you really want to waste your ammo on them before we have to? Do you really think I’m going to try to run away and leave my brother?”
Jopek actually had to consider the last question.
“Have a ton of fun,” Jopek said.
Holly tried to ask if she could come, too, but Michael was already heading for the fuselage, his mind stretching, trying for a plan, desperately, oh God, don’t let this be The End—
He was ducking through the fracture in the fuselage when Jopek barked: “Faris!”
He turned, prepared to see Jopek raising the gun.
An unlit flare batoned through the air.
Michael caught it against his chest, and let his heartbeat devour the airplane.
The Game ends with stopping a Betrayer, right? I knew that, Michael thought. Jopek and the Rapture are each other’s Betrayers. Let’s see what happens if they try to stop each other.
I don’t like what you’re planning, Michael. The Rapture tried to kill you, too, remember?
Yeah—but I’m thinking they want Jopek even more than me, after he killed all those people yesterday.
They’re still the bad guys!
But that doesn’t mean I can’t make them change teams for a while.
“Michael?” Holly called from behind him as he marched out into the street.
She emerged from the plane, her face all confusion, scrunched against the wind.
Michael grabbed at the back of his space suit, found a zipper, unhooded himself. He got a cinder block that had smashed into a candy store window, a swirly lollipop stuck on the bottom. “What are you . . . ?” said Holly. Tears glittered in her eyes.
You want to cry now?
Michael hurled the block over a chain-link fence into a nearby alley, where it tipped end over end, drunkenly strolling toward the cluster of mines.
Boom. One land mine lit, exploded, sending up a mini-rocket of fire and sound.
“The Bellows are coming. Down the road. Be careful. Michael? Hey?” Holly’s hand touched his shoulder, lightly.
“I don’t care,” Michael said, spinning on her. “I don’t care what you have to say, Holly. I don’t need your help—I don’t want it!”
She cringed.
Michael threw a stray boot and he got two mines in the chain-linked-off alley; double kaboom; the explosive fire leapt up and the sound ran past him, traveling across the city. It was his signal to the other people in town. But where were the ears to hear it?
Michael checked the horizons.
Look at me, he thought. Calling in backup. Please look at me, Rulon!
“I know I . . . don’t deserve you talking to me right now. I know that,” Holly said, wiping her tears clumsily.
Look! he begged. LOOK AT M—
“I was wrong to trust him, Michael. I should have left with you last night. I was just so goddamn wrong—”
“Yeah, I was pretty wrong, too. I thought you cared about Patrick and me,” Michael spat.
Holly shook her head. “I—I do! I care a lot. I was trying to help you guys. I just thought that Jopek . . . I thought we all had a better chance with him. I screwed up, but I didn’t see any other way, okay?
“Do you remember when I told you that my dad was a pharmacist?” Holly said.
Michael walked toward the four or five Bellows that were staggering toward him and Holly from fifty yards away.
“What are you doing?” said Holly.
“Holly, just shut up. You’ve messed up enough—”
“My dad made the cure, Michael!” she said.
Michael blinked. “What?”
“I’m trying to tell you that he was the leader of the CDC team, and he made it! And—and—the day everything got overrun, we got separated and so many of the buses out of town got swamped. Hank and I didn’t know what happened to our dad—we didn’t know if he got out safe, or if he was bit. I don’t even know if the CDC had had time to get the cure out of the city.
“Hank and I were alone. Jopek said he’d help us find the lab. He said we had to keep it a secret because he was the leader. I know that was stupid, but I just wanted to get it so, so bad. I needed to hang on to that. I needed—”
“Jopek’s training, yeah, I remember.”
“No. Yeah,” she said. “But . . . I needed hope, Michael.”
Michael didn’t question whether the disgust he felt was real then; for that word, hope, was hideous on his heart. Mom lived behind a hope of her life changing; Bobbie hoped to run her fingers over her husband’s smile one more time; the Rapture worshipped their