Hunger

doubted the baby, whose name was also John, would live very long.
    “It’s okay,” he whispered.
    The TV blinked off.

    Astrid had gotten Little Pete to bed, finally. She was exhausted and worried. Her eye hurt where the baseball bat had caught her. She had a gruesome bruise in yellow and black. Ice had helped, but not much.
    She needed to sleep; it was one in the morning, but it wasn’t going to happen. Not yet. Not until she knew Sam was okay. She wished she could have gone to the power plant with him. Not that she would have been much help, but she would at least have known.
    Strange how, in just three short months, Sam had come to feel like a necessary part of her life. More than that, even. A necessary part of her . An arm, a leg. A heart.
    She heard a noise from the street. Running. She tensed, expecting to hear the pounding of feet on her porch. But no one approached.
    Was it Hunter coming back? Or was Zil still running around looking for trouble? There wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had no powers, or none that mattered, anyway. All she could do was threaten and cajole.
    By the time she reached the window, the street was empty and quiet.
    She hoped Hunter was hiding somewhere. They’d have to figure out what to do about that situation and it would be very tricky. Explosive, maybe. But it wasn’t going to be solved tonight.
    What was happening with Sam? Had he managed to stop Caine?
    Was he hurt?
    Was he dead?
    God forbid, she prayed.
    No. He wasn’t dead. She would feel it if he was.
    She wiped away a tear, and sighed. No way she could sleep. Not happening. So she sat herself down in front of the computer. Her hands were shaking as she touched the keyboard. She needed to do something useful. Something. Anything to keep from thinking about Sam.
    At the bottom of the screen were the usual icons for Safari and Firefox. Web browsers that, when opened, would just remind her that she was not connected to the internet.
    Astrid opened the mutation file. There were all the bizarre pictures. The cat that had melded with a book. The snakes with tiny wings. The seagulls with raptor talons. The zeke.
    She opened a Word document and began to type.
    The one constant seems to be that mutations are making creatures—humans and nonhumans—more dangerous. The mutations are almost all in the form of weapons.
    She paused and thought about that for a moment. That wasn’t quite right. Some kids had developed powers that seemed to be essentially useless. The truth was, Sam wished more mutants had developed what he called “serious” powers. And there was Lana, whose gift was definitely not a weapon.
    Weapons or defense mechanisms. Of course it may be that I simply have not observed enough mutations to know. But it would not exactly be surprising if mutations tended to be survival mechanisms. That’s the whole point of evolution: survival.
    But was this evolution? Evolution was a series of hits and misses over the course of millions of years, not a sudden explosion of radical changes. Evolution built on existing DNA. What was happening in the FAYZ was a radical departure from the billion years’ worth of code in animal DNA. There might be genes for speed, but there was no gene for teleportation, or for suspension of gravity, or for telekinesis.
    There was no DNA for firing light from the palms of your hands.
    The fact is, I don’t
    The screen went blank. The room was dark.
    Astrid stood up and went to the window. She pulled back the curtains and looked out at total darkness. Not a light on in the street.
    She let herself out onto the porch.
    Darkness. Everywhere. Not a single light from the surrounding houses.
    Someone a few doors down yelled in outrage, “Hey!”
    Caine had reached the power plant. Sam had failed.
    Astrid stifled a sob. If Sam was hurt…If…
    Astrid felt fear like icy fingers reaching through her nightgown. She stumbled into the kitchen. She opened the junk drawer and found, after some searching, a flashlight. The light from it was faint and failed in seconds.
    But in the few seconds of light she found a candle.
    She tried to light it from the stove. But the gas ran unlit because it required electricity to fire.
    Matches. A lighter. Surely there were some matches somewhere.
    But there was no way to find them without light. She had a candle and no way to light it.
    Astrid felt her way to the stairs and climbed to Little Pete’s room. The Game Boy was beside his bed, where he always