“You won’t make it a block.” Ben’s voice carried over to us from the base of the bleachers. He was sitting on the floor in a fall of light from the windows, turned away so only his profile was visible. His legs were kicked wide, his shoulders drooping. His hands were doing something on the floor, but from this angle I couldn’t tell what.

“Even if you could, where you gonna go?” Eve asked.

Alex tilted her head, indicating the SPTV logo beneath the still-yammering weather reporter. “Stark Peak is closest.”

Ben gave a nasty laugh. “You’re gonna risk escaping town, getting all the way across the valley and up over Ponderosa Pass?”

He had a point. Ponderosa Pass was nearly fifty miles away.

“Hell, yeah,” Alex said. “It’s a different weather system over the mountain range. Let’s hope that the spores stay here in the valley, socked in like fog.”

“It beats waiting holed up here anyways,” Patrick said. “The Hosts are doing two things: Mapping the terrain. And collecting all the kids. We still don’t know why. But we know they’re doing it for someone.”

“For whoever that eye belongs to,” Chet said, his voice wrenched high with fear.

“Which means,” Patrick said, talking over the muffled outcry caused by Chet’s comment, “that someone needs to go get help. Because whatever’s coming hasn’t even gotten started yet.”

“We’re safer here,” Ben said.

“They were at the gate this morning,” Patrick said. “At some point one of them will catch wind that we’re in here. They’ll get in eventually.”

Ben shifted, the floor between his legs coming visible, and I saw at last what he’d been up to. He’d been pulling the wings off dying flies. They wiggled against the floorboards like little beans. He plucked up another one lazing across the seam between floor and wall. “If they do,” he said, pinching off one translucent wing, then the other, “I’ll take care of it.”

“How about the other kids out there?” Alex said. “Shouldn’t we get help for them?”

“It’s too late for them already,” Ben said. “We gotta protect what we have.”

“Until what?”

“The other cities’ll catch word soon enough. Send the army and scientists or whatever. Until then we just have to stay alive.” Ben looked at Patrick. “Course, some of us have more time than others.”

Over on the bleachers, Chet stifled a sob.

“That could be weeks,” Alex said. “Remember last July? The tornado? How long did it take for Stark Peak to send two lousy fire engines?”

Ben let the fly’s body drop among the others. He walked over, turned off the TV, and shoved it under the bleachers. “We need to conserve electricity. Turn off anything that uses energy we don’t absolutely need for survival. Buy time. Like I said, most of us can afford to wait.”