Hundreds of people jammed the paved central area, every last one of them either busy with activity or busy making a beeline for some undisclosed location for some undisclosed purpose. There was lots of yelling, lots of laughing, lots of talking, lots of arguing. In no surprise whatsoever, Newt saw at least seven brawls from where he stood at the entrance. These were often broken up by plain-clothed people holding full-sized Launchers, people who appeared healthier and stronger than those around them. Calmer, a more rational bearing. Or maybe it was just because they were the ones holding weapons—Newt assumed these were the Munies, those immune from the Flare, that worked here either for money or out of the goodness of their precious little hearts. Keisha had mentioned them in their very first conversation but he’d never followed up on it because they’d spent the next hour running for their lives from the Crank sweeps.

It was weird that there were other people like Tommy, Minho, Teresa, and the rest, who for some reason stayed stable and sane despite the viral intrusion. Immune. It shouldn’t be weird—of course there were others out there, statistically speaking. Maybe it just rubbed him the wrong way because he was still distraught that he hadn’t been the same as his friends. He had a sudden itch to write in his journal, to share some of these feelings. Tonight. Pausing to take another deep breath, he marveled at how much and how quickly he was changing. He felt like an old, sentimental geezer in moments like this.

Movement, a blur that approached in his peripheral vision from the right, snapped him out of it. A woman ran up to him, a middle-aged, short-haired lady with a wrinkly face and bright-blue eyes. She swatted him on the upper arm and kept running, didn’t say a word to him. Such things didn’t seem to faze anyone else in the huge clearing.

Welcome to Crank Palace, he thought. Welcome to the Central Zone.

Welcome to your future.

Chapter Nine

Ignoring his suddenly intense desire to run, to go back to Keisha and Dante, to huddle up in a tiny cabin far away from this madhouse, Newt forced himself to walk the perimeter. Tried to hide his limp as much as possible. He liked to think he was brave, but he felt the fear of so much unpredictability, swirling all around him like the waters of a raging ocean, sharp rocks hidden beneath the dark, white-capped surface.

The former businesses he walked past had a variety of functions, a few only needing a quick glance to know he should just move right along. Drug dens and the like. A lot of the others had become informal eateries, usually a couple of those Launcher-bearing guards keeping watch on the inside to make sure things didn’t get out of hand—it was an unstable trifecta, indeed: Cranks, food, hunger.