Light (Gone, #6)

by Michael Grant

His mom might be there, if his dad hadn’t killed her yet. He tried to picture her and succeeded. Then Orc tried to picture his mother without a bruise on the side of her head or a cast on her wrist and he couldn’t.

“Yeah, but a lot of them are our people. Lake people,” Edilio argued. “You notice it’s quiet around here? Half our people walked ten miles down to PB so they can cry looking at their family.” He didn’t say that with a sneer. Edilio didn’t own a sneer.

The tiny part of Diana that still fantasized about this beautiful girl being her actual daughter noted that Gaia had a healthy ego. That was the kind of thing a parent should notice, wasn’t it? She should beam with pride and say something like, Yes, Gaia is quite self-assured. Gaia is advanced for her age. Gaia is a gifted child. Gaia is imaginative: she thinks she’s a mass of green slime inhabiting a human body. Isn’t that cute?

Caine looked around at his current lair—a desk Caine had levitated out onto the landing at the top of the church steps that looked down onto the town plaza. He had a rolling chair. And a desk. He missed his previous lairs. This lair sucked.

Edilio said, “Toto. I’m going to say some things to King Caine. You evaluate.” “I will, Spidey.” “One: I’m my own man,” Edilio said. “He believes it.” “Two: I am sick to death of this tired-ass sibling nonsense between you two.” “He believes it is tired-ass,” Toto said.

EDILIO IS THE MOST PERFECT

“You’re still Sam’s boy, Edilio.” “Sam won’t be here, or at the lake. He’s going after your daughter.” Caine chose not to argue that label, though it filled him with extreme and conflicting emotions. “Sam is going after Gaia and Drake alone? Hah. If I can’t do it alone, neither can he.” “He believes this.” “Not alone,” Edilio said. It took Caine a few beats to get it. “No. Go kill yourself. Eat your own gun. No. No no no.”

BAHAHAHA

And thus ends my brief reign, Caine thought mordantly. He had to fight down the urge to grin. He drew a deep, satisfying breath. His eyes met Sam’s. Sam had a knowing smile, seeing and understanding, as no one else could, Caine’s relief at giving up power. “This is only because I’m bored,” Caine said. “I’m not running off to rescue Diana. Or do the right thing or any of that.” “That is not—” Toto began, but Virtue reached over and put a hand over the truth teller’s mouth. Well, at least Diana would be grateful, Caine thought. And then smiled. Nah. She wouldn’t be.

Caine stopped, turned around, and walked back to him. Sam was struck by the undeniable fact that even now, even after being beaten and humiliated by Penny, his brother could project that hard-to-define thing called charisma. Evil, yes, but a tall, handsome, charming kind of evil. “Why are we doing this?” Caine asked him. “You know damned well why we’re doing this. Because it’s a fight. It may be the fight. It may be the final fight. And what else are we good at, you and me? What are we going to do if we ever get out there anyway? You going to sign up for some AP classes? Get your college essay started? Take driver’s ed?” Caine laughed, laughing at himself, it seemed. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure Harvard will want me. I mean, how many former kings do they have applying?” Sam tried to stop himself asking, but in the end he blurted it out. “And Diana?” “Great body,” Caine said breezily. “And a very open mind.” Sam didn’t buy it. “It’s more than that, you and her.” Caine didn’t answer, which was all the answer Sam needed.

This reminds me of Jake & Rachel's conversation in Animorphs, about what in the world they're going to do when the war is over, and how they can't imagine real life and being anything but fighters.

Edilio crashed on a ratty mattress in the corner of what had once been the town magistrate’s office. He started to try and organize his plans for the next day but fell asleep so suddenly and so completely that when he woke up in the morning he would find he had only removed one shoe.

And Caine. Yes, above all, Caine. All their battles, hers and Caine’s, all their rages? All of it to end in death so this evil creature could walk out to trouble the wider world? She remembered the touch of Caine’s skin on hers. Who would have guessed that egomaniacal, power-mad Caine would have such a gentle kiss? Yeah, and that worked out so well. Pregnant with a mutant child who was sacrificed at the moment of her birth to the needs of the gaiaphage. It wasn’t like Caine could ever walk free from the FAYZ, Diana knew that. He was a criminal ten times over, a rotten, charming, worthless sociopath, and they would lock him up. And she would visit him and make fun of him behind the security glass at the prison. And then she would wait for him. Years, if necessary. All her years, if necessary. You make bad choices, Diana, she told herself. So: one more won’t be a shock.

“I’m seventy-four years old,” he said, and shrugged again, this time like he was trying to get that fact to roll off his shoulders. “I was drafted into Vietnam. Way before your time, but it was a nasty war, that one.” “I guess wars usually are.” He smiled and laughed a little. “Yes, they are, generally. Well, there was this kid, just been bumped to corporal on account of the regular corporal was dead. Nice enough fellow. Only one day, after he’d had no sleep for three days, and no hot food in five days, and had two buddies shot . . .” He stopped then for a moment, breathed hard, and looked away. She waited. “As it happened, they captured an NVA—sorry, North Vietnamese Army regular. This NVA was injured, so he couldn’t keep up when his compadres retreated. So, corporal decides to question him. The NVA spits in the corporal’s face. Long story short, the corporal shot him in the neck.” Silence. “War crime, that was, shooting a helpless prisoner. Court-martial offense. At least it would have been if anyone had ever reported it.” “You didn’t report it?” Merwin shrugged, heavily this time. “No, ma’am. No one reported me for shooting that man in the neck. Because we were all of us hungry and tired and scared and very, very angry. And the oldest of us was just twenty years old.” “Sam wouldn’t . . . ,” she started to say. “Oh, well, Ms. Temple, there are genuine saints in this world: I married one. But there aren’t many. I like to think Drake—my grandson, Drake, not that old corpor...

Again, this feels like a moment right out of Animorphs wrt war crimes and what people are pushed to do during conflict.

She glanced up to see something she’d never seen before: Edilio, his face transformed by dark anger. She took a step back. He said, “Talk, Astrid. Now.” Astrid swallowed hard. She tried to think of something to say and failed. She was not strong enough to say no to him. She felt her resistance crumble. She felt her own surrender. The coolly logical part of her mind noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio.

“She’s not that far ahead of us,” Caine said. “She’s probably going straight down the highway.” “If we run . . . ,” Sam said, though he felt too tired to last long running. “You go right ahead and run. I’ll take the bus,” Caine said. “Ah. Yeah, that would be better. Have you ever driven a bus?” Caine shook his head. “No, I have not.” “Strangely enough,” Sam said, remembering the long-ago moment of terror and competence that had earned him the nickname School Bus Sam, “I have.”

Who should he write to? A last “I love you” for Astrid? She would sneer if he used this final opportunity for a stupid romantic gesture. No, no good-byes. Not yet. He tried to think clearly. Edilio would have a battle to fight. Dekka would be in it, too, and if Sam asked her, she would come to save him, no matter what. He couldn’t do that to her and the others. It had to be someone resourceful. Someone with no powers necessary for the battle. Someone he could trust. He began writing. The first word was “Quinn.”

BEST FRIENDS FEELS AHH

“Who is it?” Gaia asked. Would she know if he lied? He couldn’t hesitate. “I think it’s Edilio.” “What are his powers?” “None,” Caine said. And thought, Unless you count having the courage to stand out there facing the gaiaphage.

THE FIGHT LASTED six seconds. In that time Brianna rushed, swung her machete, and missed. Gaia swung a fist as powerful as Jack’s and caught just a corner of Brianna’s shoulder, spinning Brianna away to sprawl on the concrete. Brianna was up in a flash, snapped her shotgun up, fired, and hit Gaia in the chest with a load of buckshot that knocked Gaia staggering back with seven small holes in her. Brianna rushed, yelling, “Die!” stuck her shotgun into the stunned Gaia’s mouth, and pulled the trigger. And there was no explosion. Dud shell. Brianna’s one good eye widened and Gaia’s hand was on her neck. Impossible to get away. Brianna swung her machete, but the angle was all wrong, so she caught Gaia’s neck, too low and too weak. Blood was everywhere. But Brianna’s head was woozy. The weakness was spreading through her. She struck again, and Gaia easily blocked this blow, ripped Brianna’s machete from her hand, and threw it aside. Gaia’s face, those cold blue eyes, were all Brianna could see. But she felt Gaia’s hand pressing palm-out against her heart and knew . . .

nononononononononononono

Edilio knew his own fear was pushing him now, because he knew Caine wasn’t wrong about the likely ending. Still, he needed Caine’s power on his side to have any slight hope. And he definitely needed hope. “I lost someone I loved at the lake,” Edilio said, his voice full of emotion. “Maybe seventy kids died up there. Just now, six, eight more. Now, Brianna dead. More to come. Well, some of that is on you, Caine. So you are going to step up. You hear me? You are going to step up.” Edilio had nothing else to say, and Caine seemed to have no answer. So Edilio turned back to Dekka and Jack and said, “That’s it for grieving. We do more grieving later if we’re alive. Right now we fall back and get ready for plan B.” “There’s a plan B?” Jack asked. “You’re another one,” Edilio snapped. “You’re not going to tell me again that you won’t fight, because I swear to God I’ll shoot you myself.” Then in a more measured voice he said, “Yes, there’s a plan B. We fight that evil creature every step of the way. Caine, Orc, Jack, Dekka, follow me.” He didn’t look back to see if they were following him. He didn’t need to.

EDILIO IS THE HERO THAT NONE OF US DESERVE

His name was Peter Ellison, but everyone had always called him Little Pete. Sometimes Petey. And now he heard his name. Like prayers floating up to him from the ghosts. A voice he knew. A voice he did not know. A third voice that reached to him in a way like the Darkness sometimes did, silently, through that emptiness that connected all who had been touched by the Darkness. In different words, in different ways, they each said, Take me. Take me, Petey. Take me, Little Pete. Take me, you little freak.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO

Someday if, when, the barrier came down, someone would clean it all up. The tow trucks would come. Beep-beeping as they backed up to slip their lift beneath some battered hulk of a car. Maybe there were a few car windows that hadn’t been broken, but not many. All the tires were partly or completely deflated. The gas tanks were long-since siphoned. Many of these cars had kept running until the gas was gone. In some of these cars babies in car seats had died of starvation. In some of these cars kids had died when the driver poofed at seventy miles an hour. Would the CSI types have to come in and reconstruct it all? Would they identify the unidentified bones? Someday families would try to come back only to find their home ransacked, torn up, sometimes reeking of human feces. There would be graffiti on their walls and trash stuffed in their toilets. And in many cases they’d find their homes burned down. Zil’s fire had taken something like a quarter of the town, and other houses had been knocked down to make firebreaks. People would marvel at the destruction and tut-tut and shake their heads because they wouldn’t know what people had lived through in this place. Those people returning to Perdido Beach wouldn’t understand what desperate battles had been fought. Yeah, sorry about pulling fuel rods out of the nuclear power plant and tossing them down a mine shaft. Why did we do that? Well . . . hah. You’re never going to believe why we did that. You say Coates Academy looks like i...

Sam turned his palms inward, toward himself. He couldn’t turn them far enough to aim for his own head or internal organs. His only chance was to use the light to cut through a leg artery and bleed to death.

Jesus fucking christ, Sam. In my reviews I've shrieked less about my love for Sam, but I do: truly, I love him.

People running. Sam could barely see them through the smoke. Three girls who had never been anything important in the life of the FAYZ, three regular kids, Rachel, Cass, and Colby, three sisters who had never fought, never been in on any of the battles, had just kept their heads down and done what work they were given, now rushed madly, hopelessly, at Gaia with tire irons and clubs.

“Give me a hand,” Diana said. She held her hand up to him. He looked down at her. “I don’t think so, Diana.” “What do you mean?” she asked. He raised one hand and pushed the boat gently away from the dock. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Going out in style,” he said. “Caine. Caine. What are you doing?” “There’s no good reason for both of us to die.” “Caine, you’re being silly,” she said as firmly as she could. “You know this is the end. I want to be with you. I don’t want our monster child hunting me down and finding me at the end all alone.” He shrugged. “I know you asked Little Pete to take you. I know you offered yourself up.” “How? How did you know?” He shrugged. “But he didn’t,” Diana said. “He didn’t, which—” “Yeah. Well. He had a better offer.” “What?” The word came out as a sob. “Caine . . . No. No. We do this together.” “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said with strained nonchalance. “I think it will be like it is with Gaia. I think when Little Pete does his thing, well, I don’t think I’ll be around then. So I don’t see how we do this together.” “Don’t, Caine. Don’t you do this,” Diana pleaded. “You have to understand, Diana: I’m not trying to be noble. It’s just the only way I have to beat it. The gaiaphage. It thinks it has me. It thinks it owns me. It thinks it cracks the whip and I have no choice but to obey. And the pain . . .” He shrugged again. “So. So, we want old green-and-evil to be surprised when it finds out, right?” “Caine, this is not what we . . . N...

FJGVAKLDJGLKDAGLKJDAFG

Connie Temple did not move. She couldn’t. She had to watch this final slaughter. A witness, even if she died for it. On the left and on the right, the first of the children inside burned. And the first of the adults outside screamed as hair caught fire and limbs fell severed to the ground. And something large pelted down the hill, a monstrosity, a nightmare creature.

me, squeaking at my e-reader: "ORC!!!!!!"

Feet on concrete now, the road, running. Clifftop! To the left, but uphill, and Gaia was coming, and another deadly beam of light, so close Sinder felt the heat of it on her cheek and cries and shouts and the sound of people gasping for breath, gagging in the smoke. And suddenly, Caine rising up behind a wrecked car. He was holding something long and white. The panicked crowd parted around him. Sinder ran on, glanced back, saw Gaia still running and firing, and Caine grim and steady.

<3<3<3<3<3

The rest of the missiles were off to the side of the road in their crates. He kind of didn’t think he’d get a chance to reload. Edilio was there, unpacking a second missile, but nope, Caine thought, Edilio isn’t going to get the shot, either. Gaia saw him. “You,” she said. “Yeah, me,” Caine said, disappointed. “Well, I thought it was worth a try. Better than my backup plan.” “Your backup plan?” Gaia asked. Caine nodded. And for a moment he hesitated, seeing Diana in his mind. Diana. A good final thought, that. “Now, Little Pete,” Caine said. “Right now.”

FUCK

Little Pete didn’t remember much that his parents and sister had taught him back before. But he remembered that it is not okay to hit. It is definitely not okay to hit. Then he had seen the ghostly shapes of all the people starting to flicker and disappear. All those game pieces, all those avatars, just disappearing, and they were being destroyed by the Darkness, weren’t they? The gaiaphage wasn’t just hitting Little Pete. Which was wrong. It was hitting other people, too. He had tried to fight back using Taylor, but he’d been too weak to make her whole, and too weak to stop the slaughter. And then he’d heard his sister calling to him. Little Pete, take me and fight it. But he didn’t really trust her very much. Other voices had drifted to him, calling him through the emptiness, even as the Darkness tried to tell him no, no, Nemesis, just fade, fade into nothingness and be happy. A girl he didn’t know had called to him. Take me. I deserve to die. But then had come the voice that said, Come on, you little freak, wherever the hell you are, whatever the hell you are, let’s get this done with. Pete had seen the scars on him, the fresh marks of the gaiaphage. You and me. Blaze of glory, Little Pete. Blaze of glory. Pete didn’t know what a blaze of glory was, but it sounded good. Now, Little Pete. Right now. The Darkness was wrong. It was not time for Peter Ellison to fade away. It was time to hit back.

ok in all my grief I still had this moment of wanting to pump my fist and going "FUCK YES, GO PETE"

It was warm: that was the surprise. It was warm and it made him sigh. It was like . . . well, not exactly like anything he’d felt, but maybe closest to the way he’d felt after he made love to Diana, and lay beside her, and smelled her, and felt her breath on his cheek, and she would put a hand on his cheek and . . . You’re giving me a good memory to go out on, aren’t you, Pete? Well, good choice, Caine thought. Huh. I can’t feel my body, Caine thought. Huh. I . . .

nononononononononononono

THE TOLL THREE HUNDRED AND thirty-two kids between the age of one month and fourteen years had been confined within the FAYZ. One hundred and ninety-six eventually emerged. One hundred and thirty-six lay dead. Dead and buried in the town plaza. Dead and floating in the lake or on its shores. Dead in the desert. In the fields. Dead of battles old and recent. Of starvation and accident, suicide and murder. It was a fatality rate of just over 40 percent.

“They won’t let me talk to him. But they’re going to release me in a couple of days. I’ll find him.” “Won’t your parents try to stop you?” Astrid considered this, then barked out a laugh. Diana joined in. “Oh, my God, we have parents again,” Astrid said, wiping away a tear. “We’re kids. We’re teenagers again.” A nurse poked her head in. “Listen, ladies, it’s not visiting hours, but there’s someone here to see you.” “Who?” Diana asked. The nurse looked left and right like she was afraid to be overheard. “It’s a young woman. She seems very determined. In fact, I almost called the police because she scared me.” Astrid and Diana exchanged a look. “Black or white?” Astrid asked. “She happens to be white.” “Lana!” Astrid and Diana said in unison.

Astrid looked at Lana, now leaning against the window, and Diana, lost in thought, and reminded herself that at times she had hated Diana. She had told Sam to kill her if necessary. And she had disliked Lana as a short-tempered bitch who sometimes abused her privileges. She let her mind move beyond these two. Orc, who had been the first to kill in the FAYZ, the first murderer. A vicious drunk. But someone who had died a hero. Mary. Mother Mary. A saint who had died trying to murder the children she cared for. Quinn, who had been a faithless worm at the start and had been a pillar at the end. Albert. She still didn’t know quite what to think of Albert, but it was undeniable that far fewer would have walked out of the FAYZ without Albert. If her own feelings were this conflicted, was it any wonder the rest of the world didn’t know what to do with the Perdido survivors?

He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn’t get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza. “Kids just playing around, I guess, but it’s morbid; we’ll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to—” “No,” Albert said. “We’re almost ready for you,” the director assured him. “That’s not a fake graveyard. Those aren’t fake graves. No one was playing around.” “You’re saying those . . . those are actually . . .” “What do you think happened here?” Albert asked in a soft voice. “What do you think this was?” Absurdly, embarrassingly, he had started to cry. “Those are kids buried there. Some of them were torn apart, you know. By coyotes. By . . . by bad people. Shot. Crushed. Like that. Some of those kids in the ground there couldn’t take it, the hunger and the fear . . . some of those kids out there had to be cut down from the ropes they used to hang themselves. Early on, when we still had any animals? I had a crew go out and hunt down cats. Cats and dogs and rats. Kill them. Other kids to skin them . . . cook them up.” There were a dozen crew people in the McDonald’s. None spoke or moved. Albert brushed away tears and sighed. “Yeah. So don’t mess with the graves. Okay? Other than that, we’re good to go.”

“You’re not being serious with me. I’m trying to treat you like an adult.” Sam put the taco down. “Are you? You’re trying to treat me like an adult? Okay. Let’s have an adult conversation, Mom. Tell me how I had a brother, but you kind of forgot to mention it. Tell me how that happened. A lot of bad things happened because of that.” “This isn’t something—” “He gave his life in the end. Caine. Your son. He’s dead. You’ve seen the video.”

She put her hand back on his chest, then moved closer still to kiss his neck. “It’s over, Sam. Finally.” “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is.” “Turn out the light, Sam.” Sam reached for the switch and turned out the light.

:"""""") kdljgladjgljfg my heart