Better to close her eyes and pretend.

But the girl, Penny, her legs strained against their ropes. Diana heard a moan.

With clumsy hands Diana grabbed the chair and pulled herself up into a seated position. The urge to lie back down was almost irresistible. But hand over hand, and then numb foot over numb foot, Diana pulled herself back up and into the chair.

Caine slept. Bug snored loudly and invisibly on the floor.

Penny blinked at her. “They drugged us,” Penny said. She yawned.

“Yeah,” Diana agreed.

“They tied us up,” Penny said. “How did you get free?”

Diana rubbed her wrists, as though she had been tied up. Why hadn’t Sanjit tied her? “Loose knots.”

Penny’s head wobbled a little. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus. “Caine’s going to kill ’em.”

Diana nodded. She tried to think. Not easy in a brain still slowed by whatever drug Sanjit had slipped her.

“They could have killed us,” Diana said.

Penny nodded. “Too scared,” she said.

Or maybe they just aren’t killers, Diana thought. Maybe they just weren’t the kind of people who could take advantage of a sleeping foe. Maybe Sanjit wasn’t the kind of kid who could cut a sleeping person’s throat.

“They’re running,” Diana said. “They’re trying to get away.”

“Never hide on this island,” Penny said. “Not for long. We’ll find them. Cut me loose.”

Penny was right, of course. Even drugged Diana knew it was true. Caine would find them eventually. And he was the kind who killed.

Her true love. He was not the beast Drake was, but something worse. Caine wouldn’t kill them in some psychotic rage. He’d kill them in cold blood. Diana staggered out of the room, moving like a drunk, slamming into a doorway, absorbing the pain, moving on. Windows. Big windows in a room so huge it made the furniture arranged here and there in separate pods look like dollhouse toys.

“Hey, untie me!” Penny demanded.

She spotted Sanjit immediately. He was in profile against a red sky, standing at the edge of the cliff. There was a little girl with him. Not Virtue, some girl Diana had not seen before.

That’s what Sanjit had been hiding: there were other kids here on the island.

Sanjit looped a rope around the girl in a sort of web. He hugged her. Leaned down to speak to her face-to-face.

No, not the killing kind, Sanjit.

Then he began to lower the clearly terrified girl out of sight. Over the cliff.

There was a shout from the other room. Bug. He yelled, “Ah ah ah ah! Get them off me!”

Bug was awake. Penny had used her power to give Bug a nice shot of fear adrenalin.

As Diana watched, Sanjit himself climbed over the side. He faced the house as he did so. Did he see Diana standing there, watching?

Diana heard Penny coming into the room, at least as wobbly as Diana herself.

“You stupid witch,” Penny snarled. “Why didn’t you untie me?”

“Bug seems to have taken care of that,” Diana answered.

She had to cut Penny off before she saw what was happening. Before she saw Sanjit.

Diana picked up a vase from a side table. Very pretty crystal. Heavy.

“This is nice,” Diana said to Penny.

Penny looked at her like she was crazy. Then Penny’s eyes focused beyond Diana. Out of the window.

“Hey!” Penny said. “They’re trying-”

Diana swung the vase and caught Penny on the side of the head. She didn’t wait to see the effect but staggered, vase still in hand, to the kitchen.

Caine was still asleep. But he wouldn’t be for long, maybe, not long enough. Penny’s power of hallucination could wake the dead. She would send terrors into Caine’s dreams and wake him as she had Bug.

Diana raised the vase over her head. It occurred to her in a moment of wry clarity that while Sanjit might not be the kind of person who would brain someone in their sleep, she apparently was.

But before she could smash the vase down on her true love’s head, Diana’s flesh erupted. Gaping red mouths appeared on her arms, gnashing with serrated shark’s teeth. The mouths were eating her alive.

Diana screamed.

In some corner of her mind she knew it was Penny. She knew it wasn’t real, because she saw the mouths but did not feel them, not really, but she screamed and screamed and her fingers let go of the vase. From far off came the sound of shattered crystal.

The red mouths were crawling up her arms, eating her skin, baring muscle and sinew, eating their way to her shoulders.

And then they stopped.

Penny stood there, snarling. Blood streamed from the side of her head. “Don’t mess with me, Diana,” Penny said. “I could send you screaming off that cliff yourself.”

“Let them go,” Diana whispered. “They’re just nice kids. They’re just nice kids.”

“Not like us, you mean,” Penny said. “You’re a stupid idiot, Diana.”

“Let them go. Don’t wake Caine up. You know what he’ll do.”

Penny shook her head, disbelieving. “I can’t believe he likes you, not me. You’re not even pretty. Not anymore.”

Diana laughed. “That’s what you want? Him?”

Penny’s eyes gave it all away. She looked longingly, lovingly at Caine, still passed out. “He’s all there is,” she said.

Penny reached with a trembling hand and gently stroked Caine’s hair. “Sorry to have to do this, sweetheart,” Penny said.

Caine woke shouting.

THIRTY-NINE

29 MINUTES

ASTRID FELL AND fell knowing it wasn’t real, knowing it was all an illusion of some kind. But it was very hard to believe that when her clothing rippled and her hair flew straight up and her arms were reaching for the walls of a tunnel that couldn’t possibly be real but seemed like it was.

But after a while falling began to feel like floating. She was suspended in the air and things no longer streamed past; they floated around.

Symbols, Astrid thought.

She was relieved to see that her brain still worked. Whatever was happening, whatever power was giving her this intense waking dream, it wasn’t frying her brain. Reason intact. Words right there where she had left them.

Symbols. Neon symbols arrayed across a dark landscape.

Not even symbols, she realized: avatars.

There was a monstrous face framed with long dark hair that formed snakes. Dark eyes and a mouth that dribbled fire.

There was a female being with orange rays, like sunset beams spraying out of her head.

A male with a hand held up and a green light formed in a ball. This avatar was far away, at the edge of the dark playing field.

One avatar was neither male nor female but half of each sex. Metal teeth and a whip.

Nerezza. Orsay. Sam. But what was the fourth avatar?

It was this fourth avatar that seemed to be in contention between two manipulators, two players. One player was represented by a box. The box was closed but for one edge that shone so bright it was hard to look at. Like a toy box containing a sun.

Petey, Astrid whispered.

The other player she felt rather than saw. She tried to turn her eyes toward it, to see it, but it was always just out of range. And she realized that the light box was restraining her, not allowing her to see the opponent.

For her own good. Protecting her.

Petey would not let her look at the gaiaphage.

Astrid’s mind flooded with images of other shadow avatars. Dark avatars. Dead. Victims in the game.

All of these were in neat little rows, like pawns lined up before the soul-killing emptiness that was the gaiaphage.

“Astrid!”

Someone was yelling her name.

“Astrid! Snap out of it!”

The game field disappeared.

Astrid’s eyes saw the plaza, her brother just getting to his feet, and Brianna shaking her roughly.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Brianna demanded, more angry than concerned.

Astrid ignored Brianna and searched for Nerezza. She was nowhere to be seen.