Free Light by Michael Grant

doesn’t mean they’re getting out. Kids who ought to be harvesting and planting are sitting there up against the barrier watching TV shows because some network put up a big monitor with captions on. Those lookers out there don’t know what damage they’re doing here. They might as well be giving those kids drugs or something.”
    Quinn didn’t disagree. He’d lost two of his own people that way. The rest stayed out of personal loyalty to him, not wanting to let him down.
    Edilio didn’t push the matter: he let it rest there. Which kind of irritated Quinn, because it meant Edilio was trusting him to step up. He had more than enough to keep him busy. He was tired, and he didn’t even think Albert would listen. Plus Albert might well shoot him right out of the water.
    “No fish, anyway,” he muttered at last. Giving Edilio as peeved a look as he could, he said, “When?” He’d been hoping to find an excuse to visit Lana. It was painful seeing her with Sanjit, but less painful than not seeing her. And, after all, he did have a boo-boo.
    Then he saw the Sorry look on Edilio’s face.
    “Great,” Quinn said.

SEVEN
71 HOURS, 12 MINUTES
    IT WAS EXHAUSTING work for Brianna. She would run two or three pieces of the Drake/Brittney thing off to far corners of the FAYZ, and by the time she got back to grab more, she’d find the body already partly reassembled. Then she’d have to chop it up all over again.
    Still, the total pile grew smaller. Some of the pieces were now ten miles apart. That was a long way for a chunk of thigh to ooze and squirm. Other pieces would be swimming. If they could.
    At some point in all of the back-and-forth, the head, still on its rock, had reverted to Brittney but then had gone right back to Drake, as if Brittney were weakening, no longer able to manifest for more than a few minutes.
    This made Brianna much happier. Brittney had never been evil—a nut, maybe, a little weird, but then who wouldn’t be, in Brittney’s rather unusual situation? She’d been buried alive, after all, only to reemerge inextricably linked with Drake in a sort of weird immortality.
    If that didn’t mess you up, you were unmessable.
    In any case it was Drake’s head that now cursed her in a gasping whisper.
    “I’m not quite sure what to do with you, Drake,” Brianna said, squatting down to look him in the eye.
    “The gaiaphage will kill you,” Drake hoarse-whispered. Then he spit up a piece of gravel that must have been sucked up off the ground through his severed windpipe.
    “I probably better take you to Sam; he can fry you up,” she said. “By the way, why do you have a sack full of dead lizards and some eggs?”
    Drake just hissed. Then he called her a dyke and made some extremely crude suggestions. Extremely crude. Crude enough that Brianna actually got angry. She raised her machete high and brought it down with all the strength and speed at her command. Which was considerable. The machete struck sparks off the stone after it had passed clean through the skull, face, and neck.
    Drake’s head split, top to bottom. The left side—which had almost all of his nose but only a quarter of his mouth—rolled off the stone. The other half—not so much nose and a lot more mouth—stayed in place.
    Brianna had a strong stomach, but something about seeing the inside of Drake’s head was almost too much for her. It retained all the same structures it had had when Drake was fully human. But it did not bleed. It was alive, but alive in a way very different from the way in which most people were alive.
    The brain was gray. Brains are sometimes described as gray, but in reality they’re pinkish—she’d seen brain spilled, so she knew. Drake’s was genuinely gray with a tinge of green. It looked like an unhealthy cauliflower that had been split down the middle.
    She could also see what she supposed were sinuses—open spaces above and behind the nose.
    And she could see teeth.
    The brain did not fall out all