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  Francis was also Rockborn, but while Dekka had a straightforwardly destructive power, Francis had a stranger, deeper, harder-to-understand ability. Francis could pass through solid objects. Or at least that’s how it looked to people. In reality, Francis moved into a fourth spatial dimension, and rather than go through, she went . . . around.

  If Francis was “the kid” of the Rockborn Gang, then Dekka was what passed for a responsible adult, not a role Dekka relished. In addition to Dekka and Francis, the Rockborn Gang consisted of Shade Darby, Malik Tenerife, Cruz (neé Hugo Cruz Rojas), and Armo, who no longer used his birth name of Aristotle Adamo because it was too long and too open to mockery. Armo was not, perhaps, the guy to go through life wearing a great philosopher’s name.

  Armo was a white boy—a very large, strong, very handsome, rather sweet, not overly bright boy with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), which made it very, very hard for him to ever do as he was told.

  Armo also had a morph, a creature not unlike a polar bear with various disturbing human features. In that morph, Armo—as long as you asked him politely and did not attempt to order him around—would happily charge a tank.

  The Rockborn Gang currently occupied a three-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath suite in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The suite would have cost $10,000 a day had it not been offered to them by the grateful management of Caesars Palace with the enthusiastic support of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The powers that be in Las Vegas knew how to show gratitude, and the Rockborn Gang had been given the lion’s share of the credit for saving Las Vegas from the mind-controlling Rockborn psycho named Dillon Poe, the self-styled Charmer, and then from the army’s brutal overreaction. Had the Rockborn Gang not stopped Poe, it was very likely that Las Vegas would have been utterly destroyed.

  Of course Las Vegas also knew the advantage for tourism in having the most Facebooked, Instagrammed, tweeted, YouTubed, reported, loved, hated, praised, reviled group of people on Planet Earth in residence. Just two days after what was being called the #CasinoWar, #MadMaxVegas, and #Vegapocalypse, among many other names, flights and room reservations were already coming back strong after having been shut down entirely.

  The Rockborn Gang had saved Las Vegas billions of dollars, and now their presence was bringing the gamblers back. There was already serious talk of erecting a statue, which was fine, Dekka supposed, and certainly better than being hated and hunted, but it all made her nervous. A black, lesbian FAYZ survivor would never be able to relax as completely as Armo, who, upon exiting the bedroom, Dekka found sprawled across a couch and a coffee table wearing pajama bottoms, with a bagel resting on his bare left pectoral and a little tub of cream cheese balanced on the right side.

  “Unh,” Dekka said to Armo, the limits of her pre-coffee small talk.

  “There’s coffee in that carafe,” Armo said, pointing with his cream cheese–smeared knife.

  Cruz sat off to one side of the fabulously luxurious room with her battered purple Moleskine open on her lap, a pen in her hand, making notes and casting subtle glances at the ever-oblivious Armo.

  Dekka poured. Dekka drank.

  “Holy Communion in the Church of Caffeine?” Cruz teased.

  Dekka nodded. “Damn right.” There was an expectant air that made Dekka frown. “What? What are you two waiting for?”

  “We’re kind of . . .” Cruz tilted her head, hearing something, and held up a hand. “Never mind, you’ll see.”

  Shade Darby, a white girl with blunt-cut dark hair—she’d hacked away at it herself—and the kind of eyes that drilled holes into you, opened the door to her bedroom, stepped through wearing a Caesars bathrobe, closed the door casually behind her, and said, “Any coffee left?”

  “See, Dekka, what we’re doing,” Cruz said as though continuing a conversation, “is waiting to see how much time Shade and Malik have decided to allow before he comes out.”

  “Out?” Dekka looked at Armo, who shrugged, causing his cream cheese to tumble down his chest.

  Cruz answered with a significant nod toward the door Shade had just closed.

  “Huh? Oh. Ahhh,” Dekka said. “I assumed you and Shade would share a room.”

  “She got a better offer,” Cruz said.

  “No, no, no. Just stop, right now,” Shade warned.

  Dekka was not a jovial person, not much given to banter or teasing, but this was too easy to pass up. In a mock-severe voice she said, “You know, Cruz, just because Shade and Malik shared a room, 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. “Ther
e’s, like, six showerheads! 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 nonspecific.”

  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 individual people,” Malik went on, animated as he often was when prosing on about either science or great guitarists, “a simulation so advanced that each of those simulated people acted independently, so real that the game pieces, the avatars, experienced what felt like reality—”

  Dekka held up a hand. “Is this going to involve math?”

  Malik winked at her, and Dekka was caught off guard by the almost maternal feelings she had for him. Shade might be a manipulative brainiac, but the girl had excellent taste in men.

  “I’ll stick to English,” Malik said.

  “Proceed,” Dekka said. Her gaze shifted to Shade and she thought, If you break this boy’s heart, I will personally administer a beat-down.

  “The point is that simulations can be reproduced like any other computer program. So if we suspect that there is a single simulation, we have to suspect that there could be millions. One reality and a potentially unlimited number of sims. Simulations might outnumber reality by billions to one. Which would mean statistically it’s likely that we are not in an original, evolved reality, but in a sim.”

  Cruz returned from the bathroom and flopped down, spilling a bit of her coffee. “Oh, God, are we doing this again?”

  “He promised no math,” Dekka stage-whispered.

  “Basically there would be no way to ever know if you are living in a sim or not. Unless something goes wrong. A glitch. Or maybe a hack.”

  “You think the Dark Watchers are the hackers?” Shade asked for the benefit of Dekka and Cruz, since she knew almost as much about it as Malik did, give or take a college-level physics course.

  Malik shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we’re a TV show. Maybe we’re a game. Maybe we’re something our three-dimensional brains can’t even describe.” He winced, closed his eyes as if in pain. Sometimes the attention of the Dark Watchers was so intrusive it felt like a kind of pain. After a moment Malik continued. “The question is: Francis.”

  “I can hear you,” Francis said, coming back in, reaching for the overflowing platter of pastries, and pausing to ask, “Can anyone have these?”

  “Francis, eat,” Cruz said.

  “You’re an anomaly,” Malik said, turning to address Francis. “Everyone else who has taken the rock has three things in common.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One: they’ve been changed physically, given a morph, sometimes vaguely animal, other times . . .” He shrugged. “Second: a power, an ability that defies conventional physics. And third: the Dark Watchers in your head anytime you’re in morph.”

  “All except Francis,” Shade said. “Morph? Yes, that whole prismatic, rainbowy thing she does. Power? Definitely. But no Watchers. Why?”

  Malik sighed. “Well, babe . . .” He froze for a moment and shot a guilty look at Shade. “I mean, Shade, that just, um . . . slipped out.”

  Shade smiled, a rare occurrence, especially recently. “You know, bunny, I kind of don’t think our secret is much of a secret.”

  “What?” Cruz erupted in mock surprise. “Shade and Malik?”

  “I’m shocked,” Dekka said in a perfectly flat voice.

  “Anyway,” Malik said, too loudly.

  “Don’t ever try to stop Malik once he’s got his lecture on,” Shade said.

  “As I was saying—”

  “So? How was it?” Cruz interrupted, batting her eyelashes.

  Malik gaped at her in shock, his mouth open.

  But Shade, in a low, marveling voice said, “Like you’ve fallen off a cliff and you’re going to die and then, suddenly, a hand grabs you and hauls you back up.” She made a face meant, belatedly, to make it seem like a joke.

  Well, well, she’s human.

  “So,” Malik persisted, his voice a bit desperate, “The point is if we are living in a sim, then what we always saw as the immutable laws of physics are just so
much software, the OS of this universe. And software can be rewritten. The fact is, none of this superpower stuff is possible, not under the laws of reality we’ve always accepted. Someone, something, has rewritten the program that defined those laws of physics.”

  Francis had kept well clear of the gentle teasing. Dekka knew she did not yet feel like she was really part of the group, and probably felt young besides.

  “If we’re just some program, then . . . well, what?” Francis asked.

  Malik shrugged. “Nothing changes, really. We cannot help but feel real because we are real, subjectively. I think, therefore I am, as Descartes said.”

  “Who’s day cart?” Francis wondered aloud.

  “No, no,” Shade said, shaking her head. “Whatever you do, don’t get him off on a tangent.”

  “We experience real emotions, real pain, at least it’s real to us,” Malik went on, trying to float above the constant interruptions. “At one level it all doesn’t change anything, real or sim. But . . .”

  “But?” Dekka prompted, trying to resist a croissant and wondering if she could use the Caesars gym without being interrupted by people wanting to get a selfie with a Rockborn mutant freak.

  “But Francis doesn’t even conform to the ‘new’ rules. She doesn’t feel the Dark Watchers. And more to the point, her power is not limited to our three dimensions. She can move into extra dimensions. Maybe,” he said, with slow emphasis, “into their dimension.”

  They heard the door of the suite being unlocked, and Armo came back wearing a bathing suit, flip-flops, and a towel draped over his shoulders. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Extradimensional space and multiple universes,” Malik said.

  “So, I’m not missing anything. Anyway I just came back to get my shades. It’s sunny and hot as hell, and they serve nachos at the pool. You guys should check it out. How about you, Cruz? Come on,” he pleaded in a wheedling voice, “I need someone to hang out with and I’ve heard all of Dekka’s stories at least twice.”

  Cruz’s eyes went wide and a blush rose up her neck. “I don’t have a bathing suit.”