stomach. Even by starlight she was helpless. In total darkness she could wander forever. Or more accurately, wander until thirst and hunger killed her.

She wondered which would do it first. People assumed it was thirst. But she’d read in a book somewhere that hunger—

“Not helpful,” she said aloud, just for the reassurance of hearing her own voice. “If … when … the sun comes up I’ll be able to locate the ridges and hills and maybe even see a bit of ocean.”

So she found a patch of ground with some tall grass and sat down carefully.

“Bad start,” she admitted. Lost in the wilderness. How long had Moses and the Hebrews managed to stay lost on the Sinai Peninsula before stumbling into the land they were to reconquer? Forty years?

“A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. And they still couldn’t find their way out of the Sinai,” Astrid muttered. “I’ll settle for one last day of sunlight.”

At some point sleep carried her off to unsettling dreams. And when she woke at last she knew that her one wish was not to be granted.

Looking up, she could make out a circle of deepest, darkest blue just beginning to lighten on the eastern edge and push the stars away.

Beneath that midnight blue was black. Not the black of night with stars and the Milky Way and distant galaxies, but the absolute blank, flat black of the stain.

The sky no longer stretched from horizon to horizon. The sky was a hole in the top of an upended bowl. The sky was the circle at the top of a well. And before the day was done the sky would be altogether gone.

Caine woke. His head was pounding. A headache so painful he thought he might pass out from the sudden onslaught of pain.

Then he felt something else. It felt like cuts. Itchy and sharp at once, all around his head.

He reached to touch it. But his hands would not move.

Caine’s eyes opened.

He saw the gray cement block, shaped like a bowl. It rested on the coffee table. His hands were in the block to the wrists.

Fear struck. Panic.

He fought to control it but he couldn’t. He cried out.

“No, no, no, no!”

He tried to pull back, tried to free his hands, but they were absolutely held fast by the concrete, which itched and squeezed his skin. He had done this to people; he had ordered this done and he knew the results; he knew what it did; he knew the cement could not just be broken off; he knew he was trapped, powerless.