Pulse

looking to the sky for a sign of where she was. Seconds later the block of stone, which sat like granite on Dylan’s chest, flew up in the air, turned sharply, and glanced past Clara’s head on its way to landing in the bleachers.
    “Looks like someone is back,” said Clara, following Dylan’s gaze. “And that one, I know, is no second pulse.”
    She was full of pleasure at the idea of killing Faith Daniels. Nothing she could think of would give her so much pleasure. The problem was, she couldn’t see Faith. She was up there, but the floodlights that remained turned everything behind them pitch-black.
    “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Clara said teasingly. She’d stopped firing objects at Dylan, but Wade hadn’t lost a beat. He continued to pummel Dylan against the cement wall, picking up the heaviest objects he could find and slamming them into Dylan again and again.
    “Leave him alone!” Faith howled from the sky above. She’d moved directly over Clara and Wade.
    “Faith, no! You can’t kill them,” Dylan yelled. “Just get out of here. Now!”
    A van tire slammed into what remained of the gym wall near Dylan’s head, and he dodged pieces of stone as they broke free; but he couldn’t avoid them all. The second pulse was weakening. He really felt it, all the way down to his skate shoes.
    Clara turned her attention to the stadium lights, turning them slowly in the direction of the sky. Everything on the field turned dark, but the sky above lit up as bright as could be. What she saw confused her; and looking up, it confused Wade as well.
    “I said, leave him alone!” Faith screamed. They could only see her in fragments, because a huge swath of something was held skyward between them and Faith. Clara had a strange feeling in her belly, a sense that something wasn’t right, and she looked at Wade.
    “Go!” she yelled, but Wade just stood there, confused and angry. Clara started to fly as a net bigger than the football field started falling out of the sky. Dylan was far enough to the edge that he could fly up the side of the gymnasium, free of whatever fate awaited Wade and Clara in the center of the field.
    Faith had flown back to the old grade school. She’d used every bit of strength she had to uproot the endless, tangled ivy from the walls of the old building. The net that came down on Clara and Wade Quinn was green and full of life. Clara became entangled in it first, feeling her strength fail her like never before. When it reached the ground, Wade tried to run, but it had him, too. Wade’s vulnerability was the same as Clara’s.
    Dylan knew it wouldn’t hold them for long, but he hoped it would be long enough. He came up alongside Faith and took her hand, high in the air.
    “Not bad,” he said, tugging gently. She looked less sad, more herself. The two of them would have been smart to get away from the Quinns as fast as possible, especially given that the floodlights were pointed up. From her tangled mess on the ground, Clara wasn’t trying to break free. She was putting every ounce of energy she had into one task. Her eyes focused on Faith Daniels, whom she could make out in bits and pieces through the vines that held her. She closed her eyes, thinking only of the hammer that lay in the gymnasium. She could feel it beginning to move as Dylan and Faith slowly started to drift away. Soon it would be out of the giant hole in the cinder-block wall and free in the sky.
    “We need to move fast,” Dylan said. “Everyone else is already gone.”
    “Gone? Where to?”
    She held his hand tighter, felt the power of his presence up her arm and into her neck. When he turned to her, she wanted nothing more than to feel his lips on her own, to fix all the broken pieces of her life.
    But that was not to be. She closed her eyes, leaned in as they moved across the sky, and then felt a blow to the back of her head that made her see stars and stars and stars. The pain was deep and sharp and full; but when it was gone, she understood the peace of feeling nothing at all.

Chapter 20
Morning Glory
    No one, not even the people from inside the States, had any interest in the California coast. It was a place of extraordinary wreckage and pain. And unless you were an Intel like Hawk, finding a signal for Tablets was impossible. Feral cats and wild dogs roamed the streets of Valencia, a city that had once been fifty miles off the coast. It currently had a marvelous view of the ocean, and no one