“IT’S THE MONSTER!” Shade Darby cried out,
speaking to no one in particular.
The monster was a
girl who appeared to be in her teens but was in reality mere days old. She was
known the world over from her first recorded appearance, during which she had
torn off a man’s arm and eaten it. While the man watched in shock and agony.
The girl, the
creature, the monster, now covered from head to toe in
blood, stood in the middle of the highway.
There was no
traffic on the highway. There hadn’t been in a year. That was how long the dome
had sat astride the 101 at Perdido Beach, creating the world’s longest detour.
One day the dome
had simply appeared, a perfect sphere twenty miles in diameter that extended
down beneath the ground as far as it rose into the sky. That dome was centered
on a nuclear power plant but encompassed vast tracts of forest, hills,
farmland, and ocean and almost all the town of Perdido
Beach, California, which lay at the extreme southern end.
The instant the
dome appeared (impenetrable, opaque, and utterly impervious to drills, lasers,
and shaped explosive charges), every single person fifteen years of age and
older had been ejected.
Ejected.
They had popped up
on the beach, in the road, on lawns, in homes, in people’s swimming pools. Some
had been injured or killed, suddenly materializing in front of speeding trucks.
Some had drowned, finding themselves without warning a mile out to sea. A few
had materialized in solid objects, with one man skewered by a lamppost, like a
human shish kebab. And some had been turned inside out, for reasons that no one
had understood then or later.
One of the first
scientists to be called to the scene to explain this incredible, impossible,
and yet terrifyingly real phenomenon was Dr. Heather Darby of Northwestern
University, in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. She had soon realized that this
would be no overnight jaunt and that the study of the dome would take months,
if not years.
So Dr. Heather
Darby had flown her daughter out to stay with her in the temporary housing
complex hastily erected by the military.
For Shade Darby,
thirteen years old, it had been wonderful. First and foremost, there was the
beach. Evanston had a beach but it did not compare to the long stretches of
golden sand south of Perdido Beach. Then there was the excitement of being in a sprawling, makeshift compound teeming with
soldiers and police and scientists and media and, of course, the Families of
the captives in the dome.
The Families.
People capitalized it, because everyone knew what that meant. They’d been all
over TV, the Families. Hysterical at first, then angry, and finally depressed
and resigned and hopeless.
But most of all
for Shade, there was the awe-inspiring, overwhelming presence of the dome
itself. It was a mystery so profound that no human had yet come close to
understanding it, not even her mother.
Finally, after
many months, a decision had been reached in secret to explode a small nuclear
device—that was the official term; normal people called it a bomb—at the
desert-fronting eastern edge of the dome. It was the very first thing to have
any impact whatsoever on the dome. And the effect it had
was . . . well, the greatest show the world had ever seen,
because suddenly the dome had gone . . . transparent.
When the dome
first appeared and ejected everyone fifteen and over, it was speculated that
all those under that age were still inside the dome, but no one knew for sure.
Many thought the dome might be a solid, a massive ball, like the world’s
biggest ball bearing, just sitting there. But most believed that approximately
332 children, aged fourteen down to newborn, were trapped inside.
Oh, the theories!
The theory Shade
Darby liked best was that they were all inside, all those children. She wanted
to believe that some benign power had taken care of them.
Shade, like most people, hoped that they were all somehow okay.
Then the dome had
become transparent, and the world seemed to freeze in place as every television
and news website on earth stared through cameras mounted on TV trucks, drones,
helicopters, and satellites—not to mention millions of individual
smartphones—at what lay revealed.
The children
definitely were inside. They were not okay. They were not at all okay. They
were filthy, starved, scarred in body and mind, armed with everything from
spiked baseball bats, lead pipes, and kitchen knives to homemade flamethrowers,
shotguns, and automatic weapons.
And there were far
fewer than 332 still alive.
They stared out
through the dome, those wild children, and the world had stared back.
A savage,
descent-of-man, dystopian madness.
And of course an
instantly trending Twitter and Instagram meme. #Dome #PerdidoBeach #LOTF
#BubbleKids. And then, when those inside had managed to communicate through
scribbled notes held up for the cameras, the world learned what those on the
inside called it, and a new hashtag was born: #FAYZ.
The mordant
acronym FAYZ: Fallout Alley Youth Zone.
But the dome was
not the only warping of reality, for it soon became clear that some of those
inside, not all, but some, had acquired fantastic powers. Supernatural powers.
Comic book powers. Powers they did not always use for good.
Shade had been
there every day since the dome had gone transparent,
watching rapt and often appalled. Her mother had standing orders for Shade to
stay away from the dome, but Shade was the daughter of two scientists, and
curiosity ran very deep in her genetic makeup. So each day, as soon as she was
sure her mother was occupied, Shade would wrap her too-noticeable auburn hair
into a bun and cover it with a cap, then sneak from the grim barracks down to
the dome, joining the throng of families.
It was the
Families who kept it all from being mere spectacle. The Families would hold up
signs. Do you know Monica Cowell? Is James Tipton safe?
Please tell me if my son, my daughter, my sister, my grandchild is alive and
safe.
#NameTheDead.
Many of the
parents and grandparents learned that the one they had been praying for had
been dead for months. Dead from starvation. Dead from animal attack. Dead from
suicide.
Dead from murder.
A girl who called
herself the Breeze, a skinny, puckish girl who could move at impossible speeds,
wrote signs and held them up to be seen and photographed.
Sorry, your son
Hunter is dead.
Sorry, your daughter
Carla died eight months ago.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Life had not been
peaceful inside what the media and the authorities and even the president of
the United States called the Perdido Beach Anomaly. PBA. PBA lacked the
bitterly dry humor of FAYZ, which solemn adults thought too glib.
Anomaly: something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or
expected. Synonyms: oddity, peculiarity, abnormality, irregularity,
inconsistency, incongruity, aberration, quirk, rarity. “PBA” was safe and
bloodless and sounded scientific, but Shade knew that all it signified was “We
don’t know.”
Theories? Lots of
theories. But understanding? There was none of that.
Shade had watched
it all, heard the cries of grief, seen the tear-streaked faces. It was
sickening but fascinating, and impossible to look away from.
Inside the dome,
frightened children huddled close to their side of the transparent force field.
Two very different worlds stared at each other, like monkeys in a cage, though
which side were the monkeys was not at all clear.
Outside the dome,
parents held up signs to be read by six-year-olds armed with butcher’s cleavers
and gnawing on raw fish. Ten-year-olds sat sullen and listless, drinking from
whiskey bottles. And nothing could be done. The atmosphere outside was thick
with sadness and despair. But beneath all that sadness and despair, at a
discreet distance where it could be hypocritically denied, were excitement and
anticipation.
It was the
greatest show on earth.
Shade sat
cross-legged on the folded blanket she’d brought, arm’s length from the dome
wall. Just beyond, right where she could have shook their hands if the barrier
were gone, sat half a dozen kids, ranging from toddler to teen. More behind them, and more still, stretching north and south. Refugees
unable to cross the invisible border. Dying while the world watched with morbid
fascination.
It was strange and
disturbing, being so near, seeing everything yet hearing nothing. A few days
earlier, Shade had been in this same spot eating a cereal bar, and the kids on
the other side had watched her every bite with a predatory intensity. They had
salivated like dogs. Shade had not made that mistake again.
Then had come
rumors of a terror to dwarf all others in the dome. A terror called Gaia,
though the signs held up inside the dome used half a dozen different spellings.
Guyuh. Gayu.
#Gaia.
Dozens of fake
Gaia Twitter and Facebook and Instagram accounts under that name, all finding
the notion terribly amusing. Until the tape.
Not long after the
moment the nuke had detonated, the dome’s force field had failed for just a
split second; for reasons no one understood then or later, a young man named
Alex, an adult of sorts, had been attempting to climb the dome. The dome had
flickered for just a split second and he had fallen through, becoming the only
adult inside. His bad luck.
It had been his
arm that Gaia had torn from his body. She had then cooked the flesh with a
blast of searing light from her hands and ripped the medium-rare flesh, chewing
and swallowing as the man named Alex lay traumatized and weeping at her feet.
This event had been caught on video. The video practically burned down the
internet, as everyone on planet Earth not living in a cave
or a coma watched it in appalled fascination.
That had taken a
lot of the fun out of #GaiaForPresident.
It was that girl,
that monster Gaia, who now appeared at the south end of the dome, covered in
blood and burns, her clothing rags.
Shade Darby’s
phone rang, making her jump. Her mother, of course. She knew why her mother was
calling. Dr. Heather Darby was making sure her daughter was safe in the
barracks, because Heather Darby, at that moment just a hundred feet away in a
tent crammed with scientific equipment, knew her daughter did not always listen
to her.
Shade let the call
go to voice mail. No way was she leaving. No way was she going to miss this.
The show was approaching its climax; Shade could sense it. Something big was
coming.
There came the
chime of a text. Shade did not even look at it.
And then, as Gaia
stared balefully down at the huddled mass of frightened children pressed
against the dome wall, she raised her bloody hands.
“Shade! Shade
Darby!” Her mother’s voice was barely audible above the rising swell of voices
as people cried out and pointed.
Gaia raised her
hands, and beams of light so bright that Shade could scarcely look at them
stabbed from Gaia’s upraised palms into the crowd of children pressed
desperately, hopelessly inside the dome.
For what felt like
slow-ticking minutes, Shade stared in disbelief. Children
were sliced through by the beam of light. Children burned. A boy no more than
seven years old melted like a candle in a microwave, burned and melted, and
from Shade’s throat came a rising wail, a scream, and all around her screams
and bellows of horror, and then it had all risen in pitch, because sound did
not escape the dome . . . but light did!
“Shade!”
Gaia’s killing
beams scythed through the children in the dome but stabbed as well through the
transparent barrier. Laser light burned cops, tourists, and media. It burned
the Families. It burned the tacky souvenir stands with their plastic dome key
chains.
People became herd
animals, a mass of wildebeest spotting a lioness springing from the tall grass.
People recoiled, backed away, saw the person standing beside them decapitated,
and ran in sheer panic, all reason gone, shoving and climbing over one another
as those deadly beams swept left and right, and people were cut down as they
ran. Arms and heads dropped away like macabre litter, torsos ran two steps
before toppling over. Seared human meat smoked and sent up a nauseating
barbecue smell.
Shade felt her
body tingling, felt her heart seem to stop then speed up, felt the echo of her
own screams inside her head as she lay facedown, hugging the ground, but never
looking away. She never once looked away as trapped children, their mouths open
in unheard cries of despair, died before her eyes, died so close she would have
felt their last breath.
Then behind Gaia came a creature that seemed almost to be made of
gravel. It barreled down the hill, heavy and awkward, a boulder with thick legs
and windmilling arms. It slammed into Gaia and sent the blood-drenched
monster-child flying. There came a ragged cheer from the onlookers crawling on
the ground like Shade, or cowering at what they hoped was a safe distance
behind emergency vehicles and National Guard Humvees.
Inside the dome a
handsome boy with dark hair and a commanding air appeared. He was improbably
armed with a shoulder-held missile, like something from a news report of
distant war. He leveled the missile and fired it at Gaia. The missile flew
leaving a trail of smoke and sparks, traveling a short distance, and missing
its intended target. It exploded silently against the inside of the barrier, a
dozen feet above Shade’s head. She recoiled in reaction, pressing her face into
the dirt, hands over her ears though there was no shock wave.
The explosion
inside the dome shattered the stone creature, stripped the outer covering away,
leaving, for just a moment, an almost-human shape. A boy. But a dead boy. He
fell alongside dozens of others, and bloody Gaia howled silent rage and brutish
laughter.
She was, Shade
thought, the most amazing creature she had ever seen or imagined: fearless,
insane, evil, and powerful. A demented young goddess. Fascinating.
Beyond Gaia, the
boy who fired the missile seemed to shrug. They were speaking, Gaia and the
dark-haired boy, an almost normal-seeming conversation. Others on the inside looked on, tense, but keeping their distance. The boy was a teenager
not that much older than Shade herself, but he did not have youthful eyes.
Then came a blast
of light so intense it burned Shade’s retinas, blinding her temporarily. She
rubbed her eyes and blinked, and when she could see again, both the dark-haired
boy and bloody Gaia were ashes.
And suddenly Shade
heard new sounds, from a new direction, from inside!
Screams. Cries. Moans of pain and the gibbering of pure terror. She smelled the
smoke of the burning forest at the far end of the FAYZ. She smelled the final,
sickening excretions of the dead so near at hand. She smelled the brackish odor
of freshly spilled blood.
A dead child
sagged forward and lay across the line of the dome wall, hand outstretched,
almost touching Shade.
The dome
was . . . gone!
A panicked mob of
the starved, filthy, ragged, scabbed, heavily armed inhabitants of the Perdido
Beach Anomaly rushed heedlessly out into the world. Dozens of them clambered
madly over their own dead and wounded friends. One, in her panic, kicked
Shade’s head, stunning her. Shade tried to rise to avoid being trampled, and a
girl, no more than ten or eleven years old, raced screaming by, swinging a
machete at imaginary pursuers. The blade caught the side of Shade’s throat.
No pain, not at
first, just shock as Shade pressed her hand to the wound and gaped as it came
away red to the wrist.
She sank back onto
the ground, wanting to cry for help, wanting to call to
her mother now, her mother who no longer cried her name.
Shade felt
suddenly dizzy, woozy, feet and hands not working quite . . .
She rolled onto her back and looked up at the cloudless sky. Strange. The sky.
Blue. She felt the rhythmic pulsing of her lifeblood escaping the confines of
her arteries.
She blinked. She
thought the word “Mom,” and fell swirling down into unconsciousness.
Ten minutes later,
Shade woke to find herself lying on a gurney, flashing lights everywhere, her
vision blurred, head pounding, needles in her elbow, a blood pressure cuff
around her wrist, thick bandages around her throat. An EMT squeezed a bag of
plasma to force the lifesaving fluid into Shade’s collapsing arteries. Shade,
barely clinging to paralyzed, nightmarish consciousness, blinked furiously to
clear her vision, and focused at last on a black plastic body bag. And on the
gloved hand of the fireman pulling the zipper up.
Up and over her
mother’s face.
CHAPTER 1
“THE FIRST SUPERHERO was not Superman,” Malik
Tenerife said to Shade Darby. “It was Gilgamesh. Like, four thousand years ago.
Superstrong, supersmart, unstoppable in battle.” He raised a finger for each
point.
“First name Gil,
last name Gamesh?”
“That’s very cute,
Shade. Pretty sure they were making that same joke four thousand years ago.
Gilgamesh, baby: the first superhero.”
“Not going with
Jehovah?”
“I don’t think
gods count as superheroes,” Malik said.
“Mmmm. They do if
they aren’t real gods,” Shade countered. “I mean, Wonder Woman is an Amazon,
Thor is one of the gods of Asgard, and wasn’t Storm from X-Men
some sort of African deity?”
Malik sat back,
shaking his head. “You know, I kinda hate when you do that.”
“When you pretend
not to know something and then kneecap me.” For a boy who supposedly hated it,
he was smiling pretty broadly.
Shade laughed
delightedly, something she rarely did. “But it’s so fun.”
His face grew
serious and he leaned forward across the tiny table. “Are you really going to
do this, Shade? You know it’s a felony, right? A federal crime? Worse, this is
national security we’re talking about.”
Shade shrugged.
They were at the Starbucks on Dempster Avenue, in Evanston, Illinois. It was
busy, jammed with the usual early morning crowd—college kids, ponytail moms,
two women in the fluorescent vests of road workers, high school kids like
Shade, college kids like Malik, all breathing steam and tracking wet in on
their shoes, all stoking the caffeine furnace.
It was noisy
enough that they could talk without too much concern for being overheard, but
Shade wished Malik had not used the word “felony,” because that was exactly the
kind of word people had a tendency to overhear.
They sipped their
drinks—Grande Latte for Malik, Tall Americano with a little half-and-half for
Shade—checked the time, and left. Malik was a tall, lithe black boy, seventeen,
with hair in loose ringlets that had a tendency to fall into his eyes, the
endearing effect of which he was quite well aware. Those occasionally ringleted
eyes were perpetually at half-mast as if to conceal the penetrating
intelligence behind them. His expression at rest was
benign skepticism, as if he was not likely to believe you but would keep an
open mind.
Shade was a
seventeen-year-old white girl with auburn hair cut to give her the look of
someone who might be inclined to curse, smoke weed, and just generally be
trouble. Only two of those things were true.
She had brown eyes
that could range from amused and affectionate to chilly and unsettling—effects
she deployed quite consciously. She was tall, five foot eight, and had the sort
of bone structure that would have caused people to say, “Hey, you should be a
model,” but for the impressive scar that ran just beneath her jaw on the right
side and behind her ear and gave her a swashbuckling air. If there were ever a
movie role for Blackbeard’s pirate niece, Shade would have been a natural for
the part.
Shade was
effortlessly charismatic, with a hint of something regal about her. But despite
the charm and the cheekbones, Shade was not a popular kid at school. She was
too bookish, too aware, too impatient, too ready to let people know she was
smarter than they were. And beyond that, there was something about Shade that felt
too old, too serious, too dark; maybe even something a bit dangerous.
Malik knew where
that feeling of danger came from: Shade was obsessed. She was like some online
game addict, but her obsession was with a very real event, with fear and death
and guilt. And it was no game.
It was chilly out
on the street, not real Chicago cold—that was coming—just chilly enough to turn
exhalations to steam and make noses run. The little
business section of Dempster—Starbucks, pizza restaurant, optometrist, seafood
market, and the venerable Blind Faith Café—was just west of the corner at
Hinman Avenue. Hinman—where Shade lived—was a street of well-tended Victorian
homes behind deep, unfenced front lawns. Trees—mature elms and oaks—had already
dropped many of their leaves, gold with green accents, on lawns, sidewalks, the
street, and on parked cars, plastering windshields with nature’s art.
Shade and Malik
walked together down to Hinman where the bus stop was. There were six kids
already milling around.
“Well, I’ll see you,
Shade,” Malik said. There was something off in the way he said it, a tension, a
worry.
Shade heard that
note and said, “Stop worrying about me, Malik. I can take care of myself.”
He laughed. He had
an unusual laugh that sounded like the noise a hungry seal made. Shade had
always liked that about him: the idiot laugh from such a smart person. Also,
the smile.
And also the feel
of his arms and his chest and his lips and . . . But that was
all past tense now. That was all over and done with, though the friendship
remained.
“It probably won’t
work,” Malik said.
“Are you rooting
against me?” Shade asked archly.
“Never.” The
smile. And a sort of salute, fist over heart, like something he’d probably seen
on Game of Thrones. But it worked. Whatever Malik did,
it generally somehow worked.
“I’m going to do
it, Malik. I have to.”
“I thought that
was the name of a perfume,” she joked, not expecting a laugh and getting only a
very serious look from Malik.
“You know you can
always call me, right?”
Shade lifted her
cup to tap his and they had a cardboard toast. “You should not be hitting on
high school girls,” she said.
“What choice do I
have? Northwestern girls aren’t dumb enough to buy my line of bullshit,” he
said, and started to go, walking backward away from her, toward the
Northwestern campus just a few blocks north. “Anyway, you’ll be a college girl
next year.”
He was six months
older than her, always a year ahead.
“Also, wasn’t the
Sandman basically a god . . . ,” Shade called after him.
“I’m going to
class now,” Malik said, and covered his ears. “I can’t hear you. Lalalalala.”
But Shade’s focus
had already shifted to the new kid at the bus stop. A Latino boy, she guessed.
Tall, six-two, quite a good-looking kid.
Wait. Nope. Maybe
not a boy, exactly.
Interesting.
He or possibly she
looked nervous, the new kid. His dark eyes were wary and alert. And made up,
with just a little eyebrow pencil and a delicate touch of mascara.
The others at the
stop were a pair of freshmen boys who looked like they should still be in
middle school; a black kid named Charles or Chuck or
something—she couldn’t recall—who had never yet been seen without earbuds; and
two massive, muscular members of the football team, one white, one black,
neither in possession of a definable neck.
“That is going to
be trouble,” Shade muttered under her breath. Both of the Muscle Twins were
eyeballing the new kid with a bored, predatory air.
No one spoke to
Shade as she positioned herself a little apart, on the sidewalk, where she
could watch. She sipped her coffee and waited, watching the football guys,
noting the nudges and the winks. She could smell violence in the air, a whiff
of testosterone, sweat, and pure animal aggression.
She noticed as well
that the new kid was quite aware of potential trouble. His eyes darted to the
football players, and when they moved behind him, Shade could practically see
the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
Evanston had
always been the very epitome of enlightened tolerance, but a perhaps gay,
perhaps trans kid and bored football players with their systems pumped full of
steroids did not always make for a good mix. And lately Evanston had begun to
change, to fray somehow, to fade a little as if it were a movie being shown on
a projector with a dimming bulb.
“Hey, answer a
question for us,” the white player said to the new kid. Shade saw the newbie
flinch, saw him withdraw fractionally, but then, with a will, recover his
position and face up to the player who was an inch shorter but heavier by
probably a hundred pounds of muscle.
“What are you?”
There was a split
second when the new kid thought about evading. There was even a quick glance to
plan an escape route. But he didn’t back down.
“My name is Cruz,”
the kid said. He wore his black hair long and loose, almost to his shoulders,
swept to one side. Shade shook her head imperceptibly, watching, analyzing.
“Didn’t ask your
name, asked what you are.” This from the black player.
“See, I heard you’re crazy. I heard you think you’re a girl.”
Shade nodded. Ah,
so that was it. Shade was gratified to have an answer. She had never really
talked to a trans person before, maybe she should make an effort to meet this
new kid—assuming he survived the next few minutes.
Mental check: he or she? Shade made a note to ask
Cruz which worked best for him. Or her. And decided in the meantime to insert
female pronouns into her own internal monologue. Not that her internal
monologue—or her pronoun choices—would matter to the kid who, from all
indications, was seconds away from serious trouble.
Cruz licked her
lips, glanced up the street, and sighed in obvious relief: the school bus was
wheezing and rattling its way up the street. Thirty seconds, Shade figured.
Cruz thought she was safe, but Shade was not so sure.
“I don’t think I’m a girl, and I don’t think
I’m a boy, I just am what I am,” Cruz said. There was some defiance there. Some courage. Cruz wasn’t small or weak, but she was both
when compared to the football players.
“You either got a
dick or you don’t got a dick.” The white one again. Obviously a philosopher.
Shade had the vague sense that his name might be Gary. Gary? Greg? Something
with a “G.”
“You seem way too
interested in what I have in my pants,” Cruz said.
Shade winced.
“Mmmm, and there we go,” she said under her breath.
The bus rolled up,
wheels sheeting standing water from the gutter. It was the black one (who Shade
believed was named Griffin . . . or was she confusing her “G”
names?) who shoved Cruz into the side of the still-moving bus.
Cruz lost her
footing, staggered forward, and threw up her hands too late to entirely soften
the impact of her face on yellow-painted aluminum. There was a definite thump
of flesh-padded bone against aluminum, and the rolling bus spun Cruz violently,
twisted her legs out from under her, and she fell to her knees in the gutter.
The bus stopped,
the door opened, and the gnome of a driver, oblivious, said, “Let’s move it,
people.”
Earbud boy and the
two frightened freshmen, as well as the two lumbering thugs, all piled aboard.
“There’s a kid
hurt out here,” Shade told the driver.
“Well, tell him to
get on board, he can see the nurse when we get to school.”
“I don’t think she
can do that,” Shade said.
Cruz sat on the curb. Blood poured from her nose, and hot tears cut
channels in the red, all in all a rather gruesome sight.
Don’t think about a
face covered in blood. Don’t go back to that place.
Shade made a quick
decision, an instinctive decision. “Go ahead, I’m taking a sick day,” Shade
told the driver. The bus pulled away, trailing vapor and fumes.
“Hey,” Shade said.
“Kid. You need me to call 911?”
Cruz shook her
head. Her breath came in gasps that threatened to become sobs.
“Come with me,
I’ll get you a Band-Aid.”
Cruz stood and
made it most of the way up before yelping in pain as she tried her left ankle.
“Go ahead, I’ll be fine,” Cruz said. “Not my first beating.”
Shade made a
soundless laugh. “Yeah, you look fine. Come on. Throw
an arm over my shoulders, I’m stronger than I look.” For the first time the two
of them made eye contact, Cruz’s tear-filled, furious, hurt, expressive brown
eyes and Shade’s more curious look. “I live just down the block. You can’t walk
and you’ve got blood all down your face. So either let me call 911, or come
with me.”
It was all said in
a friendly, easygoing tone of voice, but much of what Shade said tended to have
a command in it, like she was talking to a child, or a
dog. Lack of self-confidence had never been an issue for her.
They nearly
tripped and fell a few times—Cruz had to lean heavily on Shade—but in the end
they made their way down the sidewalk and turned left
onto the walkway that led through a gate, beneath the tendrils of an overgrown
and fading panicle hydrangea bush, to Shade’s back door.
They entered
through a kitchen much like every other kitchen in this well-heeled
neighborhood: granite counters, a restaurant-quality six-burner stove, and the
inevitable double-wide Sub-Zero refrigerator. Shade fetched a baggie, filled it
with ice, and handed it to Cruz.
“Come on.” They
headed upstairs, Cruz holding the carved-wood railing and hopping, with Shade
behind her ready to catch her if she fell backward.
Shade’s room was
on the second floor, walls a cheerful yellow, a gray marble bathroom visible
through a narrow door. There was a queen-size bed topped by a white comforter.
A desk was against one wall. A dormer window framed a padded window seat.
And there were
books. Books in neat shelves on both sides of the desk, between the dormer and
the southwest corner, piled around the window seat, piled on an easy chair,
piled on Shade’s bedside table.
Shade swept a pile
of books from the easy chair and Cruz sat. Shade stepped into her bathroom and
came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, tissues, a yellow tube of
Neosporin, a box of bandages, and a glass of water.
“Put your leg up
on the corner of the bed,” Shade instructed. Cruz complied and Shade laid the
ice bag over the twisted ankle. “Take these. Ibuprofen; it will hold the
swelling down and dull the pain.”
“Mmmm, yes, that’s
what everyone says about me,” Shade said with a droll, self-aware smile. “That
I’m just too darn nice.”
Cruz carefully
wiped blood away, using her phone as a mirror. Then, suddenly remembering, she
pulled a small, purple Moleskine notebook from her back pocket. It was swollen
from curb water in one corner, but otherwise unharmed. Cruz stuck it into a dry
jacket pocket with a sigh of relief as Shade fetched a trash can for the bloody
Kleenex.
“Shade Darby, by
the way. That’s my name.”
“Cool name.”
“It’s something to
do with the moment of my conception. I gather there were trees. Not the kind of
thing I ask too many questions about, if you know what I mean. And you’re
Cruz.”
Cruz nodded. “In
case you’re wondering, I have a dick.”
That earned a
sudden, single bark of laughter from Shade, which in turn raised a disturbing
red-and-white smile from Cruz.
“Is that a
permanent condition?” Shade asked.
Cruz shrugged. “I
don’t have a short answer.”
“Give me the long
one. I’ll tell you if I get bored.” She flopped onto her bed.
“Okay.
Well . . . you know it’s all on a spectrum, right? I mean, there
are people—most people—who are born either M or F and are perfectly fine with
that. And some people are born with one body but a completely different mind,
you know? They know from, like, toddler age that they are
in the wrong body. Me, I’m . . . more kind of neither. Or both.
Or something.”
“You’re e), all of
the above. You’re multiple choice, but on a true-false test.”
That earned
another blood-smeared grin from Cruz. “Can I use that line?”
“I understand
spectra, and I even get that sexuality and gender are different things,” Shade
said, sitting up. “This is not Alabama, after all. Or it didn’t used to be. Our
sex ed does not end with Adam and Eve.”
“You’re . . .
unusual,” Cruz said.
“Mmmm,” Shade
said.
“I like boys,
mostly,” Cruz said with a shrug. “If that clears anything up.”
“Me too,” Shade
said. Then, with a small skeptical sound, she added, “In theory. Not always in
reality.”
Cruz gave her a
sidelong glance. “I saw you with that boy, the tall, dark, and
crazy-good-looking one?”
“Malik?” Shade was
momentarily thrown off stride. She was not used to people as observant as
herself.
“He likes you.”
“Liked, past
tense. We’re just friends now.”
Cruz shook her
head slowly, side to side. “He looked back at you, like, three times.”
“So, you’re a
straight girl trapped in the body of a gay boy? Walk me through it.” Shade
deliberately shifted the conversation back to Cruz, and she was amused and
gratified to see that Cruz knew exactly what she was
doing.
Smart, Shade thought. Too smart? Just smart enough?
“I am e), all of
the above, trapped in a true-false quiz,” Cruz said. “You can quote me on
that.”
“Pronouns?”
Cruz shrugged.
“More ‘she’ than ‘he.’ I don’t get bitchy about it, but, you know, if you
can . . .” Now it was Cruz’s turn to shift the topic. “You read
a lot.”
“Yes, but I only
do it to make myself popular.” The line was delivered flat, and Shade could see
that Cruz was momentarily at a loss, not sure if this was the truth, before
realizing it was just a wry joke.
It took Cruz maybe
a second, a second and a half, to process, Shade noted. Slower than Shade would
have been, slower than Malik, but not stupid slow, not at all. Just not genius
quick.
“I’ll call us in
sick,” Shade said, and pressed her thumb to her phone.
“I don’t think you
can do that.”
“Please.” Shade dialed,
waited, said, “Hello, this is Shade Darby, senior. I’m feeling a little off
today, and I’m also calling in sick for—” She covered the phone and asked,
“What’s your legal name?”
“Hugo Cruz Martinez Rojas.”
“Hugo Rojas. Yeah, she’s hurt. A couple of our star
football players roughed her up. Yes. No. Uh-huh.” Shade hung up. “See? No
problem. The school is already dealing with the swastika incident. They don’t
want any more bad publicity.”
“Spray paint on
the side of the temporary building, the one they use for music. A swastika and
the usual hate stuff, half of it misspelled. It’s two ‘g’s,’ not one. One ‘g’
and it’s a country in Africa. Sad times when someone does that, sadder still
when they can’t even spell it.”
Cruz had removed
most of the blood from her face and neck, but Shade went to her, took a tissue,
and leaned in to wipe a fugitive blood smear from the corner of her mouth.
The gesture
embarrassed Cruz, who turned her attention again to the bookshelf beside her.
“Veronica Rossi. Andrew Smith. Lindsay Cummings. Dashner. Marie Lu. Daniel
Kraus.” Reading the authors’ names from the spines. “And Dostoyevsky? Faulkner?
Gertrude Stein? David Foster Wallace? Virginia Woolf?”
“I have eclectic
tastes,” Shade said. She waited to see what Cruz made of the rest of her
collection.
“The Science of the Perdido Beach Anomaly.” Cruz frowned. “Powers and Possibilities: The Meaning of the Perdido Beach Anomaly.
That sounds dramatic. The Physics of the Perdido Beach
Anomaly. Way too math-y for me. Our Story: Surviving
the FAYZ. I read that one myself—I guess everyone did. I didn’t like the
movie, though—they obviously toned it way down.”
“Mmmm.”
“You’re very into
the Perdido Beach thing.”
Shade nodded.
“Some would say obsessed.”
Some. Like Malik.
“My father is a
professor at Northwestern, head of astrophysics. It runs in the family.”
“And your mom?”
“She’s dead.”
Shade cursed herself silently. Four years of saying those words and she still
couldn’t get them out without a catch in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Cruz
said, her brow wrinkling in a frown.
“Thank you,” Shade
said levelly. She had the ability to place a big, giant “full stop” on the end
of subjects she did not want to pursue, and Cruz got the hint.
“My father is a
plumbing contractor,” Cruz said. “We used to live in Skokie but, well, I had
problems at the school. It was a Catholic school and I guess they like their
students to be either male or female but not all-of-the-above, or neither, or,
you know, multiple-choice. I started out wearing the boys’ uniform, and they
didn’t like it when I switched to a skirt.”
“No?”
“It was a bit short,” Cruz admitted slyly, “but they don’t make
a lot of plaid skirts in my size.”
“What do you do
when you’re not provoking violence at bus stops?”
Cruz had a silent
laugh, an internal one that expressed itself in quiet snorts, wheezes, and wide
grins, sort of the diametric opposite of Malik. “Are you asking what I want to
be when I grow up? That’s my other secret. I’ve gotten to the point where I can
mostly deal with the gender stuff, but writing . . .
I mean, you tell people you want to write and they roll their eyes.”
“I’ll be sure to
look away when I roll my eyes,” Shade promised.
“Yes, I want to be
Veronica Roth when I grow up. You know she’s from here, right? She went to
Northwestern.”
“What do you write
about?”
Cruz shrugged
uncomfortably. “I don’t know. It’s probably just therapy, you know? Working out
my own issues, but using fictional characters.”
“Isn’t that what
all fiction writers do?”
Cruz did a short
version of her internalized laugh.
Shade nodded, head
at a tilt, eyeing Cruz closely. “You . . . are interesting.”
Something in the way she said it made it a benediction, a pronouncement, and a
small, gratified smile momentarily appeared on Cruz’s lips.
After that they
chatted about books, ate chips and salsa, and drank orange juice; they watched
a little TV, with Shade leaving the choice of shows to Cruz because, of course,
Shade was testing her, or at least studying her.
Cruz actually is
interesting. And . . .
useful?
The day wore on,
and the swelling in Cruz’s ankle worsened until it was twice its normal size
but then began slowly to deflate like a balloon with a slow leak. The pain
receded as well, beaten back by ibuprofen, ice, and the recuperative powers of
youth.
All the while
Shade considered. She liked this odd person, this e) in a true-or-false world,
this person who tried to wear a skirt to Catholic school,
this smart but not too smart, funny, self-deprecating, seemingly aimless
creature who wanted to be a writer.
Person, Shade chided herself. Not creature, person.
She was aware that she had a tendency to analyze people with the intensity and
the emotional distance of a scientist counting bacteria on a slide.
Blame DNA.
Shade needed help,
backup, support, she knew that, and her only currently available choice was
Malik, who would resist and delay and generally try to get in her way. Malik
was a chronic rescuer, one of those boys—young men, actually, in Malik’s
case—who thought it was their duty in life to get between every bully and their
victim and every fool and their fate. Had he been at the bus stop, he would
have launched himself in between the two football players and gotten a
beat-down, and it would be his blood she was wiping away, and him she was
making ice packs for, and him here in her bedroom . . .
And that is not a
helpful place to go, Shade.
They had been
drawn to each other from the start, four years ago when Shade had returned to
live with her father after the life-changing disaster at Perdido Beach. At
first they’d been friends. He had visited her in the hospital after her second
surgery, the one to repair the nerves on the right side of her face—she had not
been able to feel her cheek. In later years they had become a great deal more,
each the other’s first.
The breakup had been Shade’s decision, not Malik’s. He had wanted more
of her, more commitment, more openness. But Shade liked her secrets. She liked
her privacy, her control over her life.
Her obsession.
Now Shade reached
a conclusion: time to pull the pin on the hand grenade, or light the fuse, or
some such simile.
Fortune favors the
bold, and all that.
“My father is
actually doing some work for the government,” Shade said.
“Like for NASA?”
“Mmmm, well, not exactly.
How are you at keeping secrets, Cruz?”
Cruz waved a
languid hand down her body. “I’m a gender-fluid kid who had been passing as muy macho until, like, six months ago. I can keep a secret.”
“Yeah.” Shade
nodded, tilted her head, considered, careful to keep a gently amused expression
on her face to conceal the cold appraisal in her eyes.
She owes me. I
rescued her. She has no friends.
She’ll do it.
“My dad’s, um,
tracking the path of what they’re calling an ASO—Anomalous Space Object.
Several, actually. Seven, to be precise, ASO-Two through ASO-Eight.”
Cruz lifted a
plucked eyebrow. “What happened to ASO-One?”
“Oh, ASO-One
already landed on Earth years ago. They think all eight ASOs are pieces from
the same source, an asteroid or planetoid that blew up, sending some
interstellar shrapnel our way. One of the
pieces—ASO-One—managed to catch a ride on Jupiter’s gravity well and got here
ahead of the rest. Just about nineteen years ahead. The other fragments took a
longer route. But ASO-Two through -Eight are scheduled to intercept Earth over
the next few weeks.”
Shade saw that
Cruz had not made the connection, not figured it out, and that was a little
disappointing. But then, a flicker and a frown, and Cruz made direct eye
contact and asked, “Nineteen years ago? Wasn’t that . . .”
Shade nodded
slowly. “Mmmm. Nineteen years ago ASO-One entered Earth’s orbit and slammed
into a nuclear power plant just north of the town of Perdido Beach,
California.”
That froze Cruz
solid for a long minute. Her eyes searched Shade’s face, trying to see whether
Shade was just kidding. Because this wasn’t some little secret, like “I’ve got
a crush on . . .” This was a secret two high school kids who
barely knew each other should not possess.
Cruz swallowed a
lump. “You’re talking about the alien rock?”
“The rock that
changed the world,” Shade confirmed. “The rock that rewrote the laws of
physics. The rock that turned random teen sociopaths into superpowered killers.
That rock.”
“And
you’re . . . you’re saying there are more coming?”
“According to my
father’s calculations, and he is very good at his job. He’s tracking the rocks.
One lands today off the coast of Scotland. That’s ASO-Two. Another, ASO-Three,
hits in just a few days.”
Cruz shifted
uncomfortably, obviously realizing that Shade was no
longer making idle chitchat. A message was being delivered. A question hung in
the air.
“It’s supposed to
land in Iowa. Or it was,” Shade said. “Now, with some updated numbers, they
think it will land in Nebraska. There’ll be a whole government task force there
to grab it: HSTF-Sixty-Six: Homeland Security Task Force Sixty-Six. Yes,
they’ll be there with helicopters and police escort and various scientists. In
Nebraska.”
The air between
them seemed to vibrate.
“Nebraska,” Cruz
said.
Shade nodded.
“Uh-huh.” Time to go all-in, to trust her instincts. “But the truth is it will
land in Iowa, as originally calculated.”
“So,
um . . .”
“So . . .
someone changed the inputs,” Shade said, her voice low and silky. “Someone with
access to my father’s computer. My dad is a genius, but his memory for little
things isn’t great, so he sticks a Post-it to the bottom of his keyboard. You
know, for his password.”
The play of
emotion across Cruz’s face was fascinating to Shade. First Cruz thought she was
hearing wrong. Then she thought Shade was teasing. And then, finally, even
before she asked, she knew Shade was telling the truth.
Cruz, Shade
thought, should never play poker: her face revealed all. She could practically
see the shiver go up Cruz’s spine.
Cruz said, “You.”
It was not a question.
“I’m pretty good
at math,” Shade said. “And Wolfram Alpha helps.”
Shade nodded and
tilted her head to the “quizzical” position. “The question is, Cruz, why did I change the numbers?”
It was a clear
test, a clear challenge, and Cruz passed, saying, “You’re going to try to take
the rock.”
“No,” Shade said.
“I won’t try. I’ll succeed.” Then, after a beat,
added, “Especially if you help me.”
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