A guy who’d saved my life. “Hey,” I said, “sorry I’ve been such an asshole to you all your life.”

“Can’t really blame you,” he said. “Everybody judges me by my little sister and my old man. It isn’t unfair exactly.”

“Hey!” Monica said, and aimed a halfhearted, off-balance kick at her brother. Which he avoided. “I am so not voting for you next election.”

“I don’t think there will be another election,” he said, “or that I’d want to be mayor of this slow-motion disaster, anyway. I only did it because they said I had to.” He was walking backward now, facing away from us and watching our tails as we inched along the walkway. I began to wake up enough to see that we were in the water treatment plant’s lower levels, which reeked even though they were open to the air. There were tanks on all sides, and open pools on the other side of the chain link. Sewage was moving through there, or should have been, I guessed; it was no longer going anywhere, which was part of why it stank so badly.

I’d been locked in the last set of shallow tanks, where the recycled and treated water was given a final rinse before heading into the storage towers.

But it was worse than that, a whole lot worse. The pool we were passing now was large, and it was deep, and it had bodies. Just like the Civic Pool, but this water was a murky gray-green color, thick with draug and contaminants.

This was Magnus’s new blood garden, and it teemed with the draug, although few of them had any kind of shape to them. They were ignoring us, because we were human, and they were ripping into their favorite snacks. I felt the droplets of draug that were still on me sliding down, drawn toward the main pool, and a trickle of water ran from my feet to the edge.

Hannah had paused, staring. Monica made a strangled noise and tried to pull me forward, but I stayed put. “What?” Monica demanded. “Okay, fine, drowned people, gross, but we have to go!”

“Not yet,” Hannah said. “Hold on to him.” She slipped out from under my arm, and Monica staggered on her heel-less shoes as I sagged against her.

“Hey, watch the hands, Collins!” she snapped. As if I had any control over them, or wanted to feel her up anyway. She was just scared, and she wanted nothing more than to dump me and run.

I guessed that it was kind of impressive that she didn’t do that.

“Hannah?” Richard asked, backing toward her. “What are we doing?”

“We can’t leave this. They’re growing in numbers again. We have to take them down if we can.”

“How?”

“I have silver powder,” Hannah said. She grabbed the phone again and dialed. “I need to let them know to evac. Come on, come on …”

She finally got an answer.

I heard the screams coming out of the phone from four feet away.