LITMIR.BIZ

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that doesn’t mean anything, you know . . . happened. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

      “Well, something happened,” Armo said. “I know Malik’s power is causing people pain, but the noises I heard last night didn’t sound like pain.”

      “Oh it’s going to be like this, is it?” Shade said, shaking her head. “You realize if I morph I’m fast enough to smack the shit out of all four of you, right?”

      At which point Malik came out of the bedroom and Cruz said, “Hah! Three minutes on the dot.”

      “Good morning,” Malik said. Malik was African American, a college freshman with adorable ringleted hair, sleepy eyes, and a scary IQ. He and Shade had dated long ago, and broken up because . . . well, because by Shade’s own account she had been obsessive and driven and not above manipulating friends.

      Or as Dekka put it: a ruthless bitch.

      The person Dekka and the others now spoke to was in some ways not Malik. It was Malik’s morph of himself. The real Malik, the Malik who would emerge if he ever left morph, was a boy who’d been burned so badly doctors had been about to put him in a medically induced coma and allow him to die. The rock had saved him, but at a terrible price. Each of them—with the fascinating exception of Francis—felt the intrusive, overbearing presence of the unseen Dark Watchers whenever they were in morph. Malik lived with that twenty-four/seven so long as he was in morph—and leaving morph would mean an excruciating death.

      But at the moment, Malik looked unusually cheerful. So uncharacteristically, stupidly happy that Cruz giggled out loud and the others could not help but grin. It wasn’t prurient leering, Dekka told herself . . . well, okay, in part maybe it was . . . but each of them liked Malik, admired him, and each of them knew that of them all, he was the one who had suffered the most terrible harm. Seeing Malik smile was . . .

       Like watching the sun rise.

      Malik made a point of saying, “Good morning,” to Shade in an overly formal way, as though they hadn’t seen each other since yesterday.

      “Plausible,” Cruz commented, dryly. “Totally plausible. I know I believed it.”

      Dekka drank her coffee and went to the floor-to-ceiling window to look out, and to hide the sadness that had welled up inside her. She was nothing but pleased to see Malik happy, and frankly she enjoyed seeing the eternally cool and self-possessed Shade looking abashed and embarrassed. Served her right. But it inevitably brought personal memories to the surface, memories of her own doomed, lost, one-way love for a girl named Brianna. The Breeze, she’d called herself. Crazy fearless, reckless, Breeze.

       Crazy, fearless, and reckless one too many times, my love. One too many times.

      Cruz, the girl whose rescue of a baby had become the iconic photo of #ArmageddonVegas, had spent the night alone because the alternative would have been sharing with Armo, and that was not on the agenda, though Dekka had spotted more than one longing look from Cruz directed at the boy who could pass as the fourth Hemsworth brother.

      It made Dekka sad seeing Cruz crushing on Armo. Dekka had detected no nastiness or hate in Armo, but that did not mean he would fall for a six foot-tall transgender Latina. Dekka’s own life had been shadowed by lost love, and she didn’t wish that ache on anyone.

      Francis came in, hair wet and face alight with wonder. “There’s like . . . like . . . in the shower,” she began.

      “Yeah, yeah, it’s nice,” Dekka muttered.

      But Francis was not put off by Dekka’s puritanical gloom in the face of luxury. “There’s, like, six shower heads! Six! There’s this big wide one in the ceiling and then there are . . .”

      Dekka tuned her out as the description of the wonders of the shower went on. Truth was, it actually was an amazing shower. It was the shower Dekka might have expected when she got to heaven. She was momentarily distracted by the notion of Saint Peter, like some real-estate guy on HGTV, saying, And wait till you see the shower!

      Armo stood up, adjusted his pajama bottoms and announced, “It’s already ten thirty and unlike you people I’ve been up since eight. I’m going down to the pool. Who’s with me?”

      No one was interested aside from Cruz. Dekka saw her dark eyes zeroing in on a dab of cream cheese clinging to Armo’s chest and thought, You poor kid.

      Finding no takers, Armo disappeared into a bathroom and re-emerged in a bathing suit. “Call me if something happens.”

      “Cruz, I thought you liked sunbathing,” Shade said once Armo was gone.

      Cruz shrugged. “I don’t know what to wear. It’s a problem.”

      “Oh, right.” Shade winced.

      “You could always do what I do,” Dekka suggested. “T-shirt and shorts. That’s kind of gender non-specific.”

      Cruz looked uncomfortable, and Dekka hoped she hadn’t said anything stupid. She’d had years of people assuming various things just because she was gay, or because she was black, and even the innocently curious inquiries got to be tedious after a while. Or in Dekka’s case, instantly.

      “I don’t want to look like . . . ,” Cruz began, then veered away into a low, abashed mutter concluding with, “I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him, geez.”

      Dekka sat down opposite her in the place Armo had vacated and leaned forward to keep her conversation with Cruz private. “Sweetheart, Armo is a good guy. Just whatever you do, don’t ever try to order him around. Other than that, though? The boy is pure Malibu beach bum, mellow to the bone. Just, again, and I cannot stress this too much: don’t tell him what to do.”

      Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I got that. He mentioned he was ODD. It took me a while to figure out he meant Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”

      Dekka smiled affectionately. “Oh, Armo’s regular old odd, too, but he’s good people. When things get hairy, you want Armo nearby.”

      Armo. Crazy, fearless, and reckless. I have a type, Dekka thought dryly, even if it isn’t always a romantic type.

      She moved to the far end of the vast living room, where Shade was now in earnest conversation with Malik.

      “Hey, Dekka,” Shade said, waving her to a seat. “Malik is theorizing.”

      Of all the internal relationships within the Rockborn Gang, none was more emotionally loaded than Shade and Malik’s. Shade had been present four years earlier when the FAYZ had at last come down, releasing its traumatized young inhabitants, Dekka among them. Shade had lost her mother that day, killed by Gaia, the monstrous alien in human form who had terrorized the last days of the FAYZ. That death had spawned an obsession in Shade, an obsession that had dragged Cruz and Malik into this new nightmare world with her.

      Malik was what he now was because of Shade. He lived with the constant presence of the Dark Watchers because of Shade. They had been with him as he had spent the night with her, seeing what he saw, feeling his emotions.

      What must that have been like for Malik? Dekka wondered. And the same phrase she’d applied to Cruz came to mind again: you poor kid.

      “Once upon a time the most sophisticated computer game on earth was just a virtual tennis ball and two virtual rackets,” Malik said, talking between bites of blueberry muffin. “We moved up to Pac-Man and Galaga. Then Mario and Donkey Kong. Then the Sims, where human players could create and control avatars meant to represent humans. That was the turning point, right there. That was the point when the gamer became a god. The gamer wasn’t just a happy face gobbling up power dots and chasing ghosts; the gamer was creating virtual people and manipulating their world.”

      “Talking Dark Watchers?” Dekka asked in a low voice. Shade nodded.

      “If you created a perfect sim, so perfect, so sophisticated that it encompassed millions, even billions of

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