Hunger

But Orsay’s mother’s addiction grew ever worse, and soon there was no hiding it. There was a divorce. Orsay’s mother did not fight for custody. Her father took a job at Stefano Rey, wanting to get far away from the city and far away from his ex-wife.

Orsay had lived a lonely life since then. School was a once-a-day video link with a classroom all the way off in Sunnyvale.

Occasionally she’d make a short-term friend with one of the kids who came with their parents to camp. Maybe a nice couple of days of swimming and fishing and hiking. But never more than a day here and a day there.

“Dad. I’m trying to tell you something important here. It’s not about Mom. It’s about me. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something very, very weird in my head.”

“Sweetheart, you’re a teenager. Of course there’s something wrong in your head. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be a teenager. It’s normal for you to start thinking about . . . well, diff—”

And that’s when her father had simply disappeared.

There.

Not there.

She’d thought she was hallucinating. She had thought the craziness had suddenly overtaken her.

But her father was really gone. So were Ranger Assante and Ranger Cruz and Ranger Swallow.

So was everyone in the Main West campground.

The satellite uplink was dead. The cell phones were dead.

All that first day she had searched, but there was no one. Not in any of the campgrounds she could reach easily, anyway.

She had been terrified.

But that night she had felt silence descend on her battered mind. For the first time in weeks.

The creepy, lurid, crazy-quilt visions of people and places she didn’t know were gone. In its place . . . not peace, exactly. But quiet. Her mind and dreams were her own again.

Despite her fear, Orsay slept. Reality had become a nightmare, but at least now it was her own nightmare.

On the second day, Orsay had hiked until she’d encountered the barrier. And then she knew that whatever was happening to her, it was real.

The barrier was impassable. It hurt to touch it.

There was no going north. The only way open was to the south, toward the distant town of Perdido Beach, almost twenty miles away.

Orsay had resisted. She was desperately lonely, but then she had been for a long time. And the compensation for feeling sane again was almost enough to make up for the utter isolation.

She found enough food in the storehouse and, when that was used up, in the campgrounds.

For a while she thought she might be the only person left alive. But then she had chanced upon a group of kids hiking through the forest. There were five of them. Four boys and a girl, all about Orsay’s age, except for one younger boy, maybe four or five years old.

She followed them a while, keeping out of sight. They were noisy enough to hear from a distance. They lacked Orsay’s well-developed woodsman’s skills.

That night, as they began to sleep, Orsay crept closer, wondering, hoping . . .

And then it started.

The first dream was from a boy named Edilio. Flashes of a day filled with insane action: a huge boat that flew through the air and crashed down on his head; a hotel atop a cliff; a race around a marina.

Crowding behind Edilio’s dream came visions from a boy named Quinn. These were sad dreams, dark and gloomy and full of emotion, with only a few dark shapes to give them life.

But then the little boy, the four-year-old, fell into an REM state, and his dreams had blown away the others. It was as if the others’ dreams were on small TVs while the little boy’s dream was on an IMAX movie screen with surround sound.

Images of terrible menace.

Images of staggering beauty.

Things that were somehow both beautiful and terrifying.

None of it was logical. None of it made sense. But there was no looking away, no chance of hiding from the cascade of pictures, sounds, feelings. It was as if Orsay had tried to stand in front of a tornado.

The boy, Little Pete, had seen her. Dreamers often did, although they usually weren’t sure who she was or why she was there. They usually ignored her as just another nonsensical element of a random dream.

But Little Pete had stepped into his own dream and he had come to her. He had stared right at her.

“Be careful,” Little Pete said. “There’s a monster.”

And that was when Orsay had sensed a dark presence, looming up behind her. A presence that was like a black hole, eating the light of Little Pete’s dream.

There was a name for the dark thing. A word Orsay couldn’t make sense of. A word she had never heard. In the dream she had turned away from Little Pete to face the darkness, to ask it its name. To ask it what “gaiaphage” meant.

But Little Pete had smiled, just a little. He shook his head no, as if chiding a foolish child who’d been about to touch a hot stove.

And she had awakened, expelled from the dream like an unwelcomed guest at a party.

Now, months later, she still winced at the memory. But she also craved it. She had spent every night since wishing that she could touch Little Pete’s sleeping mind once more. She savored the fragments she could recall, tried to get that same rush but always failed.

She was almost out of food, down to MREs—meals ready to eat, the overly salted meals in a pouch that soldiers and some campers ate. She told herself that she was coming down from the forest at long last for food. Just for food.

Now Orsay watched from a safe distance, concealed by darkness, as a real-life monster, a boy with a thick, powerful tentacle in place of one arm, said good-bye to a boy who simply disappeared.