The Monster Series

First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA

Text copyright © 2019 Michael Grant

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 94669

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 17687

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To my two Katherines

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe.

I don’t know.

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism,” said the monster.

—Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

ASO-7

1 SEX, PASTRIES, AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS

2 MANHATTAN MAYHEM

3 BOLDLY GOING WHERE NO 3-D PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

4 PSYCHOPATH ROLL CALL

5 HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL?

6 INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE

7 MALMEDY IN THE PINE BARRENS

8 UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

9 DOWN AND DIRTY

10 NEW YORK, NEW YORK

11 KILL US

12 RARE MOMENTS OF PEACE

13 PARENTING FAILS

14 ASTRID DOES AMAZON

15 OVER THERE

16 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 1

17 SUPERHERO CHORES, PART 2

18 BUG FIGHTERS

19 LOSING BATTLES

20 THE BROWNSTONE DECLARATION

21 THE DESK CLERK

22 NORMAL IS NO LONGER WITH US

23 PROBLEMS AT HOME

24 COUP

25 OF COURSE IT’S A TRAP

26 HELLO THERE, DRAKE

27 LESBOKITTY REPRESENTS

28 NO BATTLE PLAN . . .

29 . . . EVER SURVIVES CONTACT WITH . . .

30 . . . THE ENEMY

31 RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

32 DOMES

33 PLANS AND PLOTS AND STOLEN KISSES

34 SPEED, NOTHING BUT SPEED

35 STOP THAT TRAIN! I WANT TO GET ON

36 TOO LATE FOR FLYING LESSONS

37 JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE(S)

38 MOMENTUM

39 GAS WILL EXPAND TO FILL AVAILABLE SPACE

40 A LAIR OF THEIR OWN

41 MEET YOUR MAKER

42 TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Back series promotional page

ASO-7

ANOMALOUS SPACE OBJECT Seven was being carefully tracked by Professor Martin Darby of Northwestern University, father of the famous and/or infamous Shade Darby. Shade’s father had had his security clearance reinstated, despite the fact that his daughter had used his data to locate and steal one of the earlier ASOs and had then used the rock—its universal shorthand name—to become Rockborn, a mutant with a power—the power, in Shade’s case, to move at speeds just over Mach 1.

ASO-7 had passed the orbit of the moon and was now spinning around the Earth in a decaying elliptical, an orbit that Professor Darby and counterparts at universities all over the world had calculated and recalculated with growing alarm.

ASO-7 was a large piece, roughly eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) long and sixteen meters (fifty-two feet) wide. Estimated mass, assuming the composition matched earlier ASOs, was 1600 tons, about the weight of 550 Toyota Land Cruisers.

The size of the rock and the fact that it seemed to be moving erratically had left Professor Darby able to calculate only probabilities. He’d turned those probabilities into a simplified map, which he’d forwarded along with his calculations, to Homeland Security, NASA, and the Department of Defense.

The map showed the likely strike zone as a pink crosshatched area. That pink cross-hatching extended from just north of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to the Long Island Sound around Bayville.

But it was what occupied the middle of that strike zone that had sent alarm bells ringing throughout the US government. Because in the middle of that zone stood New York City.

The odds of a relatively safe splashdown in the water of Long Island Sound were 40 percent, which left smaller likelihoods of strikes near Elizabeth, or in Manhattan proper, which had only a 20 percent likelihood of being the bull’s-eye.

But that was a one-in-five chance of utterly annihilating the greatest of American cities, because this much was certain: if ASO-7 hit land, it would release energy equivalent to thirty-five kilotons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. If ASO-7 was intact and hit, say, Rockefeller Center, it would obliterate sixty square blocks, and severely damage buildings and toss cars and buses around from Thirty-Ninth Street to Fifty-Seventh Street, and from Ninth Avenue almost to Lexington Avenue. If it landed on a weekday, the estimates were that it would kill as many as a million people instantly and another quarter million from fires and related injuries.

ASO-7 had the potential to be the greatest disaster ever to strike the United States.

Department of Homeland Security

Memo: 19-00475

Top Secret (HSTF-66)

Re: ASO-7

DoD, NASA, and university assessments suggest a likelihood that ASO-7 will impact in or near New York City. Likelihood 20 percent low estimate (Northwestern University), 40 percent highest estimate (Oxford University).

Potential Countermeasures:

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). THAAD uses KKV technology (Kinetic Kill Vehicle) and would be ineffective.

GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense). No units are within range.

Aegis-capable ships. Aegis RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) uses KKV technology and would be ineffective.

DoD assesses likelihood of any of these systems being effective at zero percent.

The only option we have to present at this time is to launch one or more ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads to intercept and either divert or break up the ASO. Such an application is theoretical and untested.

Preliminary estimates of effective destruction of ASO-7 by a single warhead are 5 percent. Preliminary estimates show a 30 percent likelihood of altering the ASO’s course, with that new course being almost entirely unpredictable. The most likely result appears to be fracturing of ASO-7 resulting in multiple smaller meteorites with impact zones and damage impossible to predict.

Embassy of the People’s Republic of China—Washington

ALERT

Top Secret

Ambassador Gao has been informed by US State Department that two ICBMs (Type: LGM-30) enhanced by additional solid-fuel boosters and carrying single warheads (Type: W87) with yields estimated at 475 kilotons will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on an intercept course with ASO-7.

US Defense Department liaisons have offered reassurance as to angle and flight time. Recommend People’s Army track but otherwise treat as nonhostile.

The Rachel Maddow Show—Interview Transcript.

RACHEL MADDOW: I want to thank you for joining us by Skype from Las Vegas. It has been a very intense few weeks, and an especially intense forty-eight hours for all of you. So thank you for agreeing to this interview.

SHADE DARBY: You’re welcome.

MADDOW: Would you mind . . . using Skype can be awkward . . . would you mind if we go around to each member of the group?

SHADE: No problem. Dekka?

DEKKA TALENT: I’m Dekka Talent.

MADDOW: You are a survivor of the Perdido Beach Anomaly—what you, I assume, call the FAYZ?

DEKKA: Yep.

MADDOW: How is this situation different from life in the PBA dome, in the FAYZ?

DEKKA: No dome. And the rock mutation is more physical. We change. Physically. Also we have food now, so that’s different.

MADDOW: Is that transformation, that morphing, is that painful?

DEKKA: No. More creepy and disturbing than painful.

MADDOW: Can you give us a sense of how that feels? It must be just . . . well, let me just ask: What is it like? How does it feel?

DEKKA: (Shrugs.) You should probably ask Cruz or Shade or . . . (pushes Cruz forward)

CRUZ: Hi.

MADDOW: Cruz, you have become the face of the Rockborn Gang. In fact, we’re going to put up the iconic photo of you carrying a baby away from the flames that engulfed hundreds of people in that just unspeakably awful moment in Las Vegas. I wonder if you see your new status as, well, like I said, the face of the Rockborn Gang, I wonder if you see this perhaps as an ironic twist, given that you are transgender and your ability, your superpower, is to alter your appearance at will.

CRUZ: I guess. I mean, yeah, it’s like, I don’t know. Like the rock has a weird sense of humor. Or else the media does. But I’m not the hero here. It wasn’t me that stopped Dillon Po

MADDOW: The so-called Charmer. Dillon Poe, who had the power to compel absolute obedience with just the sound of his voice.

CRUZ: Yeah, him. It wasn’t me that stopped him. It was Malik and Francs. I just happened to be in that picture.

MADDOW: The story is that you were recruited, in a way, by Shade Darby, who was your friend from school. Is that correct?

CRUZ: More or less. You should talk to Shade. Shade and Dekka are sort of the . . . I don’t know. I mean, I’m just this chameleon person. Or talk to Malik, he’s the one who . . .

MADDOW: Did you want to say something more about Malik?

CRUZ: Malik, come here, your turn.

MALIK: Good evening, Ms. Maddow.

MADDOW: Welcome to the show, and thanks for coming on. Your story is perhaps the most tragic. You were very badly burned in the battle that took place at the Port of Los Angeles.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Doctors did not expect you to survive. Is it true, as some reports have it, that the Malik you are now, the person we are seeing, is actually a morph?

MALIK: Yes, that’s true. I am in morph now. If I de-morph, I revert back to the condition I was in the hospital. Which, as you said, is . . . intolerable.

MADDOW: And the power you have is the ability to essentially project that pain onto others. That’s how you prepared the ground for the raid on the so-called Ranch, the Homeland Security facility people are comparing to Dr. Mengele’s Auschwitz.

MALIK: Yes. That is my power. The ability to project excruciating pain. It’s not . . . It’s not something I wanted.

MADDOW: Survivors from the Ranch, survivors—and there were very few—say the pain you projected was so awful that in some cases they attempted suicide rather than endure it.

MALIK: (Nods)

MADDOW: And Dillon Poe did in fact kill himself rather than endure it.

MALIK: Yes.

MADDOW: Does it concern you at all that this power is in the hands of . . . well, in your hands and in the hands of the others in the group? And then I wonder if you would talk about how you see all of this playing out.

MALIK: Does it concern me? (Laughs) Of course it concerns me. We have six people here who have extreme power. No one elected us. No one said, ‘Let’s give all this power to these kids.’ The problem is that the rock gives power to the good and the bad alike, people like Justin DeVeere—

MADDOW: Knightmare.

MALIK: Yeah, him. And Tom Peaks—

MADDOW: Napalm or Dragon, as people are calling him.

MALIK: And Dillon Poe, yeah. The only thing the people in charge could do to stop Poe was send a tank brigade into the city, and, I’m sorry, but that wasn’t going to stop him, either. Look, I don’t want to be doing this; none of us wants to be doing this. But Dillon Poe had to die; there’s no question about that. He had to die. He was a mass murderer. He killed—

MADDOW: The official death toll is currently 3,102 people. And may rise as more bodies are found.

MALIK: Yeah, he had to be stopped, and the only way to do it was by killing him. But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be the one who . . . None of us likes doing this, Ms. Maddow. You know?

MADDOW: Shade Darby? Is that true for all of you? I ask because—and please correct me if any of this is wrong—but you actually chose this path. You actually obtained a piece of the rock and became a mutant deliberately.

SHADE: Yes. And I have to live with that. Not just what I did to myself, that’s on me, but I dragged Cruz into it, and Malik. You could say I chose this for myself, although . . . Did I know this was how it would turn out? No, of course not.

MADDOW: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I sense, and again, correct me, but I sense that you feel some guilt.

SHADE: Some guilt? (Laughs) I saw my father thrown to the ground and arrested for something I did. I convinced Cruz to help me, and now she’s in the middle of all this, living this life. And Malik . . . Do I feel guilty that someone I care about is haunted night and day by voices in his head? That he’s defined by pain? People are calling him M-Pain and Screamer and, you know, Malik is the smartest, kindest . . . Yeah. Yes, Rachel, I feel guilt.

MADDOW: Is Aristotle Adamo there with you?

ARMO: Call me Armo.

MADDOW: I want to run a piece of tape we have obtained. I’ll warn the audience that it is shaky and poor quality and . . . well, I was going to say it may disturb some viewers, but given what everyone has seen in recent days and weeks . . . Let’s roll the tape. That is you, in morph, attacking an Apache helicopter, a military helicopter, as it hovers over the ground.

ARMO: Huh. Cool, I actually haven’t seen that before.

MADDOW: You were a prisoner at the Ranch where—

ARMO: Can you run that tape again? That was way cool.

MADDOW: Actually, if you could answer my question and—

ARMO: Nah, first run the tape.

MADDOW: (Pause.) All right, ummmmm, control room?

“GOTTA ADMIT: THIS is nice. I guess.” Dekka Talent sounded unhappy about it as she rubbed a bedsheet between thumb and forefinger. “It’s all so smooth and soft.”

“Beats my old sleeping bag,” Francis Specter said, yawning, ruffling her red hair, and throwing back the covers of her own bed. “Do you mind if I . . .” She gestured toward the bathroom.

“It’s your bathroom as much as mine, kid.”

They’d shared the bedroom, each with her own queen-sized bed, night-light, side table, bottle of spring water, TV remote, and pillow mints. Dekka was the elder of the two, of voting if not yet drinking age, and had about her a seriousness and physical presence that made her seem older.

Francis Specter was a new person in Dekka’s life, and in the life of the rest of their group as well, an underfed white girl of fourteen, with wary, suspicious eyes.

Both girls had pasts full of pain and trauma. Dekka had survived the FAYZ, usually called the Perdido Beach Anomaly or PBA, the bizarre twenty-mile-in-diameter, impenetrable, opaque dome that had imprisoned 332 kids under the age of fifteen. 332 kids at the start . . . far fewer by the end.

Following the collapse of the FAYZ dome, Dekka had had four years of relative normalcy, doing her best to sink back into obscurity as a cashier at a Bay Area Safeway. That obscurity had ended when it was learned that more of the rock—the same alien mutagenic virus-infected celestial debris that had caused the FAYZ—was heading for Earth.

A secret government group, Homeland Security Task Force 66, had brought Dekka to the Ranch and there had tried to use the rock to give her some of the powers she’d had in the FAYZ. HSTF-66’s plan had worked, partially. Dekka had gained powers, but not the powers she’d once held in the FAYZ. Things had changed. Outside the confines of the dome, rock mutations yielded more terrifying powers that were accompanied by physical changes, often quite extreme. In Dekka’s case, the rock had grabbed a bit of cat DNA and some imagery from Dekka’s own mind, played its inscrutable game, and yielded a morph with poisonous snakes where her dreads were, and a body covered in fur.

And Dekka’s old power of canceling gravity had been replaced by an ability to shred anything—or anyone—in her path. Like she was a human blender, a human chain saw. She’d learned to focus this power, but it was still horrifically destructive. In the course of too many battles, Dekka had turned walls and floors and ceilings to mulch. And human beings—bad guys, to be sure, but still human beings—had been reduced to bloody gobbets. By Dekka. By her will.

Dekka was not happy about the soft sheets because Dekka had zero reason to believe that life would continue to allow her to survive, let alone survive in luxury. She was also not happy about the four and a half bathrooms, each a wonder of marble and mirrors and glass, with deep tubs and showers that could have been used to hose off a whole rugby team, outfitted with towels so thick and soft Dekka could have slept comfortably on one of them, let alone the bed.

Luxury, in Dekka’s opinion, made you soft. And the future did not feel soft.

But the sheets sure do.

Also, she admitted privately, it was a bit intimidating. She was not a rich kid like her sidekick, Armo, who took it all in his stride. Armo’s path to the Rockborn Gang had started when he wrecked his 600-horsepower, $90,000 Viper in Malibu. Dekka could not have afforded to pay a month’s insurance on such a vehicle.

As for Francis Specter, Dekka knew that she had endured a very different sort of hardship, living with her mother as her mother descended into drug addiction and a depraved life with a racist biker gang at a bare-bones compound in the Mojave desert.

Francis was also Rockborn, but while Dekka had a straight-forwardly destructive power, Francis had a stranger, deeper, harder-to-understand ability. Francis could pass through solid objects. Or at least that’s how it looked to people. In reality, Francis moved into a fourth spatial dimension, and rather than go through, she went . . . around.

If Francis was “the kid” of the Rockborn Gang, then Dekka was what passed for a responsible adult, not a role Dekka relished. In addition to Dekka and Francis, the Rockborn Gang consisted of Shade Darby, Malik Tenerife, Cruz (neé Hugo Cruz Rojas), and Armo, who no longer used his birth name of Aristotle Adamo because it was too long and too open to mockery. Armo was not, perhaps, the guy to go through life wearing a great philosopher’s name.

Armo was a white boy—a very large, strong, very handsome, rather sweet, not overly bright boy with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), which made it very, very hard for him to ever do as he was told.

Armo also had a morph, a creature not unlike a polar bear with various disturbing human features. In that morph, Armo—as long as you asked him politely and did not attempt to order him around—would happily charge a tank.

The Rockborn Gang currently occupied a three-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath suite in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The suite would have cost $10,000 a day had it not been offered to them by the grateful management of Caesars Palace with the enthusiastic support of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The powers that be in Las Vegas knew how to show gratitude, and the Rockborn Gang had been given the lion’s share of the credit for saving Las Vegas from the mindcontrolling Rockborn psycho named Dillon Poe, the self-styled Charmer, and then from the army’s brutal overreaction. Had the Rockborn Gang not stopped Poe, it was very likely that Las Vegas would have been utterly destroyed.

Of course Las Vegas also knew the advantage for tourism in having the most Facebooked, Instagrammed, tweeted, YouTubed, reported, loved, hated, praised, reviled group of people on Planet Earth in residence. Just two days after what was being called the #CasinoWar, #MadMaxVegas, and #Vegapocalypse, among many other names, flights and room reservations were already coming back strong after having been shut down entirely.

The Rockborn Gang had saved Las Vegas billions of dollars, and now their presence was bringing the gamblers back. There was already serious talk of erecting a statue, which was fine, Dekka supposed, and certainly better than being hated and hunted, but it all made her nervous. A black, lesbian FAYZ survivor would never be able to relax as completely as Armo who, upon exiting the bedroom, Dekka found sprawled across a couch and a coffee table wearing pajama bottoms, with a bagel resting on his bare left pectoral and a little tub of cream cheese balanced on the right side.

“Unh,” Dekka said to Armo, the limits of her pre-coffee small talk.

“There’s coffee in that carafe,” Armo said, pointing with his cream cheese–smeared knife.

Cruz sat off to one side of the fabulously luxurious room with her battered purple Moleskine open on her lap, a pen in her hand, making notes and casting subtle glances at the ever-oblivious Armo.

Dekka poured. Dekka drank.

“Holy Communion in the Church of Caffeine?” Cruz teased.

Dekka nodded. “Damn right.” There was an expectant air that made Dekka frown. “What? What are you two waiting for?”

“We’re kind of . . .” Cruz tilted her head, hearing something, and held up a hand. “Never mind, you’ll see.”

Shade Darby, a white girl with blunt-cut dark hair—she’d hacked away at it herself—and the kind of eyes that drilled holes into you, opened the door to her bedroom, stepped through wearing a Caesars bathrobe, closed the door casually behind her, and said, “Any coffee left?”

“See, Dekka, what we’re doing,” Cruz said as though continuing a conversation, “is waiting to see how much time Shade and Malik have decided to allow before he comes out.”

“Out?” Dekka looked at Armo, who shrugged, causing his cream cheese to tumble down his chest.

Cruz answered with a significant nod toward the door Shade had just closed.

“Huh? Oh. Ahhh,” Dekka said. “I assumed you and Shade would share a room.”

“She got a better offer,” Cruz said.

“No, no, no. Just stop, right now,” Shade warned.

Dekka was not a jovial person, not much given to banter or teasing, but this was too easy to pass up. In a mock-severe voice she said, “You know, Cruz, just because Shade and Malik shared a room, that doesn’t mean anything, you know . . . happened. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

“Well, something happened,” Armo said. “I know Malik’s power is causing people pain, but the noises I heard last night didn’t sound like pain.”

“Oh it’s going to be like this, is it?” Shade said, shaking her head. “You realize if I morph I’m fast enough to smack the shit out of all four of you, right?”

At which point Malik came out of the bedroom and Cruz said, “Hah! Three minutes on the dot.”

“Good morning,” Malik said. Malik was African American, a college freshman with adorable ringleted hair, sleepy eyes, and a scary IQ. He and Shade had dated long ago, and broken up because . . . well, because by Shade’s own account she had been obsessive and driven and not above manipulating friends.

Or as Dekka put it: a ruthless bitch.

The person Dekka and the others now spoke to was in some ways not Malik. It was Malik’s morph of himself. The real Malik, the Malik who would emerge if he ever left morph, was a boy who’d been burned so badly doctors had been about to put him in a medically induced coma and allow him to die. The rock had saved him, but at a terrible price. Each of them—with the fascinating exception of Francis—felt the intrusive, overbearing presence of the unseen Dark Watchers whenever they were in morph. Malik lived with that twenty-four/seven so long as he was in morph—and leaving morph would mean an excruciating death.

But at the moment, Malik looked unusually cheerful. So uncharacteristically, stupidly happy that Cruz giggled out loud and the others could not help but grin. It wasn’t prurient leering, Dekka told herself . . . well, okay, in part maybe it was . . . but each of them liked Malik, admired him, and each of them knew that of them all, he was the one who had suffered the most terrible harm. Seeing Malik smile was . . .

Like watching the sun rise.

Malik made a point of saying, “Good morning,” to Shade in an overly formal way, as though they hadn’t seen each other since yesterday.

“Plausible,” Cruz commented, dryly. “Totally plausible. I know I believed it.”

Dekka drank her coffee and went to the floor-to-ceiling window to look out, and to hide the sadness that had welled up inside her. She was nothing but pleased to see Malik happy, and frankly she enjoyed seeing the eternally cool and self-possessed Shade looking abashed and embarrassed. Served her right. But it inevitably brought personal memories to the surface, memories of her own doomed, lost, one-way love for a girl named Brianna. The Breeze, she’d called herself. Crazy fearless, reckless, Breeze.

Crazy, fearless, and reckless one too many times, my love. One too many times.

Cruz, the girl whose rescue of a baby had become the iconic photo of #ArmageddonVegas, had spent the night alone because the alternative would have been sharing with Armo, and that was not on the agenda, though Dekka had spotted more than one longing look from Cruz directed at the boy who could pass as the fourth Hemsworth brother.

It made Dekka sad seeing Cruz crushing on Armo. Dekka had detected no nastiness or hate in Armo, but that did not mean he would fall for a six foot-tall transgender Latina. Dekka’s own life had been shadowed by lost love, and she didn’t wish that ache on anyone.

Francis came in, hair wet and face alight with wonder. “There’s like . . . like . . . in the shower,” she began.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s nice,” Dekka muttered.

But Francis was not put off by Dekka’s puritanical gloom in the face of luxury. “There’s, like, six shower heads! Six! There’s this big wide one in the ceiling and then there are . . .”

Dekka tuned her out as the description of the wonders of the shower went on. Truth was, it actually was an amazing shower. It was the shower Dekka might have expected when she got to heaven. She was momentarily distracted by the notion of Saint Peter, like some real-estate guy on HGTV, saying, And wait till you see the shower!

Armo stood up, adjusted his pajama bottoms and announced, “It’s already ten thirty and unlike you people I’ve been up since eight. I’m going down to the pool. Who’s with me?”

No one was interested aside from Cruz. Dekka saw her dark eyes zeroing in on a dab of cream cheese clinging to Armo’s chest and thought, You poor kid.

Finding no takers, Armo disappeared into a bathroom and re-emerged in a bathing suit. “Call me if something happens.”

“Cruz, I thought you liked sunbathing,” Shade said once Armo was gone.

Cruz shrugged. “I don’t know what to wear. It’s a problem.”

“Oh, right.” Shade winced.

“You could always do what I do,” Dekka suggested. “T-shirt and shorts. That’s kind of gender non-specific.”

Cruz looked uncomfortable, and Dekka hoped she hadn’t said anything stupid. She’d had years of people assuming various things just because she was gay, or because she was black, and even the innocently curious inquiries got to be tedious after a while. Or in Dekka’s case, instantly.

“I don’t want to look like . . . ,” Cruz began, then veered away into a low, abashed mutter concluding with, “I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him, geez.”

Dekka sat down opposite her in the place Armo had vacated and leaned forward to keep her conversation with Cruz private. “Sweetheart, Armo is a good guy. Just whatever you do, don’t ever try to order him around. Other than that, though? The boy is pure Malibu beach bum, mellow to the bone. Just, again, and I cannot stress this too much: don’t tell him what to do.”