It was quiet. Good. Sounds made his head hurt.
He had to be quiet himself or someone would come and bring light and noise and touching and pain and panic and it would all come at him like a tidal wave a million feet high, spinning him, crushing him, smothering him.
Then he would have to shut down. He would have to turn it all off. Hide from it. Go back to the game, back to the game, because inside the game, it was dark and quiet.
But for now, with no light and no sound and no touch, he could hold on, for just a moment, to…himself.
Hold on to…to nothing.
He knew where the game was. Just there, on the nightstand, waiting. Calling to him so softly so as not to upset him.
Nemesis, it called him.
Nemesis.
Lana had not slept. She had read and read, trying to lose herself in the book. She had a small candle, not much, but a rare thing in the FAYZ.
She lit a cigarette in the candle and sucked the smoke into her lungs. Amazing, really, how quickly she had become addicted.
Cigarettes and vodka. The bottle was half empty, sitting there on the floor beside her bed. It hadn’t worked, hadn’t helped her sleep.
Lana searched her mind for the gaiaphage. But it was not with her. For the first time since she had crawled up out of that mine shaft.
It was done with her, for now, at least.
That fact should have given her peace. But Lana knew it would return when it needed her, that it would still be able to use her. She would never be free.
“What did you do, evil old troll?” Lana asked dreamily. “What did you do with my power?”
She told herself that the monster, the gaiaphage…the Darkness…could only use the Healer to heal, and that no evil could come from that.
But she knew better. The Darkness did not reach out through the back doors of time and space and siphon off her power for no reason.
For days it had been inside her mind, using her to heal.
To heal who?
She dropped her hand to the vodka bottle, raised it to her lips, and swallowed the liquid fire.
To heal what?
FOURTEEN
30 HOURS, 25 MINUTES
ON THE FIRST day of the disappearance—or, as Sanjit secretly thought of it, the deliverance—he and his brothers and sisters had searched the entire estate.
Not one single adult had been found. No nanny, no cook, no groundskeepers—which was a relief because one of the assistant groundskeepers seemed like kind of a perv—and no maids.
They stayed together as a group, Sanjit cracking jokes to keep everyone’s spirits up.
“Are we sure we want to find anyone?” he’d asked.
“We need grown-ups,” Virtue had argued in his pedantic way.
“For what, Choo?”
“For…” This had stumped Virtue.