MARCUS WAVED the wand of the Geiger counter in front of him with long sweeping motions. The bright yellow machine in his right hand pinged rapidly and the needle pushed off the scale. According to the machine, the level of rads was increasing with each step closer into town. At the gate it had pulsed at a slow steady rate. After we cut a hole with Kurt’s wire cutters and stepped inside, it shot up to dangerous levels. If we kept going, we would be exposed to enough rads to give us instant cancer. As it was, we were probably causing some long-term damage. I didn’t care. I wanted to know the truth about my mother.

We stopped just beyond the gate, afraid to move closer. This wasn’t superpower radiation. This was long painful death radiation. Silently we looked at each other. Tape Deck, oblivious to our concern, walked forward.

“I knew it,” she said. She put her hands on her head like she was calling the gods.“What?” I asked, frozen in place.

“The Geiger counter. It went up too high and too fast. Even if there was an incident, it’s still miles off. There would be a curve upward, not a cliff.” Tape Deck shook her head. “Faker than my mom’s Berkin bag knockoff.”

Tape Deck pulled something out of her briefcase-ish purse. It was one of the Doolittle High Geiger counters but this one was different. It was inside a green glowing metal box with the label, Palacorp printed on the side. Palacorp was one of PeriGenomics’ competitors in the superweapons field. Tape Dec’ks machine pinged once every few seconds, at a steady rate, and the needle stayed close to zero the whole time.“I don’t get it,” Marcus said. “Why is mine going crazy and yours barely registering anything?”

“Does that block radiation?” Alice asked, pointing to the box.

“Not exactly. It blocks something else,” she said. “Are you really that dense, Marcus?” I shook my head in time with Tape Deck. Marcus sure could miss the obvious sometimes.

The town of Innsmouth came into view. It was exactly as we’d seen on the news. Completely devastated. The buildings were burned to char; the whole town was like a music video about being depressed where everything was rendered in shades of gray, black, and brown. The world was dead. No birds flew. No squirrels scurried. The grass looked like ash. Cars were abandoned in the middle of roads, their doors opened, swinging in the breeze. The air smelled of sulfur and tar. My eyes started to water. I covered my face with a tissue.

“What exactly does that thing block,” I asked, “because if that’s not a radioactive wasteland I don’t know what is.”

“Powers,” Tape Deck said. “It blocks powers.”

“Are you sure it works?” Johnny asked.

“Yes. This casing isn’t enough to block any gamma waves, so if there was radiation it would read it.”

“Trust it with your life?” I asked.

She thought about it for a second. “Yeah.”

“Trust it with our lives, sure?” Alice asked.

Hamilton rolled his eyes. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I felt just as paranoid as everybody else. “If I trust it with my life I definitely trust it with yours. Besides, it’s not like you can do anything if I’m wrong. If Marcus’s counter is right in a few more steps we’re all dead. But also if he’s right, in a few miles, our skin will be peeling off. So if we go forward we’re going to find out soon enough if we have hours or decades left to live.” Tape Deck took a breath and smiled. “But I’m pretty sure we’re going to live.”

She walked forward, bravely. We stood frozen behind her, shivering. “Don’t be scared, guys. It could be a false signal sent out to trick the machine. Or someone with powers like mine that can control Geiger counters messing with it. But, considering that,” she said pointing to the destroyed town, “if there is no radiation that means there was no disaster. Or no nuclear disaster. So most likely it’s a psycho-neural field over this whole region. The field would warp the reality inside so that we only saw what he wanted us to see.”

“Wouldn’t someone need to be here to do that?” I asked. Someone like the J4 family. Or Pheobeter. Johnny looked pale. “Yeah, we’ve met people who could do that,” he said. The bulk of the group, save Tape Deck, was still standing in place.

What Tape Deck was saying made sense, and we all believed her. She looked so happy in the great non-radiated beyond. I thought she was fine, a couple of paces ahead of us, but she was slowing down. She wasn’t going to sacrifice her life for this experimentation. It was going to take someone to break the spell, and I took the first step. I took the first twenty actually. I zoomed past Tape Deck into the radiated atmosphere, and I felt completely fine. Tape Deck followed closely. Everyone else stood still. Johnny was about to charge ahead but when I saw him move, I shouted, “Wait!” He paused.

A plan came into my head. “How about Tape Deck and I go forward, and if we don’t turn into a puddle of radioactive goop, we’ll come back to get you guys.” My gut knew that we were fine, but I didn’t want everyone else to freak out.

“We’re all in this together?” Johnny said, but the rest of them seemed nervous. “Okay, new plan,” he said, grabbing Marcus’s Geiger Counter and walking toward us. “Me, Sarah and Tape Deck walk into town. If we don’t turn into goop we’ll get you.” “Fine by me,” said Alice.

Hamilton looked pissed. He wanted to be part of the fun. “No point in us all dying,” he said, but I knew he was disappointed.