Sterling Squadron (12 page)

And the third thing to remember?

Don’t
fight more than one person at a time.

It was really, really hard.

Which is when Ethan noticed the Sterling kids had inched into a half circle around them.

“We’re not new,” Paul told them, and tilted his head to show off his scars. “We just got out late from Dorm H. We were just going to grab a bite.”

“Bite?” The boy with the golf club snapped his teeth at Paul.

The other kids all laughed.

Sweat made Ethan’s balled fists slippery as he braced for combat.

If Felix could drop two or three of them, they’d have a chance. As long as that one kid didn’t start swinging that golf putter around like it was a Neanderthal club.

Ethan’s pulse was a drumroll in his brain. The adrenaline in his blood made it hard to think about anything.

The other kids had them surrounded now.

Ethan went back-to-back with Paul and Felix. Madison scooted in beside him.

One sudden move would start this fight.

Before anyone took the first punch, though, a window on the third story of the billiard hall broke.

A flaming trash can pinwheeled from the window. It hit the ground, crumpled, and sent plumes of burning paper into the air.

“Fire toss contest!” the smoking girl said. Her face brightened. “Let’s play. We can beat up freshmen anytime.”

The boy in charge of the pack looked at the smoldering trash. “Yeah … let’s go burn something.”

He turned and he and his gang strode down the street.

The smoking girl looked over her shoulder at Ethan, winked, and said, “Catch you later.…”

“Too close,” Paul whispered. “This way, before they change their minds.” He ducked into a side street and quickly walked away.

“We would’ve pulverized them,” Madison growled. “I am so going to knock that girl’s head off next time I see her!”

“That’s not why we’re here,” Felix said, clamping one massive hand on Madison’s slender shoulder.

Ethan couldn’t speak. He felt weak from the spent adrenaline. It was all he could do to shamble after Paul, who led them out onto another street with pinball arcades and soda bars. Most windows on the buildings here were busted. There were screams and laughs from inside.

This place was a nightmare.

They jogged up a set of concrete stairs and halted at a large iron gate. A high stone wall topped with barbed wire ran in either direction. On the gate was a polished silver S.

“Welcome to Sterling School for the Gifted,” Paul said with a grimace. “If you thought it was weird and rough in Fiesta City, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  14  

ETHAN, MADISON, AND FELIX FOLLOWED
Paul as he snuck onto the Sterling school grounds, slunk between long shadows cast by oak trees, ran across a bed of daisies, and then broke a window to get into a redbrick building.

Inside, Paul paused. Moonlight spilled through the windows onto a tile floor. There were canvas bins on wheels.

“Laundry room,” Paul whispered. He rummaged through a bin and handed them black sweats. “These are what everyone wears here.”

Ethan changed out of his jeans and T-shirt and shucked on the sweats over his flight suit.

The sweats were stinky, but the fleece was comfortable and good camouflage at night.

Madison peered out the window. “Adults in the hall,” she hissed. “Three with flashlights.”

“All students are supposed to be in Fiesta City,” Paul said. “We better lie low or we’ll stick out.”

They waited for the patrol of adults to pass, and then Paul led them across a grassy field. Sprinklers turned on with a
shunka-shunka-shunka
, and they sprinted ahead of the streams of water, almost getting soaked.

This place reminded Ethan of Northside Elementary back in Santa Blanca: P.E. fields, a building that had to be a cafeteria, based on the burned hamburger smell wafting from the place, classrooms with one wide wall of windows, covered walkways, and ivy on the brick walls. It seemed so normal, apart from the insane-asylum carnival that was Fiesta City and apart from the radioactive desert surrounding the place. Yeah,
totally
normal.

Paul halted at a metal door. “Dormitories,” he said, and jimmied the lock. They slipped inside. Paul didn’t turn on the lights.

As Ethan’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the room had two dozen empty cots. He sat on one that smelled
of dust and didn’t have a pillow or a blanket. “So we just wait here?”

It felt like the wrong thing to do. Ethan’s instincts told him this was a dangerous place.

Felix flopped onto the stripped cot next to him and stretched. “Why not wait … just for a minute.”

Madison sat, too, and yawned.

Ethan closed his eyes. The funny thing was, despite the excitement, the critical mission, the only thing he could think of was that he could really use a five-minute catnap.

He should be wide awake—thinking, searching, figuring out a way to find Sterling kids to recruit.

Instead, completely against his wishes, his head hit the mattress.

Alarm bells trilled and Ethan almost jumped out of his skin. His heart hammered in his chest as he sat up, fumbling through layers of panic to wakefulness.

Sunlight spilled in through the windows.

Ethan had fallen asleep? How’d he let
that
happen?

Madison, Paul, and Felix sat up in nearby cots.

There were twenty other kids in this room. They pulled pillows over their heads; some snored straight through the alarm. One boy tossed a book at the bell mounted on the wall and knocked it off.

A door slammed open and ten adults marched into the room. They wore black sweats like the rest of the kids but had a silver
S
embroidered on the chest.

“Get up!” the adults shouted. “Class in five minutes! Slackers, eat now or never!”

Ethan leaped to his feet.

One adult tossed a brown bag at Ethan, his friends, and the other kids who managed to get up. Inside the bag was an apple, a bacon-and-egg sandwich, and a carton of milk.

Most of the kids, though, kept sleeping.

The adults pulled out wooden batons. They smacked the sleeping kids, yanked off their blankets, and kicked them out of their cots.

“Late for class,” one of the adults yelled, “and you run a
hundred
laps!”

Ethan’s head cleared a little and he tasted a metal tang.

Knockout gas. He’d tasted the stuff before in the school bus that took him from Santa Blanca. The Ch’zar had tried to drug him into a deep sleep. That gas must be used to knock out the students here, which made sense, considering how insanely rowdy those kids in Fiesta City had been.

Ethan glanced at Felix.

Felix took a huge bite of his apple and nodded back, indicating they play along: they had to pretend to be Sterling students for now.

Great.

The last of the Sterling kids got up, complaining and grumbling. Ethan and his team marched into the hall and passed other kids filing out of dozens of other dormitories.

They got pushed farther down the hall, then outside into a covered walkway. That led into another building, where they were shoved into a classroom.

The room was full of blackboards and desks and tables with miniature three-dimensional landscapes on them. They reminded Ethan of a model train setup—only these landscapes had gridlines. In the corners were miniature soldiers with muskets and swords, tiny cannons, and men mounted on horseback.

On the blackboard were the words:

Scrawled underneath were rules explaining how the soldiers moved, attacked, and defended, and who won when they fought.

Ethan was intrigued. This didn’t look so bad, almost like a normal classroom. He might even learn something here.

“It’s just a game?” Madison asked, and she scratched her head under her baseball cap.

“Keep your caps on,” Paul whispered. “If the teachers see your faces, they may recognize you—and we’ll be cooked.”

Ethan pulled his cap down so low he could barely see past the brim.

Every adult here was part of the Ch’zar collective hive mind. They’d know Ethan Blackwood—the kid who’d blown up the Geo Transit Tunnel, fought the Battle of Northside Elementary, and then escaped their perfect neighborhood to join the Resisters.

A teacher with black-rimmed glasses entered and announced, “Pair off and play, kids.”

One girl challenged Felix to a match. Felix looked at his friends, shrugged, and set up the pieces on a table.

“Don’t be such a dork.” Paul shouldered past Ethan. “Blend in, Blackwood.”

Paul nodded at Madison and they grabbed a table.

Ethan shuffled into the corner, far from the gaze of that teacher. There was a boy there who had more muscles
on one arm than Ethan had in his entire body. One front tooth was chipped.

“I’ll take red,” the muscle-bound boy told him with a growl. “You take the green pieces.”

Ethan read the rules on the blackboard. He saw how a defense and an offense could be built, taking advantage of the units’ abilities and overlapping ranges of weapons.

Kid stuff.

“Sure,” Ethan told the boy. “Whatever.”

His opponent moved first into the middle of the board.

Ethan studied the terrain. You didn’t worry about the ground when you flew an I.C.E. suit or played on a soccer field. In this game, though, he somehow knew it was vital.

He sent his cavalry to engage the other boy’s frontline soldiers and lured them back.

His opponent chased but struggled up a hillside just to get pounded to smithereens by Ethan’s cannons. Ethan moved his infantry to mop up the survivors.

In three minutes he’d cleared the board. Ethan hadn’t lost a single piece.

“You … you can’t do that,” the other boy stammered, and smashed his fist on the table, sending the pieces flying.

A few students came over, interested in the massacre of a game.

One boy with dark skin, ice-blue eyes, and a look of intense concentration pushed the muscled kid away. “Don’t worry, Kris,” he said. “I’ll play him next.”

The big kid looked relieved. “This’ll be good,” he said with a chuckle.

Ethan had a bad feeling about this—especially when
more
kids gathered around the table to watch. One was the girl from last night, the one with the bobbed hair, the one in the gang who’d threatened them. Today she chewed gum and watched intently as Ethan set up his pieces.

What if the teacher noticed him?

Ethan pulled his cap down even tighter and focused on the game, hoping he could somehow become invisible.

  15