“What is doing it?” Edilio asked. “I mean, you’re saying this stuff was happening before the FAYZ.”

“Look, I’m supposedly smart, but that doesn’t mean I understand any of this,” Astrid admitted. “All I know is that under the laws of biology and physics, none of this is possible. The human body has no organ that generates light. And what Petey did, the ability to move things from one place to another? Scientists have figured out how to do it with a couple of atoms. Not entire human beings. It would take more energy than the entire power plant produces, which means that, basically, the laws of physics would have to be rewritten.”

“How do you rewrite the laws of physics?” Sam wondered.

Astrid threw up her hands. “I can just about, barely, follow AP physics. To understand this, you’d have to be Einstein or Heisenberg or Feynman, on that level. I just know that impossible things don’t happen. So either this isn’t happening, or somehow the rules have been changed.”

“Like someone hacked the universe,” Quinn said.

“Exactly,” Astrid said, surprised that Quinn had gotten it. “Like someone hacked the universe and rewrote the software.”

Gone, Chapter 13