Safe or not, he was going to the reactor.
Sunlight shone through the hole Caine had blown in the concrete containment vessel. But it was faint: sunset reflected off the mountains.
Sam raised his hand and formed a ball of light. It didn’t reveal anything but shadows.
He reached the spot. Right here Drake had shown Sam that he could cause a chain reaction and kill every living thing in the FAYZ.
Right here Drake had named the price.
This was the floor where Sam had laid down and taken the beating.
Sam saw the wrapper of the morphine syringe that Brianna had stuck into him. Here, too, the floor was coated in a flaky brown scum.
A noise! He spun, raised his hands and shot brilliant beams of light.
Something cracked. He fired again and swept the killing beam from left to right, slowly around the room, burning anything it touched.
A catwalk ladder crashed to the floor. A computer monitor exploded like a burned-out lightbulb.
Sam crouched, ready. Listening.
“If someone’s there you’d better tell me,” he said to the shadows. “Because I’ll kill you.”
No voice spoke.
Sam formed a second light and tossed it high overhead. Now shadows crossed each other, cast by two competing lights.
Another light and another and another. He formed them with his will and hung them in the air like Japanese lanterns. He saw no one.
His beams had cut cables and melted instrument panels. But there were no bodies lying on the floor.
“A rat, probably,” he said.
He was shaking. The lights were still not enough, it was still too dark. And even if it were light, something could be hiding anywhere. Too many nooks and crannies, too many awkward machines providing possible concealment.
“A rat,” he said, without any conviction. “Something.”
But not Drake.
No, Drake was in Perdido Beach, if in fact he was anywhere outside of Sam’s overworked imagination.
The reactor chamber was only fractionally lighter than when he’d come in. He’d found nothing. He’d learned nothing.
“I blew the crap out of the place though,” he said.
And accomplished? Nothing.
Sam stuck one hand in the neck of his T-shirt. He touched the skin of his shoulder. He reached under his shirt and touched his chest and stomach. Reached around with both hands to run his fingers along his sides and back. New wounds, the still-fresh marks of Drake’s whip. But worse was the memory of old wounds.
He was here. He was alive. He was hurt, yes, but his skin was not hanging in tatters.
And he was very definitely alive.
“Well,” Sam said. “There’s that.”
He had needed to come back to this place because this place filled him with terror. He had needed to take possession of this place. This very place where he had begged to die.
But had not died.