Lies

“Sometimes my head doesn’t want to give me words.”
    Lana had healed him as well as she could, but the skull had never grown back all the way right. She’d fixed his brain well enough that he didn’t pee in his pants like he did for a while after the beating. And when he talked he could mostly make himself understood. But Lana had been unable to return him all the way to normal.
    “It’s okay,” Hunter said, not realizing that he hadn’t said any of this out loud. “I’m just different now.”
    “You’re important,” Sam said. “You’re a lifeline for kids. Do the coyotes ever bother you?”
    Hunter shook his head and gulped some more of the hot bird meat. “We made a deal. I don’t go where they’re hunting. And I don’t hunt coyotes. So they don’t bother me.”
    For a while neither of them said anything. The fire burned down. The last of the bird was consumed. Hunter pushed dirt onto the fire, smothering it.
    “Maybe I could work with you,” Sam said. He held up his own hand. “I can hunt, too, I guess.”
    Hunter frowned. This was confusing. “But you’re Sam and I’m Hunter.”
    “You could teach me what you know,” Sam said. “You know. About animals. And how to find them. And how to cut them up and all.”
    Hunter thought about it, but then the idea slipped out ofhis brain. And he realized he’d forgotten what Sam was talking about.
    “If I go back I’m going to do things,” Sam said. He looked down at the ashes of the near-dead fire.
    “You’re good at doing things,” Hunter said.
    Sam looked angry. Then his face softened until he looked sad. “Yeah. Only I don’t always want to do those things.”
    “I’m Hunter. So I hunt.”
    “My real name is Samuel. He was this prophet in the Bible.”
    Hunter didn’t know what “prophet” meant. Or “Bible.”
    “He was the guy who picked out the first king of Israel.”
    Hunter nodded, mystified.
    “You believe in God, Hunter?” Sam asked.
    Hunter felt a sudden stab of guilt. He hung his head. “I almost killed those boys.”
    “What boys?”
    “Zil. And his friends. The ones who hurt me. I was hunting a doe, and I saw them. And I could have.”
    “Could have killed them.”
    Hunter nodded.
    “To tell you the truth, Hunter, I wish you had.”
    “I’m Hunter,” he said, and grinned because it struck him as funny. “I’m not Boy Killer.” He laughed. It was a joke.
    Sam didn’t laugh. In fact, it looked like he wanted to cry.
    “You know Drake, Hunter?”
    “No.”
    “He’s a boy with a kind of snake for an arm. A snake. Ora whip. So he’s not really a boy. So if you ever saw him, you could hunt him.”
    “Okay,” Hunter said doubtfully.
    Sam bit his lip. He looked like he wanted to say something else. He stood up, knees popping after sitting so long. “Thanks for the meat, Hunter.”
    Hunter watched him go. A boy with a snake arm? No. He’d never seen anything like that. That would be something. That would be even weirder than the snakes he’d seen in the caves. The ones with wings.
    That reminded Hunter. He pushed up his sleeve to examine the spot where the snake had spit on him. It hurt. There was a little sore, a sort of hole. The hole had scabbed over, like any of the endless number of scrapes Hunter had suffered tearing through brush.
    But as he looked at the scab Hunter was disturbed to see that it was a strange color. Not reddish like most scabs. This was green.
    He rolled his sleeve back down. And forgot about it again.

    Sanjit stood at the edge of the cliff. The binoculars didn’t show much detail. But it wasn’t hard to see the plume of smoke. It was like a massive, twisted exclamation point over Perdido Beach.
    He tilted the glasses upward. Far up in the sky the smoke seemed to spread out horizontally. Like it was running into a glass ceiling. But that had to be an illusion.
    He turned to his right and focused on the yacht. His view traveled from the bow to the stern. The helicopter.
    Choo was trying to fly a kite for Pixie. The kite wasn’t really taking off. It never did, but Pixie kept hoping and Choo kept trying. Because, Sanjit reflected, as grumpy as Virtue was, he was a good person. Something Sanjit wasn’t sure he could say about himself.
    Peace was inside, keeping watch over Bowie. His fever had stopped spiking. But Sanjit knew better than to think this was a permanent improvement. They’d been up and down like this for a long time.
    He stared at the helicopter. Not a