Hunger

hasn’t he turned the system back on?”
    “There’s no way to stop the Coates kids from using it, too, unless we disable the tower up on the ridge. Or unless I figure out a way to replace the entire authorization protocol and then authorize only certain numbers. Which would be a big programming job since I would be starting from scratch.”
    “Oh.” Brianna peered closely at him. “Well, we don’t want to do anything that will help Caine and Drake and that witch, Diana. Do we?”
    Jack shrugged. “Well, I was scared of Drake. I mean, everyone is scared of Drake. But Caine and Diana, they were okay to me.”
    Brianna didn’t like that answer. The “interested” smileshe’d worn for him evaporated. She held up her hands. The scars from Drake’s cruel “plastering” were gone. But the memory of that abuse, and the horror of starvation, especially now that it was back, were still fresh. “They weren’t so nice to me.”
    “No,” Jack admitted. He looked down at the ground. “But still. I mean, they all—Sam and Astrid and all—they asked me to figure it out, the phones I mean, and I did. I want…I mean…I mean, I did it. I did it . It works. So we should turn it back on.”
    Brianna’s expression hardened. “No. If it helps the Coates people in any way, then no. I don’t want their lives to be any easier. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer in every way they can suffer. And then I want them to die.”
    She saw shock register behind those askew glasses. Jack was no different from most people, Brianna admitted to herself with some bitterness: he didn’t take her seriously. Of course she maintained an aura of cool and everything—after all, she was the Breeze. She was a superhero, so she had some obligation to carry off a certain style. But she was also Brianna. Regular girl.
    “Oh, did that sound too harsh?” she asked, letting annoyance resonate in her tone of voice.
    “A little bit,” Jack said.
    “Yeah? Well, thanks for helping. Later,” Brianna said. And she was gone before he could say something else stupid.

    Duck woke up.
    He was completely disoriented. He was flat on his back. Wet. Wearing nothing but a bathing suit. In the dark.
    He was cold. His fingertips were numb. He was shivering.
    He felt something hard and sharp beneath his shoulder blades and he shifted to lessen the pain. He looked around, bewildered. There was a faint light from above. Sunlight bouncing weakly down a long dirt shaft.
    Duck tried to make sense of it. He remembered everything: sinking to the bottom of the pool, then sinking through the bottom of the pool. He remembered choking on water and his lungs burning. There were scrapes down his sides, and along the underside of his arms.
    And now, here he was, in a hole. A deep hole. At the bottom of a mud-sided shaft that he had somehow caused by falling into the earth.
    Falling into the earth?
    It was impossible to be sure how far down underground he was. But from the faraway look of the light, he had to be at least twenty feet down. Twenty feet. Underground.
    Fear stabbed at his heart. He was buried alive. There was no way he’d be able to clamber back up through that narrow muddy shaft to the surface.
    No way.
    “Help!” he yelled. The sound echoed faintly.
    Duck realized that he was not in a confined space. There was air. And the surface beneath him was too hard and too rough to be dirt. He got to his knees. Then, slowly, stood up. There was a ceiling just inches above his head. He stretched his arms to either side and touched a wall to his left, nothing to his right.
    “It’s a pipe,” Duck said to the darkness. “Or a tunnel.”
    It was also pitch black in both directions.
    “Or a cave.”
    “How did this happen?” Duck demanded of the cave. His teeth chattered from cold. From fear as well. There was a faint echo, but no answer.
    He looked up toward the light and yelled, “Help! Help!” a couple more times. But there was zero chance of anyone hearing. Unless of course Zil and the boys who’d been harassing him had gone for help. That was possible, wasn’t it? They might be jerks, but surely they would go for help. They wouldn’t just leave him down here.
    And yet, there were no anxious faces peering down at him from above.
    “Come on, Duck: Think.”
    He was in a tunnel, or whatever, far underground. The tunnel floor was muddy and wet. Despite this, the tunnel did not feel particularly damp, not like it was a sewer. And he himself