“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Should I get Astrid? Or Sam?”
Perfectly reasonable questions. Edilio wished he had a perfectly reasonable answer. “Take off,” Edilio said. “Good job. Sucks you had to see this.”
She left, grateful to get away. And Edilio stared down balefully at the thing…the person…the body…that would be like a dagger in Sam’s heart.
In the months since the death of Drake Merwin, the defeat of the gaiaphage and the deal with the zekes, a tenuous order and calm had come to the FAYZ.
Edilio felt that tenuous structure, the system Edilio had worked so hard to build, the system he had just started to believe might last, coming apart in his hands now, like tissue paper in a rainstor
m.
It had never been real. The FAYZ would always win.
Sam stood over the body. The sight of it rocked him. He took a stagger-step back.
Edilio grabbed him.
Sam felt panic welling up inside of him. He wanted to run. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was pounding in his chest. His veins filled with ice water.
He knew what had happened.
“Hey, Boss,” Edilio said. “You okay, man?”
Sam couldn’t answer. He took air in little gasps. Like a toddler on the edge of tears.
“Sam,” Edilio said. “Come on, man.”
Edilio looked from the mutilated body to his friend and back again.
He had been there. Sam knew the terrible wounds he was seeing. The body of a twelve-year-old boy named Leonard bore marks Sam knew and would never forget.
The marks of a whip.
The street was quiet. No one in sight. No one who could have borne witness.
“Drake,” Sam said in a whisper.
“No, man: Drake’s dead and gone.”
Sam, suddenly furious, grabbed Edilio’s shirt. “Don’t tell me what I’m seeing, Edilio. It’s him,” Sam yelled.
Edilio patiently pried Sam’s fingers off. “Listen, Sam, I know what it looks like. I saw you. I saw what you looked like that day. So, I know, all right? But man, it makes no sense. Drake is dead and buried under tons of rock in a mine shaft.”
“It’s Drake,” Sam said flatly.
“Okay, that’s enough, Sam,” Edilio snapped. “You’re freaking out.”
Sam closed his eyes and felt again the pain…pain like nothing he’d imagined could exist outside of hell. Pain like being burned alive.
The blows of Drake’s whip hand. Each one tearing strips of flesh…
“You don’t…You don’t know what it was like…”
“Sam…”
“Even after Brianna shot me full of morphine…you don’t know…you don’t know…All right? You don’t know. Pray to God you don’t ever know.”