“He’s a one,” she told Caine.

Caine nodded. “Well, that’s both bad and good. Bad because if you did have serious powers you might be useful to me. Good because since you don’t, I have very little reason to worry about you.”

“That sounds kind of stupid,” Sanjit said.

Bug and Penny stared in disbelief.

“I mean, it sounds good, but then if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense,” Sanjit said. “If I did have these powers you’re talking about, I’d be a threat. I don’t, so I’m not as useful as I’d be if I did. Useful and threatening are actually the same thing here.” But as he said it he smiled a huge, innocent-seeming smile.

Caine returned the smile. But it was a shark smiling at Nemo.

No, that was wrong. Sanjit’s smile was slyer than that. Like he knew what he was doing was dangerous.

Not many people held their own with Caine. Diana did. But she had long known that was part of her appeal to him: Caine needed someone who wasn’t intimidated.

But that wasn’t going to work for Sanjit. She wondered if there was some way she could warn him that he wasn’t dealing with a garden variety schoolyard bully who would give him a wedgie.

She saw the dangerous light in Caine’s eyes. She felt the way everyone held their breath. So must Sanjit. But he held Caine’s gaze and kept that infectious smile in place.

“Get me something else to eat,” Caine said at last.

“Absolutely,” Sanjit said. Virtue followed him out of the room.

“He’s lying about something,” Caine said in a low voice to Diana.

“Most people lie,” Diana said.

“But not you, Diana. Not to me.”

“Of course not.”

“He’s hiding something,” Caine said. But then Sanjit and Virtue came back carrying a serving tray loaded with cans of peaches, and a box of graham crackers with big tubs of jelly and peanut butter. Unimaginable luxuries, worth so much more than gold.

Whatever Sanjit was hiding, Diana thought, it was nowhere near as important as what he was giving them.

They ate and ate and ate. Not caring that their stomachs cramped. Not caring that their heads pounded.

Not even caring when weariness and exhaustion caught up with them and one by one their eyes drooped.

Penny slid from her chair, like a passed-out drunk. Diana glanced blearily at Caine to see if he was going to react. But Caine just put his head down on the table.

Bug was snoring.

Diana looked at Sanjit, her eyes barely able to focus. He winked at her.

“Oh,” Diana said, and then crossed her arms on the table and lay her head down.

“It’s going to be really bad when they wake up,” Virtue said. “Maybe we should kill them.”

Sanjit grabbed his brother and pulled him close for a quick hug. “Yeah. Right. We’re a pair of desperate killers.”

“Caine may be, though. When he wakes up…”

“The Ambien I gave them should keep them asleep for a while at least. And when they wake, they’ll be tied up. And we’ll be gone,” Sanjit said. “At least, I hope. The way it sounds, we’d better take some time to get food stowed away first. Which means a lot of climbing up and down and up and down.”

Virtue swallowed. “You’re actually going to do it?”

Sanjit’s smile was gone. “I’m going to try, Choo. That’s all I can do.”

THIRTY-FIVE

1 HOUR 27 MINUTES

SAM WAS FINALLY where he’d known all along he would end up. It had taken him all day to get there. The sun was already sinking toward the false horizon.

The Perdido Beach nuclear power plant was eerily silent. In the old days it had kept up a constant roar. Not from the actual nuclear reactor, but from the giant turbines that turned superheated steam into electricity.

Things were as he’d left them. A hole burned into the control room wall. Cars smashed here and there by Caine or by Dekka. All the evidence of the battle that had taken place a few short months ago.

He went in through the turbine room. The machines were big as houses, hunched, coiled metal monsters turned to so much scrap.

The control room, too, as Caine and he had left it. The door ripped from its hinges by Jack. Dried blood-Brittney’s, most of it-formed a flaky brown crust on the polished floor.

The ancient computers were blank. The warning lights and indicator lights were all dead, except for a fading pool of illumination cast by a single functioning emergency beam. The battery would be exhausted soon.

No wonder Jack had refused to come back to this place. It wasn’t fear of radiation. It was fear of ghosts. It hurt Jack deep down inside, Sam thought, to see machines rendered useless.

Sam’s steps echoed softly as he walked. He knew where he was going, where he had to go.

There was a badge on a desk, one of the warning badges that turned color when radiation levels were high. Sam picked it up, looked at it, not sure whether he cared.

Safe or not, he was going to the reactor.

Sunlight shone through the hole Caine had blown in the concrete containment vessel. But it was faint: sunset reflected off the mountains.

Sam raised his hand and formed a ball of light. It didn’t reveal anything but shadows.

He reached the spot. Right here Drake had shown Sam that he could cause a chain reaction and kill every living thing in the FAYZ.

Right here Drake had named the price.

This was the floor where Sam had laid down and taken the beating.

Sam saw the wrapper of the morphine syringe that Brianna had stuck into him. Here, too, the floor was coated in a flaky brown scum.

A noise! He spun, raised his hands and shot brilliant beams of light.

Something cracked. He fired again and swept the killing beam from left to right, slowly around the room, burning anything it touched.

A catwalk ladder crashed to the floor. A computer monitor exploded like a burned-out lightbulb.

Sam crouched, ready. Listening.

“If someone’s there you’d better tell me,” he said to the shadows. “Because I’ll kill you.”

No voice spoke.

Sam formed a second light and tossed it high overhead. Now shadows crossed each other, cast by two competing lights.

Another light and another and another. He formed them with his will and hung them in the air like Japanese lanterns. He saw no one.

His beams had cut cables and melted instrument panels. But there were no bodies lying on the floor.

“A rat, probably,” he said.

He was shaking. The lights were still not enough, it was still too dark. And even if it were light, something could be hiding anywhere. Too many nooks and crannies, too many awkward machines providing possible concealment.

“A rat,” he said, without any conviction. “Something.”

But not Drake.

No, Drake was in Perdido Beach, if in fact he was anywhere outside of Sam’s overworked imagination.

The reactor chamber was only fractionally lighter than when he’d come in. He’d found nothing. He’d learned nothing.

“I blew the crap out of the place though,” he said.

And accomplished? Nothing.

Sam stuck one hand in the neck of his T-shirt. He touched the skin of his shoulder. He reached under his shirt and touched his chest and stomach. Reached around with both hands to run his fingers along his sides and back. New wounds, the still-fresh marks of Drake’s whip. But worse was the memory of old wounds.

He was here. He was alive. He was hurt, yes, but his skin was not hanging in tatters.

And he was very definitely alive.

“Well,” Sam said. “There’s that.”

He had needed to come back to this place because this place filled him with terror. He had needed to take possession of this place. This very place where he had begged to die.

But had not died.

One by one he extinguished the Sammy Suns, until only the faint, indirect rays of sunset lit the room.