“No fish, anyway,” he muttered at last. Giving Edilio as peeved a look as he could, he said, “When?” He’d been hoping to find an excuse to visit Lana. It was painful seeing her with Sanjit, but less painful than not seeing her. And, after all, he did have a boo-boo.

Then he saw the Sorry look on Edilio’s face.

“Great,” Quinn said.

SEVEN

71 HOURS, 12 MINUTES

IT WAS EXHAUSTING work for Brianna. She would run two or three pieces of the Drake/Brittney thing off to far corners of the FAYZ, and by the time she got back to grab more, she’d find the body already partly reassembled. Then she’d have to chop it up all over again.

Still, the total pile grew smaller. Some of the pieces were now ten miles apart. That was a long way for a chunk of thigh to ooze and squirm. Other pieces would be swimming. If they could.

At some point in all of the back-and-forth, the head, still on its rock, had reverted to Brittney but then had gone right back to Drake, as if Brittney were weakening, no longer able to manifest for more than a few minutes.

This made Brianna much happier. Brittney had never been evil—a nut, maybe, a little weird, but then who wouldn’t be, in Brittney’s rather unusual situation? She’d been buried alive, after all, only to reemerge inextricably linked with Drake in a sort of weird immortality.

If that didn’t mess you up, you were unmessable.

In any case it was Drake’s head that now cursed her in a gasping whisper.

“I’m not quite sure what to do with you, Drake,” Brianna said, squatting down to look him in the eye.

“The gaiaphage will kill you,” Drake hoarse-whispered. Then he spit up a piece of gravel that must have been sucked up off the ground through his severed windpipe.

“I probably better take you to Sam; he can fry you up,” she said. “By the way, why do you have a sack full of dead lizards and some eggs?”

Drake just hissed. Then he called her a dyke and made some extremely crude suggestions. Extremely crude. Crude enough that Brianna actually got angry. She raised her machete high and brought it down with all the strength and speed at her command. Which was considerable. The machete struck sparks off the stone after it had passed clean through the skull, face, and neck.

Drake’s head split, top to bottom. The left side—which had almost all of his nose but only a quarter of his mouth—rolled off the stone. The other half—not so much nose and a lot more mouth—stayed in place.

Brianna had a strong stomach, but something about seeing the inside of Drake’s head was almost too much for her. It retained all the same structures it had had when Drake was fully human. But it did not bleed. It was alive, but alive in a way very different from the way in which most people were alive.

The brain was gray. Brains are sometimes described as gray, but in reality they’re pinkish—she’d seen brain spilled, so she knew. Drake’s was genuinely gray with a tinge of green. It looked like an unhealthy cauliflower that had been split down the middle.

She could also see what she supposed were sinuses—open spaces above and behind the nose.

And she could see teeth.

The brain did not fall out all the way, but it did sag a bit and looked as if it might fall out if she shook the head sideways a little.

And it had an odd smell about it. It was the smell of the meat department at a supermarket. A smell that suggested slaughterhouses.

“About your little fantasies there, Drake? Your boy parts? They’re in the glove compartment of an old, wrecked pickup truck that looks like it rolled down a ravine. Might even be Lana’s grandfather’s truck: I should ask her. And some are floating out in the surf. I mean, if you’re ever looking for them.”

What was left of Drake’s mouth tried to speak, but his esophagus was no longer even slightly intact. The exposed tongue stuck sideways, licking air.

Brianna opened the bag of dead lizards and the little eggs. She lifted the right side of Drake’s head and dropped it in. Then fetched the left side and dropped it in as well.

The bag was surprisingly heavy, and the weight of it was awkward, so she couldn’t run full speed. She set off at a slow thirty miles an hour, whistling happily but making no sound since even at thirty the wind snatched the tune away.

It took just ten minutes—she stopped to pee and drink some water at one point—to reach the lake. She sauntered down the dock toward the houseboat, swinging the bag with affected nonchalance, feeling a bit like one of those girls who likes to shop and can’t wait to show off her purchases to her friends.

Astrid and Dekka were on the boat, apparently discussing something important. Astrid looked impatient, like she was restraining herself from saying something snippy. Dekka looked like a thundercloud that might spark lightning at any moment. So, basically, both girls were totally normal.

Astrid was the first to notice Brianna.

“Aren’t you supposed to be patrolling?”

“Where’s Sam?” Brianna asked.

“He’s out. So is Edilio,” Dekka said. “You going to tell us what’s in the bag or do we have to guess?”

Brianna stopped. She was disappointed. In her imagination the big revelation would have been to an admiring Sam Temple. He was the one she wanted to impress. Failing that, Edilio, who was generally warm and sweet to her.

But she was tired and wanted to put the bag down. Also, she couldn’t keep the secret any longer.

She climbed nimbly up to the top deck of the boat, grinned, and said, “Is it anyone’s birthday? Because I have a present.”