Sterling Squadron (11 page)

“Sorry, Paul,” Felix told him, “I
am
in charge. Technically you’re not a staff sergeant. Escaped prisoners have no rank.”

Paul shut up. He crossed his arms and fumed.

“Besides,” Felix whispered, “there’s something going on with you and this mission. I hear it in your voice. Am I wrong?”

Paul shuffled his feet. “It’s just this place. It gives me … nightmares.”

Felix waited for more explanation from Paul. None came.

Madison grabbed a backpack from her dragonfly’s cockpit. “You two should stop arguing about who’s going to lead,” she said. “We should just get going!”

“We’re not going anywhere without a plan,” Felix said, his tone turning frosty. “And not without establishing a chain of command.”

Madison rummaged in her pack and pulled out four baseball caps.

“Yeah,” she said with a snort, “we need a chain of command for a mission that’s illegal and probably the last thing we do before we all get court-martialed.”

She tossed Ethan a cap.

“What are these for?” he asked.

“Your head, stupid.” Paul tugged one on.

“They’re disguises,” Felix told him. “The Ch’zar have seen us—especially you, Ethan. Every adult on the planet will recognize you because of their collective hive mind.” He pointed to his iron-gray eyes. “They seem to know our eyes more than any other feature.”

Ethan thought about
every
Ch’zar-controlled human adult on Earth knowing what he looked like and decided to
not
think about it.

Too creepy.

He turned the cap around. There was an embroidered red
R
on its crown.

“We stole them from a neighborhood baseball team called the Rebels.” Madison smiled crookedly. “Rebels? Resisters? Get it? Just like us. I’d love to flaunt it in front of the Ch’zar.”

Ethan smiled back, but he wasn’t looking at the cap. He stared at the Resister pilot’s wings on Madison’s bodysuit.

He wished for the millionth time that he had a set of those. The insignia had crossed insect wings with a bundle of arrows underneath, all surrounded by a semicircle of gold stars. Only those who graduated from flight school got them, awarded in a special ceremony by Colonel Winter herself.

All things considered, it seemed awfully unlikely he’d get a set of those wings now (especially from Colonel Winter).

“Infiltration into Fiesta City won’t be a problem,” Paul told them. “We can walk right in.”

“Hello? There are patrols,” Madison said.

“Sterling kids walk out here all the time. The adults don’t care.” Paul gestured around them. “We’re surrounded by radioactive desert. No one wanders too far.”

Ethan saw similarities to this place and Santa Blanca. His old neighborhood wasn’t surrounded by radioactive desert, but mountains. Both places were prisons.

A static squawk from Ethan’s cockpit made everyone jump.

“Sorry,” he said, his heart pounding from the unexpected noise. “I left the encrypted channel open.”

Colonel Winter’s voice filled the tiny cavern.

They all froze and listened.

“Broadcasting on cycling encrypted frequency Delta. This is a code red recall order to all units in the field. Repeat: a CODE RED recall order to all field units. This is not a drill. This is Santa Claus broadcasting on cycling encrypted frequency Delta.…”

Santa Claus
was Colonel Winter’s code name.

Code red
meant there was an emergency—a big one. Every pilot, every ground unit, every Resister
everywhere
was supposed to get back to the Seed Bank as fast as they could.

The kids looked at each other, none sure what to do about the message.

“A code red means us,” Felix whispered. “We’ve got to get back.” He took a step toward his mother’s voice.

“No way!” Paul maneuvered between him and the radio. “That’s a trick.”

“The colonel doesn’t play tricks,” Madison told him.

“She doesn’t trick her
pilots
,” Felix said, and frowned. “But maybe she doesn’t think we’re her pilots anymore. Maybe she thinks we’re traitors … or we’ve changed.” His gaze unfocused.

“That’s ridiculous.” Madison poked Felix in the ribs to get his attention. “If we changed, if the Ch’zar controlled us, we wouldn’t be listening to any orders.”

Ethan marched to his I.C.E. suit and turned off the radio. He sealed the cockpit.

“I hate to admit it,” Ethan said, “but Paul’s right. It could be a trick.”

Paul seemed irritated that Ethan was agreeing with him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan said. “It just means our mission is more important than ever. So the Resistance needs pilots. We’re here to get them.”

Felix smoothed a hand over his shorn hair. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll do the mission. We’ll get these Sterling kids and get back as quick as possible.”

“No argument with that,” Paul said. He rummaged though his pack, found jeans and a T-shirt, and pulled them on over his flight suit. He shouldered the backpack and walked onto the dry riverbed. “You guys have no idea the trouble we’re marching into.”

Ethan wasn’t sure what bothered him the most: seeing Paul walk off into the moonlit night after that cryptic warning—the urgency he’d heard in Colonel Winter’s voice still echoing in his head—or the fact that they were walking into a Ch’zar prison stronghold with no backup.

He got the feeling they were marching into the absolute wrong place.

  13  

ETHAN’S JEANS AND T-SHIRT FIT LOOSELY
over his flight suit. It felt as if he wore a raincoat
under
his clothes. His boots crunched over gravel in the dry riverbed. In the moonlight the stones looked like bones.

Paul led the way, preferring to walk ahead.

Madison and Felix flanked Ethan.

No one spoke.

It was as if they were all afraid the Ch’zar might hear them.

Which was ridiculous because, of course, they were going to see and hear them coming. Those firefly patrols
had to have spotted them. A hundred interceptor drones could be rocketing toward them right now.

How in the world was this going to work? Who took walks out in the wilderness in the middle of the night?

Then again, maybe it would work.

Over the bank of the dry riverbed, flashing lights and colors painted the night sky under Fiesta City.

If Ethan were in Santa Blanca, everyone would be settling down for dinner and then getting ready for bed. This place seemed to be just waking up.

Thinking of Santa Blanca made Ethan homesick.

Where was his sister Emma?

The Ch’zar had taken her away. She’d seen the battle in Santa Blanca, Resister I.C.E. suits fighting with Ch’zar giant insects. They probably put her in some work camp, if she hadn’t hit puberty.

Puberty was when you had a growth spurt, started dating (which made Ethan uneasy just thinking about it), and pimples showed up on your face in force.

It was also when your brain changed, especially a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. When the prefrontal cortex changed, it became possible for the Ch’zar to mentally control humans. Emma could be part of the Ch’zar right now.

Thinking of
that
made Ethan feel sick.

It was a fate that awaited them all if they couldn’t beat the Ch’zar.

The only exception he knew was his parents. He was pretty sure they’d kept their minds: two independent adults in the middle of the mentally dominated population of Santa Blanca.

They’d hidden that fact from everyone, even from him and Emma.

And when Ethan had discovered the Ch’zar and found out his parents might not be one of them, they vanished and left him a mysterious goodbye note … and a million unanswered questions.

Ethan sighed and kicked a stone.

He couldn’t help Emma or his parents anymore. They were gone. The only thing he could do was help here and now—save the Resisters, fight, and keep his mind his own for as long as possible.

Paul marched up the dry riverbank and stopped.

Ethan, Felix, and Madison clambered up the slope after him. They stopped dead in their tracks.

It looked like a carnival had come to town.

The Ferris wheel spun, and neon flashed on its spokes. There were game booths with baseballs thrown at tin milk cans, coins tossed onto glass plates, and water pistols shot
to fill balloons to the bursting point. There were rides, too: the Tilt-A-Whirl, Spin Out, and rattling roller coasters.

The lights and colors fascinated Ethan.

Apparently this wasn’t a school night, because the kids here weren’t doing their homework. They played the games and rode the rides.

But not like they were supposed to.

No one waited in line for the rides. They pushed and shoved their way to the front. And instead of playing the games by the rules, the kids cheated. Ethan couldn’t believe it. They got way too close to throw for the baseball toss and even stole dimes from the coin toss!

None of the adults running the carnival seemed to care.

Paul kept his head down, let his hair fall into his eyes, and plodded ahead. “Come on. You haven’t seen the half of it,” he muttered.

They followed him around a corner.

Felix halted and whistled low.

Ahead was a street with wall-to-wall ice-cream parlors, pizza places, and candy stores. The smell was intoxicating: cheese and pepperoni and fresh crust, caramels, and melted milk chocolate.

Ethan’s mouth watered.

Madison and Felix drifted closer to the food.

Felix’s stomach grumbled so loudly that Ethan heard it four paces away.

Ethan couldn’t remember how long it’d been since breakfast. The field protein bars in his pack tasted like sawdust (he suspected they
were
part sawdust).

He licked his lips. Maybe just one slice of pizza with extra pepperoni. How long would that take?

Paul stepped in front of them and shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said. “All the stuff here is meant to distract you. Take one bite and the next thing you know, you’re eating all night.”

Madison blinked rapidly as if she were waking from a dream.

Ethan squinted. Inside a pizza joint, the kids listened to music and danced—all while nonstop stuffing their faces with pizza.

Distract
was an understatement.

“Heads up,” Madison whispered. Her body tensed as she nodded down the street.

A gang of kids walked toward them. There were three boys and two girls. Most were older than them. One boy hefted a golf putter over his shoulder. One of the girls smoked a cigarette. Her brown hair had been clipped bowl-cut short.

Ethan recognized their purposeful stride and mean smiles. He’d seen this before on the soccer field, when the opposing team was up five points and they
still
drove toward the goal like it was a tie.

These kids were 100 percent trouble. They meant to crush their enemy.

The biggest boy in the pack looked over Ethan and the others. His gaze settled on Felix, who was still a head taller than him.

“What do we have here?” the kid said. He shifted the golf putter off his shoulder and
thunk
ed it into his hand.

Felix wasn’t impressed. His eyes narrowed.

Ethan was sure Felix could knock this bully out with one punch.

“They’re new kids,” the smoking girl muttered around her cigarette. “Just look at their faces. So clueless.” She blew smoke at Ethan and smiled at him, her black eyes glimmering with interest.

Ugh. The smoke stunk.

Ethan thought they had cured cigarettes decades ago. That must have been another lie told by the Ch’zar.

Madison bent her knees as if about to launch a vicious kick at the girl’s head.

The combat training pounded into Ethan for the last month clicked into place. He recalled three things.

The first thing to remember in a fight: breathe.

He’d tensed up so much in those first practice fights that he’d forgotten to inhale. By the time Ethan had realized it, he was sucking wind.

The second thing to remember in a fight: a good stance.

Ethan shifted to get his feet solid under him. He bent his knees.