Fear: A Gone Novel

people of his religion say, You can never take a life because if you do you interrupt the proper cycle of rebirth .
    “Do you ever have feelings you can’t really explain?” Lana asked.
    Sanjit was startled out of his own thoughts. “Yes. But what do you mean?”
    “Like … like feeling that a storm is coming. Or that you’d better not get on a plane. Or that if you turn the wrong corner at the wrong time you’ll come face-to-face with something awful.”
    Sanjit did take her hand now and she didn’t refuse him. “Once I was to see a friend in the market. And it was as if my feet were refusing to move. Like they were telling me, ‘No. Don’t walk.’”
    “And?”
    “And a car bomb went off.”
    “In the market where you didn’t want to go?”
    “No. Ten feet away from the place where I was standing when my feet told me not to move. I ignored my feet. I went to the market.” Sanjit shrugged. “Intuition was telling me something. Just not what I thought it was telling me.”
    Lana nodded. Her face was very grim. “It’s happening.”
    “What’s happening?”
    She fidgeted and dropped his hand. Then she smiled wryly and took his hand back, holding it between hers. “Kinda feels like a war is coming. It’s been coming for a long time.”
    Sanjit broke out a grin. “Oh, is that all? In that case all we have to do is figure out how to survive. Haven’t I told you what ‘Sanjit’ means? It’s Sanskrit for ‘invincible.’”
    Lana actually smiled, something so rare it broke Sanjit’s heart. “I remember: you can’t be vinced.”
    “No one vinces me, baby.”
    “Darkness is coming,” Lana said, her smile fading.
    “You can’t tell the future,” Sanjit said firmly. “No one can. Not even in this place. So: what do we do with Taylor?”
    Lana sighed. “Get her a room.”

THIRTEEN
25 H OURS
    IT WASN’T POSSIBLE to draw on or mark the surface of the dome. So Astrid gave Sam a plan and Sam asked Roger—he liked to be called the Artful Roger—to build ten identical wooden frameworks. Like picture frames exactly two feet by two feet.
    The frameworks were mounted on poles, each exactly five feet high.
    Then Astrid, with Edilio for security, and Roger to help carry, walked along the barrier from west to east. They paced off distances of three hundred paces. Then, using a long tape measure, they measured off a hundred feet from the base of the barrier. There they dug a hole and set up the first frame. Another three hundred paces, then another carefully measured hundred feet, and another frame.
    At each frame Astrid stepped back to a precisely measured ten paces. She took a photograph through each frame, carefully thumbing in the day and time and approximately how much of the area inside the frame appeared to be covered by the stain.
    This was why Astrid had come back. Because Jack might be smart enough to think of measuring the stain, but then again he might not think of it.
    It was not that Astrid was lonely. It was not that she was just looking for an excuse to go to Sam.
    And yet, look what had happened when she did, finally, go to Sam.
    Astrid smiled and turned away so Edilio wouldn’t see it and be embarrassed.
    Had this been her desire all along? To find some excuse to go running back to Sam and to throw herself on him? It was the kind of question that would have preoccupied Astrid in the old days. The old Astrid would have been very concerned with her own motives, very much needing to be able to justify herself. She had always needed some kind of moral and ethical framework, some abstract standard to judge herself by.
    And, of course, she had judged other people the same way. Then, when it had come down to survival, to doing whatever it took to end the horror, she had done the ruthless thing. Yes, there was a certain crude morality at work there: she had sacrificed Little Pete for the greater good. But that was the excuse of every tyrant or evildoer in history: sacrifice one or ten or a million for some notion of the common good.
    What she had done was immoral. It was wrong. Astrid had set aside her religious faith, but good was still good, and evil was still evil, and throwing her brother into the literal jaws of death…
    It wasn’t that she doubted she had done wrong. It wasn’t that she doubted she deserved punishment. In fact, it was the very idea of forgiveness that made her rebel. She didn’t want forgiveness. She didn’t want to be washed clean of her sin. She wanted