lost ~ the gone series

twelve

Someone will get hurt. That was what Sam's mother had written in her journal. Was it possible she knew about the FAYZ? Or just the power? 

Mila sat on a blanket while everyone else tended to their own jobs, or just their curiosities. They'd arrived to the Plant before midnight, but it had taken around an hour to search the entire thing. Sans the reactor room, because out of the eight of them, none had felt comfortable going in there - radiation or no radiation. 

Caine had delegated the task of looking for people to Mila and Sam. Neither liked being bossed around, but neither felt like arguing, either. They looked everywhere, except the restricted areas that Mila couldn't access without her mom's ID card, and no one was to be found, not even Aspen's brother. 

Aspen, Quinn, Sam, and Edilio were off continuing the search for Little Pete, because the boys knew Aspen wouldn't be able to sleep until they found him. 

Everyone had set up makeshift beds in the control room of the Plant, the warm lights of the computers and the soft hum of the equipment making them all slightly less afraid that they would wake up with their hair falling out in clumps. 

"Did you find any food?" Karis crawled onto Mila's blanket. She had taken off her jeans in an effort to sleep more comfortably, but that had only caused everyone else to be uncomfortable whenever Karis left her makeshift bed and her spandex shorts were displayed to the power plant's inhabitants. 

Mila took out the ponytail that had accompanied her in the long walk, and her sandy-colored hair fell past her shoulders. "No. It wasn't my job to look for food."

Karis let out a dramatic sigh and rolled back over to her own bed. "Whose job was it?" Mila didn't answer. She didn't know. 

They heard a loud slam, and Mila looked up to see Caine and Elias coming through the control room door. "We'll have to take Jack here. All this tech stuff hurts for me to look at." Elias laughed and collapsed onto his bed, closest to the desks of monitors. 

 There was a huge electronic map being displayed on the wall behind all the computers, and this proved most interesting to Mila, with its bright lights and strange colors that didn't make any sense to her. She'd been staring at the circle over Perdido Beach, the one with the Plant at its center. 

"Do you guys want to play a game?" Karis asked. When the three people in the room stared at her instead of saying anything, she added, "like Truth or Dare? It's just boring in here."

"I want to go to bed," Mila groaned. 

The door slammed again, and this time it was the rest of their friends that came in. With a little boy who couldn't have been older than five. 

"Is that... Pete?" Karis stood up and walked to the door. 

Aspen smiled. "Yeah. Found him in the bathroom, of all places." Her eyes were rimmed with red, as if she'd been so overjoyed with finding him that she couldn't help herself. But the tears had dried, signaling that they'd found him less recently. 

"That's good!" Mila stood up and went to hug her friend. Quinn patted Aspen on the back, and Edilio and Sam sat down on the opposite side of the control room, where their beds were. 

Aspen led Pete to an alcove in the room, with pillows she had set up around the walls and a small blanket in the middle. "Okay, let's go night-night now," she whispered as she picked him up and carefully sat him back down in the small area. 

Pete stared at her blankly, hands in his lap, blonde hair plastered to the sides of his forehead with sweat. Or maybe water. Whatever it was that he had encountered in the bathroom.