He himself didn’t have the all-knowing dot. Instead he radiated, blazed with the more-than-purple color. His body was limned in the glow, which cast no shadow, but still hurt to look at. I waited for the load of information to flood into my head about him, what he was up to, why he was doing this. About damn time.

Nothing. The glow dimmed, clamped down. A slammed door. Nothing.

“Can’t see me, yeah?” He laughed with genuine happiness. “But you can see them! Not me, them!” And I can’t see YOU anymore!” He shook his head in wonder. “All this time and it was you, not Sean, not any of them! The problem child! The goddamn ARSONIST!” Again with the happy laughing, the sheer joy.

That joy wasn’t contagious. I remembered Phase Two: Leave. The extra femur was cold in my hand. A dead human. A dead me.

“Whatever this is has to stop,” I said. “Whatever murderous dumbassery you’re doing.”

He frowned melodramatically, clownishly sad. “Aw, man, when you say that stuff … it cuts like a knife!” Then he grinned, the glee back. “But it feels sooo right.” He danced with unfettered happiness. “I don’t see the shine on you, like it is on me. It’s like with Mandy Nakahara, she has one but it doesn’t show when she’s around.”

I didn’t know what to do. I looked back at the dancers. What would they do, if alerted?

“You can see the dots on them, yeah? The little data nodes? That’s mine! I call them Quantum Biometric Resonance Tags,” Harrigan gushed. “The QBRT, yeah? The App grabbed them from your phone, right? And then…oh, Owen! We need to TALK!”

“Owen I found him let’s–” Cassie stopped, saw me and Harrigan facing one another. “Ho boy,” she concluded. She was hauling Armand by the hand, and he looked deleriously happy about it. Then he saw Harrigan and his eyes stuck out like doorknobs.

Armand Elizondo Fonesca

Level One Human

Pacific–

I looked away before I could get distracted by the infodump into my head about Armand.

“We’re leaving,” I said to Harrigan. “Meet me there, Abajo junto a la balsa, Romeo.”

Armand grinned goofily and ran for the raft, Cassie springing after him like a gazelle.

“You think I care about NPC losers?” Harrigan demanded. “They can do whatever the hell they want! We have YOU, Owen, and it’s all we need!”

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I held up the femur, my spare femur. Props can be more effective than a cool line. I didn’t point at him or brandish it like a wizard staff. I did wiggle it, though: looky here, Doc.

He shrugged. “Eggs and omelettes, man! Stay with me, we can work it out, we can find out how it happened!” He took a step forward, suddenly grave. “We can do it again, for more people. For Sean.”

I remembered why I’d come to the party. “Sean is–STOP!”

Because he was grabbing for his stylus, and bringing it to that tablet, the one that made people lose muscle control, that would allow him to plop me back in the cage again, in a mad science lab, into a jail cell, anything at all. Whatever he wanted.

What followed was not a balletic, cool battle like in the movies. It was two klutzes flailing at one another.

I got a pretty good hit in to start with: I wildly swung the femur, the leg of Dead Owen Walsh. I’d been aiming for the tablet but I got his stylus instead, and it went flying.

Harrigan’s jaw dropped. His gaze followed the stylus as it spun into the bushes. “You little–” He spun to face me again. He took the tablet in both hands and swung it at my face. A pro-wrestling move people ordinarily perform with a folding chair instead of office equipment.

That tablet conked me on the top of the head. It hurt. I lashed out and pushed the tablet away, and it flew from his grasp, landing face-up in a patch of soft leaves.

Now that screen bore two cracks; it flickered in a wounded, busted manner. “Oh you son of a …” Harrigan left me alone to fret over his machine. Then he stood up straight and faced the bonfire with its dancers. “Hey, campers! HEY CAMPERS, EMERGENCY!” His voice got high, screechy, impossible to ignore. “EMERGENCY OVER HERE!”

They stopped dancing and started coming over. A mass of young people silhouetted against the bonfire. People with glowing stars inside their skulls.

Would they have sided with me, instead of him? I didn’t know. I turned and scrambled into the jungle.

“Help me find it! Help me or–” I didn’t hear what he threatened them with.

I fled through my jungle passages, batting branches aside as they slapped my face. Something was startled, a little screeching ball of black fur that scurried up a tree and might have yelled alien curse words at me, I don’t know. I crashed from the jungle and found myself on the path, the only path here.

I ran for the beach, ran faster than I’d ever run, trying desperately to keep from tripping and tumbling down the hill.

As I went down the path I saw collections, constellations of the blazing information dots. The Quantum Resonance Tags, or whatever he’d called them. But the party was uphill, and the tags there were jumping and wiggling. Dancing, conversing, looking for a stylus lost in the bushes. These dots were motionless.

They were in clusters, tight groups. Stacks. The info-dots weren’t five-or-six feet above the ground at head height. There were decidedly not dancing.

They were underground, just under the trees. Names flooded into my brain until I pulled my eyes away: Adeline Marie Beaumont. Ethan Cole Donovan. Naomi Jade Chen.

Sean Jeffrey Harrigan.

Mass graves. Containing people who still lived, some of whom were grooving up there at the party. There were patches of the things, all up and down the hill on either side of the path.

The island was full of them. As I looked out to sea, I spotted more clusters of the formerly human markers, the little stars that had been people. Underwater, under the sea floor. Hundreds. Thousands.

Yeah, time to go.