Sterling Squadron (15 page)

“I had friends graduate, too,” he said consolingly.

“Not like this,” Paul said. “The way they graduate people
here
 … it’s why they select the aggressive ones. Why they weed out the kids with independent streaks.” Paul looked at Ethan, and Felix, and then Madison, unable to say more.

A chill shuddered down Madison’s back and she took a step back.

“Don’t you get it?” Paul managed to say in a strangled whisper. “The most aggressive and independent kids don’t
just
get absorbed into the hive mind. They stick them into I.C.E. suits.”

Ethan had heard Paul perfectly, but his words didn’t make sense and felt like they bounced and tumbled through his brain. “I.C.E. suits?” he echoed.

“That’s not possible …,” Madison said.

“We
saw
it,” Paul said. “The giant bugs … a bunch of
kids going willingly inside … technicians riveting them into the suit.
Permanently
. They were just like us. Only a little older.” His eyes narrowed and blinked and brimmed with tears.

“That’s who we’ve been fighting all this time,” Paul whispered. “Kids like us. Maybe not in every Ch’zar I.C.E. suit, but there are smart ones, leaders in a swarm. Those are different than the others … because they’re piloted.”

Ethan got it. In the simulations, he’d seen how some enemy units were special.

The other wasps, the locusts, the beetles he’d fought and killed in Santa Blanca, even those black widow spiders that had tried to murder Paul—they could’ve had
humans
inside them.

He felt sick. He sucked in a deep breath, but that didn’t help.

Human kids were trying to kill them—sure, they were all mind-controlled, but they were human nonetheless.

He wanted to tell Paul he was a liar.

But one more thing about it made some sense.

Dr. Irving said the Resistance had borrowed the I.C.E. technology from the Ch’zar. The fighting suit cockpits, the controls, all that stuff had
already
been engineered by the aliens … because they had pilots inside them, too.

It changed everything.

How could Ethan fight them knowing that inside the Ch’zar armor might be his old friends—even his sister Emma?

“They caught us,” Paul went on. “We’d seen the truth. We didn’t have a clue
what
we’d actually seen, but they couldn’t put us back with the rest of the Sterling kids. So they have this place here, Ward Zero, where they isolate kids who’ve seen things. They tell everyone else that they’re crazy.”

“That’s when you escaped?” Felix asked.

“I ran. Got out of here,” Paul said. “I would’ve rather died in the desert than stay. But the colonel found me.…” Paul exhaled and his attention snapped back to the computer.

On-screen flashed new student records, each with a big red
WARD ZERO PATIENT
.

Paul tabbed through the files.

“My friends aren’t here,” he whispered. “I’m too late.” Paul pounded the desk with his fist.

Ethan wanted to tell Paul he was sorry, that he knew what it felt like to lose someone you cared about to the Ch’zar.

Something more important, something
impossible
, caught his eye, though.

“Go back! Back!” Ethan told him.

Paul called up the last file.

On the computer was the name of a Ward Zero patient that made Ethan’s heart pound with joy, hope, and then dread:

BLACKWOOD, EMMA KATHERINE
.

  19  

ETHAN WENT OUT THE WINDOW OF THE PRINCIPAL’S
office.

There was no time to come up with an airtight plan. Ethan’s sister was here.

He’d thought he’d lost her forever.

Emma had always gotten Ethan into trouble, and they’d always argued, but she was also the only one who’d stuck by him when the other neighborhood kids teased him about coming from a small family.

Emma was a year older than Ethan. That meant she
could hit puberty at
any time
. She could get absorbed into the Collective today!

If there was any chance she was still human, he had to get her out of here.

One more reason to hurry: Even if Principal Kendell hadn’t recognized Ethan’s face, someone was bound to check on her soon. Then every adult, every enemy I.C.E. fighting suit circling Fiesta City would come for them.

Ethan dropped from the window ledge to the ground. He crouched behind a juniper hedge.

Two adults in cybernetic athletic suits patrolled the freshly cut lawn between the administration building and the dormitories. The heavy steel frames made the ground tremble as they passed.

Madison landed next to Ethan.

Felix dropped with a thud after her. He crouched on all fours behind the hedge.

Paul eased out the window next and slid it shut behind him.

“Those guards are still patrolling,” Felix whispered, “not searching for us or running for the office. That means they still don’t know anything. So we just walk out of here—pretend we’re four kids late for class.”

“Then we better hurry,” Ethan said, “because
that
won’t last long.”

He gathered his courage and strode onto the lawn, walking past one of the hulking athletic suits. Its shoulder-mounted cannon looked big enough to take on an I.C.E. suit.

Ethan’s heart hammered in his chest. It took all his willpower
not
to run.

The adults in six hundred pounds of hydraulics, armor plate, and weapons clanked by, eyeing Ethan suspiciously but otherwise trudging along in a straight line.

Madison, Felix, and Paul caught up.

“You
are
crazy,” Paul said with a snort. “I’m beginning to like that about you.” He darted down a walkway. “This way.” He broke into a trot, and then a full sprint.

Paul led them to a part of the school that had chain-link fences topped with razor wire. There were signs on the fence showing stick figures zapped by lightning. There were no students or teachers anywhere in sight.

Ethan tensed, waiting for alarms.

The teachers, though, could communicate silently. Telepathically. They could signal each other to release sleep gas into the corridors.

Ethan and his team could just wake up, captured … or not wake up at all.

Paul skidded to a halt before a rusty gate with a padlock. It was plastered with more electrocution warnings and
NO TRESPASSING
signs.

Madison dug into her sweats, grabbed the flight suit gloves tucked under her belt, and snapped them on. From a tiny pocket on her flight suit, she took out a tool kit and pulled out two metal picks.

“Don’t touch it,” Ethan told her. “It’s electrif—”

She knelt and picked the padlock.

“Her gloves are insulated,” Felix told Ethan. “This isn’t the first time we’ve broken into a place the Ch’zar have locked up.”

The padlock clicked open. Madison cracked a wry, crooked smile and slipped through the gate.

She came back a second later and whispered, “Coast is clear.”

Beyond was a small hospital made of white brick. A sign on the dead lawn surrounding it read:

Ethan scoffed. More lies.

Like the kids inside ever got visitors … except when the Ch’zar came for them.

“There’s a skylight,” Paul said. “That’s how I busted out the first time. We can get in that way, too, and avoid the staff.”

They snuck around back.

Madison pointed to a gutter pipe running along the wall. She clambered up the pipe and onto the roof like a spider monkey.

Paul followed with a practiced ease.

Ethan went next, grunting with effort, and for one insane moment, he wished he’d had
more
physical training in boot camp.

Felix came up last, slow but sure.

The pipe groaned and pulled away from the wall. He froze.

After a heart-pounding second, though, the pipe settled, and Felix inched up the rest of the way.

They all sighed.

Paul and Ethan then jimmied open the skylight. They all dropped down, snuck along a green-tiled hallway with flickering fluorescent lights, and came to a corridor that had doors numbered 1 through 20.

Paul traced the number 3 on one door.

“This was my friend Jeff’s room,” he said, and bit his lip. “I should have taken him with me. I should have taken
them all. I was so scared. Once I found a way out through that skylight, I just ran for it.”

Ethan knew how Paul had felt.

It’d been like that the first time he’d seen the Ch’zar’s giant insects. He’d just wanted to bolt like a scared animal.

Paul opened the door.

The room had two cots, linens stacked neatly on their ends. It was empty.

Paul’s shoulders slumped.

The door to the adjacent room opened. A boy younger than Ethan came out in a blue hospital gown and slippers. He looked half asleep. “Are you new?” he asked them.

“There was a kid who used to be in this room,” Paul said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Where is he?”

The other boy shook his head. “Jeff, yeah, I remember. They took him away.…”

Paul swallowed hard. His jaw clenched with rage.

“I’m sorry,” Ethan whispered to Paul. “We got a mission to do, though. We can still save the rest of them.”

Paul looked at Ethan like he’d spoken in a foreign language; then he glanced down the hall.

“Are there others here?” Paul asked the kid in the hospital gown.

The boy nodded, sensing now that something was
very different about them. He went from door to door, knocking.

An older girl stepped from room 11. She was tall and athletic, and had cinched her hospital gown about her waist with string to make it look more like a white dress. Her long black hair was intricately braided, and freckles splashed over her golden skin.

Ethan blinked, not quite believing what he saw.

“Emma?” he cried.

She blinked, too. She stared at Ethan—then grinned and ran and crashed into him, hugging him so hard he could barely breathe.

He hugged her back.

She was solid, not just his imagination.

Emma was the only part of his old life left in the entire world. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed that. He’d never known how much he cared for his sister until he’d lost her … and then got her back—his teasing, practical-joking, punching-him-in-the-arm older sister. For a second he felt like a little kid again, like his older sister was going to take care of him like she always had.

“I thought you were gone for good,” Ethan whispered. “Last time I saw you, they were dragging you onto that zeppelin.”

Emma pushed him away. Her smile faded.

“You
were
there.” She wiped away tears of joy, and her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Those bugs. You’re one of them!”

“It’s not like that.” Ethan held up his hands. “I mean, yes, I was in an Infiltrator wasp, but”—he waved his hands around the room—“I’m not part of any of
this
.”

Ethan had started a battle that had raged through Northside Elementary in an attempt to rescue Emma. Resisters and Ch’zar had fought each other in their I.C.E. suits—giant monsters that had destroyed the entire school.

Emma had spotted him, he remembered. Somehow she’d recognized something familiar about his wasp.

Ethan had no idea
how
she’d known it was him inside, though.

A half-dozen other kids in pajamas emerged from their rooms. They all had dull, hopeless expressions—but they lit up with curiosity as they took in Ethan and the others.

“Maybe some of you have seen the truth—the giant bugs,” Ethan told them. “We’re part of a resistance fighting them with our own type of insects. We have to. The adults can’t help us. They’re all mind-controlled by the Ch’zar.”

Everyone looked confused.

Ethan realized how crazy he must sound.

“Ch’zar?” Emma asked, her eyes darting from Ethan to his friends. She took a step away from them.

Felix stepped up. “The Ch’zar are aliens,” he told her. “They came to Earth fifty years ago and conquered the world with their mind-control powers, but it only works on adults.”