Lies

fake, well, we’d have our answer.”
    “Maybe we should torture her,” Howard said, only half kidding.
    “We can’t just sit by if we think kids are going to be dying,” Astrid pleaded. “Suicide is a mortal sin. These kids won’t be getting out of the FAYZ, they’ll be going to hell.”
    “Wow,” Howard said. “Hell? And we know this, how exactly? You don’t know any more than any of us do about what happens after a poof.”
    “So that’s what this is about?” Dekka asked. “Your religion?”
    “Everyone’s religion is against suicide,” Astrid snapped.
    “I’m against it, too,” Dekka said defensively. “I just don’t want to be getting dragged into the middle of some kind of religious thing.”
    “Whatever Orsay represents, it’s not a religion,” Astrid said icily.
    Sam heard Orsay’s voice in his head. Let them go, Sam. Let them go and get out of the way.
    His mother’s words, if Orsay was telling the truth.
    “Let’s give it a week,” Sam said.
    Dekka took a deep breath and blew it out all at once. “Okay. I’ll go with Sam on this. We lie. For a week.”
    The meeting broke up. Sam was the first out of the room, suddenly desperate for fresh air. Edilio caught up to him as he was running down the steps of town hall.
    “Hey. Hey! We never told them about what you and me saw last night.”
    Sam stopped, looked toward the plaza, toward the hole they had refilled.
    “Yeah? What did we see last night, Edilio? Me, I just saw a hole in the ground.”
    Sam didn’t give Edilio the chance to argue. He didn’t want to hear what Edilio would say. He walked quickly away.

EIGHT
55 HOURS, 17 MINUTES
    CAINE HATED DEALING with Bug. The kid creeped him out. For one thing, Bug had become less and less visible. It used to be that Bug would do his disappearing act only when necessary. Then he started doing it whenever he wanted to spy on someone, which was pretty frequently.
    Now he would become visible only when Caine ordered him to.
    Caine was betting everything on Bug’s story. A story of a magical island. It was insane, of course. But when reality was hopeless, fantasy became more and more necessary.
    “How much farther to this farmhouse of yours, Bug?” Caine asked.
    “Not far. Stop worrying.”
    “You stop worrying,” Caine muttered. Bug was walking invisible through open fields. Nothing but depressions in the dirt where he stepped. Caine was all-too-visible. Broad daylight. Across a dusty, plowed field under a bright, hot sun.Bug said no one was in these fields. Bug said these fields had nothing growing and that none of Sam’s people knew about the farmhouse, which was practically unnoticeable, off a dirt road and looked abandoned.
    Caine’s first question had been, “Then how do you know about them?”
    “I know lots of stuff,” Bug answered. “Besides, a long time ago you said to keep an eye on Zil.”
    “So how does Zil know about this farmhouse?”
    The voice above the impressions of invisible feet said, “I think one of Zil’s guys used to know these kids. Back in the day.”
    Caine’s next question: “Do they have food there?”
    “Yeah. Some. But they also have shotguns. And the girl, the sister Emily? She’s some kind of freak, I think. I don’t know what she does, I ain’t seen her do anything freaky, but her brother is scared of her. So is Zil, kind of, only he doesn’t show it.”
    “Great,” Caine muttered. He noted that Zil was a kid who wouldn’t let himself show fear. Maybe useful.
    Caine shaded his eyes with his hand and scanned around, looking for telltale dust plumes from a truck or car. Bug said the Perdido Beach people were low on gas, too, but still drove when they needed to.
    He was confident that he could take on and defeat any one freak from Sam’s group. With the sole exception of Sam himself. But if it was Brianna and Dekka together? Or even that little preppy nitwit Taylor and a few of Edilio’s soldiers?
    But right now the real problem was simply that Caine was weak. Walking this distance—miles—was hard. Very hard when his stomach was stabbing him again, and his navel was scraping his spine. His legs were wobbly. His eyes sometimes became unfocused.
    One good meal…well, not really a good meal…was not enough. But it was keeping him alive. Digesting Panda. Panda energy flowing from his stomach through his blood.
    The farmhouse was hidden by a stand of trees, but otherwise right out in the open. A long way from the road, yes,