Rogue Read Online Free PDF Page A

punch.”
    “Exactly.”
    “What?” she boomed as he went back to his papers. “You get guns, and Driggs gets the deadly Heisman, and all I get is an
office supply?
”
    “Yes. Don’t lose it.”
    It took every ounce of Lex’s strength to not kick the bubonic football into his face. Noticing this, Driggs swooped in and wrapped her in a calming, solid embrace. “Relax, spaz,” he said.
    “But he—”
    “—wouldn’t give you a bazooka. Oh, the unbearable trials and tribulations of the living.”
    Lex deflated. Nothing put things in perspective like remembering that your boyfriend had been killed not a few hours earlier and was now stuck in some hellish existence halfway between life and death.
    “Sorry,” she said, giving his arms a squeeze, happy that she could even do that.
    “That’s okay. Human problems are hard. Hangnails and tricky toothpaste tubes and getting shat on by birds and the like.”
    “Mondays suck too,” she mumbled into his chest.
    “Oh, Mondays are the
worst
.”
    They hugged for a moment more, then parted—at which point Driggs’s body immediately faded. “Hmm,” he said.
    “What?” Lex asked.
    “The same thing happened es ng happwhen we were holding hands earlier. The second you let go, I faded.”
    “You think your solidness has something to do with my touch?” She reached out for his skin, but her hand passed through. “No, that can’t be it.”
    “Maybe you can’t make me solid,” he said. “Only keep me solid once I do it myself. Which . . .”
    Would be happening less and less. This unsaid bit led to a pained exchange of glances—the most pained they’d exchanged yet, by far—followed by a series of nervous scratching of necks and the inability to say anything that would ever make this any less excruciating.
    But at the end of it all, she put her hand in his—through his—and smiled up at him. He smiled back. They pretended this was normal, because they had to. Otherwise they’d just start screaming.
    “Almost done,” Uncle Mort said. He crossed back to his laptop, minimized the night-vision window, and started to compose an email.
    “What are you doing?” Lex asked.
    “Just leaving a parting gift with Kilda, if she’s still alive to receive it,” he told her. “A little educational film for her to play for the townspeople in secret. To help sway them back to our side.”
    “Back to our side?” Lex could hardly say it without laughing. “The townspeople hate us. They voted you out as mayor, they wanted me dead even
before
I Damned Corpp and Heloise, and—” She scowled. She was really starting to hate being able to tick off the names of the people she’d killed. “What could possibly sway them back to our side?”
    Uncle Mort brought up the night-vision video again. “This.”
    Lex squinted at the thick white lines. They seemed familiar yet alien, like a big, picked-clean skeleton.
    “I always knew Norwood’s big fat mouth would do him in,” Uncle Mort said. “I just didn’t know he’d make it so easy for me.”
    Staring at the bright lines, Lex suddenly understood. “The Ghost Gum tree!” When Uncle Mort had ramped up security right after Zara attacked Driggs, he’d put in more security cameras. If he’d put one in the tree—“It would have recorded the whole thing. Me Damning Heloise, Zara giving him my Lifeglass—”
    “And Norwood bragging that he blew up the fountain.”
    Lex should have been able to anticipate her uncle’s guerrilla genius, but it still surprised her, every time. Kloo hadn’t been the only one to die in that explosion—a bunch of Seniors were killed, and many others had been injured. It had enraged the townspeople, whipped them into such a furor that they’d overthrown Uncle Mort and replaced him with Norwood, never knowing that Norwood was the one responsible for the explosion in the first place.
    Uncle Mort was right. This they couldn’t forgive.
    “If, deep down, Croakers are as loyal as I think