“What kind of music do you like?” Sam asked.
“Let me guess,” Quinn interrupted. “Classical. And jazz.” He stretched the word “jazz” out to comic length.
“Actually—”
“Snake,” Edilio yelled. He danced backward, tripped, and fell, bounced back up looking sheepish. Then, in a calmer tone, he said, “There’s a snake there.”
“Let me see,” Astrid said eagerly. She approached cautiously while Sam and Quinn stayed even more cautiously out of range.
“I don’t like snakes,” Edilio admitted.
Sam grinned. “Yeah, I kind of got that from the way you moved away so gracefully.” He brushed some clinging dirt and dry leaves off Edilio’s back.
“You should look at this,” Astrid called urgently.
“You look at it,” Edilio said. “I saw it once already. One look at a snake is all I need.”
“It’s not a snake,” Astrid said. “At least it’s not just a snake. It should be fairly safe, he’s down a hole.”
Sam approached reluctantly. He didn’t really want to see the snake. But he also didn’t want to look like a coward.
“Just don’t startle it,” Astrid said. “It may be capable of flight. At least short flights.”
Sam froze. “Excuse me?”
“Just step lightly.”
Sam crept closer. And there it was. At first he just saw the triangular head peeking up from the bottom of a foot-deep hole padded with fallen leaves. “Is that a rattlesnake?”
“Not anymore,” Astrid said. “Come around behind me.” When Sam was in position she said, “Look. About six inches below his head.”
“What is that?” Flaps of leathery skin, not covered with scales, but gray and ribbed with what looked like pink veins, hung flat against the snake’s body.
“They look like vestigial wings,” Astrid said.
“Snakes don’t have wings,” Sam said.
“They didn’t used to,” she said darkly.
The two of them drew slowly back. They rejoined Edilio, Quinn, and Little Pete, who was gazing up at the sky like he was expecting someone from that direction.
“What was it?” Quinn asked.
“A rattlesnake with wings,” Sam said.
“Ah. That’s good, because I was thinking we didn’t have quite enough to be worried about,” Quinn said.
“I’m not surprised,” Astrid said. When the others stared at her she explained. “I mean, it’s obvious that there’s some sort of accelerated mutation at work in the FAYZ. In fact, given Petey and Sam and the others, the mutation must have preceded the FAYZ. But I suspect the FAYZ is accelerating the process. We saw the gull that had mutated. Then there was Albert’s teleporting cat. Now this.”
“Let’s get moving,” Sam said, mostly because there was no point standing around moping. Everyone walked more carefully now, eyes down, very aware of what they might step on.
They stopped for lunch when Little Pete started losing it and staged a sit-down strike. Sam helped make the food, then took his can of peaches and his Power Bar and sat alone at a distance from the others. He needed to think. They were all waiting for him to come up with a plan, he could feel it.
They were a little bit above the valley floor still, out in the open with no shade. The ground was rocky. The sun beat down. It didn’t look like there was much in the way of shelter or shade ahead of them. Just the barrier extending on and on, forever and ever. From this height he should have been able to see over the top of it, but Astrid was right: no matter where you stood, the barrier seemed to be equally tall, equally impenetrable.
It glowed a little in the sunlight, but mostly the barrier never changed, day or night. It was always the same faintly shimmering gray. It was just reflective enough that sometimes you could almost believe you saw an opening, trees that extended beyond the barrier, or a feature of the land that seemed to pass through a hole in the barrier. But it was always an optical illusion, a trick of the light.
He felt rather than heard Astrid come up behind him.
“It’s a sphere, isn’t it?” he said. “It goes all the way around us. All the way under us and all the way over us.”
“I think so,” she said.
“Why do we see the stars at night? Why can we see the sun?”
“I’m not sure we’re seeing the sun,” Astrid said. “It may be an illusion. It may be some kind of reflection. I don’t know.” She stepped deliberately on a small twig and snapped it in half. “I really don’t know.”
“You hate saying ‘I don’t know,’ don’t you?”
Astrid laughed. “You noticed.”
Sam sighed and hung his head. “This is a waste of time, isn’t it? I mean, trying to find a gate. Trying to find a way out.”
“There may not be an out,” Astrid confirmed.
“Is the world still there? I mean, on the other side of the barrier?”
She sat beside him, close enough to be companionable, but not touching. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I liked your egg idea. But to tell you the truth, Sam, I don’t think the barrier is just a wall. A wall doesn’t explain what’s happening to us. To you and Petey and the birds and Albert’s cat and the snakes. And it doesn’t explain why everyone over fourteen disappeared all at once. And keeps disappearing.”