Fear: A Gone Novel

rushed to the rowboat and crouched in its shadow, eyes on the houseboat. If she tried to move the boat, she would be caught. Maybe Drake could have done it, moving swiftly in a way that she could not. But she had no idea how to row a boat and was likely to make noise.
    If she tried to swim, it would be even worse. She knew how to swim, but she knew only the crawl, and the splashing would draw every ear in the small fleet.
    Then Sam and his people would hear and they would catch her and Sam would burn her to ashes.
    She would fail Drake. She would fail the gaiaphage.
    Then: a flash of genius. Brittney almost laughed out loud.
    She breathed, but she did not need to breathe.
    Brittney began picking up small rocks and stuffing them in her pockets. She tied off the bottom of her shirt, as tight as she could make it, then dropped more rocks down the front of her shirt, using her arms to hold them all in like a pregnant woman’s belly.
    Weighed down, she walked into the water. As the water rose around her she kept her gaze on the sailboat. She walked directly toward it, fixing the direction in her mind.
    The water rose over her waist, over her chest, to her mouth and nose. And then it closed over her head.
    She was almost completely sightless in the water. The only light was from the moon, and it seemed to reach only a few feet into the lake.
    Brittney focused all her energy on walking in a straight line. The rocks controlled her buoyancy, but still she tended to float just a little, which made holding to a straight line very hard.
    Freezing water filled her lungs. She could tell that it was cold, but the cold did not bother her. What did bother her was the certainty that she was off course. How many steps should she take? How far out was the sailboat? It had seemed like perhaps two hundred steps, but she had lost count after stumbling and losing some of the rocks that held her down.
    No choice now but to surface. She opened the bottom of her shirt and let the rocks fall free. Her feet came up off the stony lake bottom and she floated upward.
    It took a very long time. She was not very buoyant.
    All the while she looked around and saw nothing until she was near the surface. Then she saw a rope slanting down into the darkness below.
    She swam underwater, silent, no bubbles issuing from her mouth. She gripped the rope and began to pull herself upward, careful not to yank on that line.
    She came up face-first. The twisted wires of her braces glinted with moonlight. A boat—a boat with a tall mast and what might be green trim—was directly above her.
    Brittney wasn’t sure whether it was proper to say a prayer of thanks to the gaiaphage. Maybe that was just for her old God. But she smiled in the renewed belief that she had purpose, and that she was serving her master well.

TWENTY-ONE
15 H OURS , 12 M INUTES
    ASTRID’S PLAN WOULD have been brilliant.
    Except that in distancing herself from the road for safety she managed to get lost.
    This quasi-desert was not her familiar woods. And the funny thing about a road was that from a distance you couldn’t actually see it at night unless you were seeing streetlights or car lights.
    The FAYZ had neither.
    So the gravel road disappeared from view, and although she was sure she was paralleling it, she seemed now to be in much less austere countryside than that which the road passed through.
    The moon had set and the stars provided far too little light to see by. So she had gone slower and slower. And then she had tried to turn a sharp right angle to intersect the road. But the road was not there. Or if it was there it was much farther off than she had imagined.
    “Stupid,” she told herself. So much for the newly competent Astrid. She’d managed to lose herself in just a couple of hours.
    As much as she hated to admit it, the only wise movement now was to stand still and wait for dawn. If dawn came. That thought sent a thrill of fear through her stomach. Even by starlight she was helpless. In total darkness she could wander forever. Or more accurately, wander until thirst and hunger killed her.
    She wondered which would do it first. People assumed it was thirst. But she’d read in a book somewhere that hunger—
    “Not helpful,” she said aloud, just for the reassurance of hearing her own voice. “If … when … the sun comes up I’ll be able to locate the ridges and hills and maybe even see a bit of ocean.”
    So she found a patch of ground with some tall grass and sat