Sterling Squadron (17 page)

ETHAN, FELIX, MADISON, AND PAUL STOOD
shoulder to shoulder and raised their fists to fight.

This was crazy.
One
weaponized athletic suit would be more than a match for four kids.

Two would wipe the floor with them.

The Ward Zero kids huddled behind them, clutching one another, terrified. Even Emma.

Ethan didn’t blame her.

It was the only
smart
thing to do.

He looked around for a club, a weapon,
anything
to fight with—and found one.

“The gate,” Ethan whispered to his friends.

“It’s electrified,” Felix said, and then his face lit up as he caught on. “Oh … it’s electrified.”

Madison glanced at the sliding gate and then to the two suits lumbering toward them. “I’ll do it,” she whispered.

Paul turned to the Ward Zero kids. “Stand very still,” he warned them.

The two suits lumbered closer, steps shaking the ground, lances crackling, and net cannons swiveling to cover the defending Resisters.

“COME PEACEFULLY,” one teacher in a suit boomed over a loudspeaker. “YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”

“We give up!” Ethan raised his hands. “Just, please, don’t hurt us.”

He stayed right where he was and let the two suits pound toward him.

The first suit stepped into the gap where the gate had been rolled aside.

Madison leaped forward. She grabbed the electrified gate with gloved hands and slammed it into the athletic suit’s steel frame.

A gazillion volts of electricity cracked, buzzed, and shot through the suit. The adult inside the cockpit danced and passed out.

The lights in the hospital and on the fence went dark.

The electrified athletic suit teetered and fell toward them, completely short-circuited and inert.

The second suit, though, pushed through the gate, over its fallen comrade, and charged them.

Ethan was scared out of his mind, but he’d trained for two years in athletic suits on his school’s soccer team, the Grizzlies. He knew the suits were powered by hydraulic lines and could lift tons, but those lines were just rubber hoses. They were always failing or popping off. It was the suits’ one weakness.

“The hydraulics!” Ethan screamed. “Go for the tubes!”

The teacher shot a net at Paul and Felix.

They dodged and the net fell on the Ward Zero kids, who went down hopelessly tangled.

The teacher thrust his lance at Ethan.

Ethan sidestepped, but it struck so close, the hair on his arms rose toward the electrified steel and he smelled ozone.

Felix, his face a mask of deadly concentration, darted inside the monster’s reach and grabbed a fistful of rubber lines, braced with one leg, and pulled with all his might.

The suit swatted him aside.

Felix went flying through the air—clutching three black tubes.

Red hydraulic fluid geysered from the mechanical monster.

It collapsed with a clatter.

Paul moved in, snarling, and kicked the teacher in the cockpit, knocking him out cold.

Ethan couldn’t believe it. They’d survived?

Carl, Lee, and Emma untangled themselves from the net. They were shaken but still managed to clap each other on the back and looked as ready to fight as any other Resister.

Madison, Paul, even Felix were okay, although as Felix tried to stand, he couldn’t: one of his legs bent at a weird angle.

Ethan’s joy faded as he saw blood soak through the thigh of Felix’s flight suit.

Everyone was suddenly still and quiet as they saw, too.

“It’s broken,” Felix told them as calmly as if stating he’d just untied a shoelace.

“We’ll splint it,” Madison said, and cast about for a length of wood or metal to brace his leg.

Felix met Ethan’s eyes and he shook his head.

Ethan understood how bad the situation was. A kid limping around with a bleeding broken leg, even at Sterling, was bound to attract attention. It would slow them all down, too.

But Ethan wouldn’t leave Felix behind.

What about the other kids? Emma? Who would get them out if he stayed here?

Ethan shook his head back at Felix.

It didn’t matter. He wasn’t leaving his friend behind, no matter what. Felix hadn’t left
him
behind in Santa Blanca. If he had, Ethan would be part of the Ch’zar right now.

Paul picked up a lance from a fallen athletic suit and handed it to Felix. It was huge but somehow looked right in Felix’s hand, as if he were a modern medieval knight.

Another athletic suit tromped around the corner of the hospital. It spotted them. It stood there, and five more suits of armor joined it. They moved together, toward Ethan and the others, spreading out so they couldn’t slip back into the hospital.

“I’ve got this,” Felix said. Using the lance as a crutch, he hobbled between the gate and the approaching suits.

“No way!” Ethan and Madison said together.

“Don’t you understand?” Paul said, glancing at the athletic suits and back to them. “There’s no other choice.”

“You’ve got to get to our suits,” Felix said. “You’ve got to save your sister, Ethan.”

Ethan crossed his arms over the chest. He absolutely would not do it.

Madison stood next to him and crossed her arms in the same manner.

Before either could say anything, though, Felix took a deep breath and told them, “I’m still the highest-ranking Resister on this mission. Those are orders.”

The six athletic suits had closed half the distance between the hospital and the gate.

Emma looked like she’d follow her brother to the ends of the earth … but she also glanced at the incoming suits and grew pale. “Ethan?” she whispered. “What are we going to do?”

Ethan felt like he was dying inside.

Tactically and strategically, Felix was right. But this wasn’t like a board game in some class. Felix wasn’t a piece to be sacrificed so they could lose the battle but win the war.

All their lives were at stake, though.

Maybe even the continued existence of the Resistance.

Was
that
worth Felix’s life?

No.

And … yes.

Ethan set a hand on Felix’s shoulder. “We’ll come back for you, Felix. I promise.”

“I know you will,” Felix said with a smile.

Something in his honest smile, though, was cold, hard, and sad.

Madison stared at them. “You can’t be serious.…”

Ethan turned to her, the Ward Zero kids, and Paul. He would have given anything to stay and fight, but he couldn’t do that. If he did, the Ch’zar won.

“Move it,” he told them, mimicking Felix’s got-a-mission-to-do tone. “You heard his orders.”

He gave Madison a gentle shove.

She moved, but sluggishly, then seemed to make up her mind, snapped out of it, and helped Lee, Carl, and Emma.

They ran for the tunnel.

Ethan paused and looked back.

Felix raised his lance and roared a battle cry. The mechanical athletic suits closed on him.

More than anything, Ethan wanted to stay and fight, to die if he had to with his friend … but instead, he followed Felix’s last order: he ran.

  22  

ETHAN MARCHED DOWN THE WALKWAYS OF
the Sterling campus. It was a beautiful afternoon. Birds twittered and the air smelled of fresh-cut grass.

He felt like a rotten coward and a quitter for leaving Felix to fight a hopeless battle.

But what choice did he have?

Ethan suddenly got why Colonel Winter was so mean all the time. He bet she had to make these life-and-death, every-option-was-bad type of choices all the time.

Felix wouldn’t last long against those athletic suits.
Especially with a broken leg. He’d go down fighting, though, until they netted and stunned him.

And then …?

The Ch’zar wouldn’t kill him. They’d interrogate Felix. He’d resist. And then they’d—

Madison jabbed him in the ribs.

“We need your brain on this mission.” Her gaze fixed straight ahead, but Ethan saw tears gleaming in her eyes. “We have to get back to our suits.”

“Right,” Ethan said.

That would be the only way they’d get out alive. That was their
only
chance to rescue Felix.

So he kept moving.

Ethan inhaled, getting a whiff of everyone in his group. They stank.

They’d just come from Sterling’s laundry. They’d gotten Carl, Lee, and Emma sets of smelly black sweats like everyone else. Ethan had found a set of teachers’ sweats, though, and changed into those. It was the same basic black but had a silver
S
embroidered over the heart. That might come in handy.

They moved quickly and quietly as Paul led them toward the front gate. They kept to the shadows. Classes would still be in session. There were only a few kids outside now, obviously cutting class.

The plan was to blend with the kids after the last class and slip into Fiesta City.

His mind flashed back to Felix, standing there with that stupid lance, about to get squished by six robotic opponents.

He
couldn’t
think of him. He had to keep sharp, focused.

Ethan glanced at his sister. He needed her strength. They’d always gotten into—and out of—trouble together.

Her brown eyes met his.

She’d changed. She looked as if she’d aged a few years in the last few weeks. The easy smile that had always seemed to be on her lips was gone, replaced with lines of worry. Who wouldn’t be changed after all she’d been through? He wondered what he looked like to her now.

Emma’s eyes focused past Ethan … and widened with terror.

He followed her gaze.

Two walkways over, an athletic suit marched parallel alongside them.

Ethan turned to Madison to warn her but saw three
more
suits marching with them one sidewalk away on the other side, mirroring their progress.

That was no coincidence.

Ethan had to do something. They needed a distraction so they could get away from those mechanical monsters.

On the brick wall ahead was a fire alarm. He walked faster, straight for it.

“Don’t!” Paul whispered.

Ethan wrenched the alarm’s lever down.

Cameras on the walls nearby flashed, capturing Ethan’s profile on two sides.

Ethan blinked, recovering his sight, and then figured out what’d just happened.

Of course. Sterling would have a way to see whoever triggered the alarm. In a school full of delinquent kids, it’d be too tempting a target otherwise.

Class bells rang in short, shrill bursts.

Kids poured out of the classrooms, grinning and whooping it up, happy to be released early. Not one of them took the fire alarm seriously.

Over the campus loudspeakers, a voice boomed, “ALL STUDENTS WALK TO THEIR DESIGNATED EMERGENCY ASSEMBLY AREAS.”

The Sterling kids ignored this, so teachers came out and herded them along.

Ethan and his crew got pushed along in the tide of jostling students.

Paul shoved his way to Ethan and then gave Ethan a
shove for good measure. “Great,” he muttered. “Those cameras feed into the front office. Every teacher just got a look at
your
face. They know where we are!”

Ethan spied teachers from every direction now moving toward them,
against
the flow of students. Athletic suits tromped onto the covered sidewalks, too. They slammed aside any students who happened to be in their way.

This was it.

The Ch’zar had them. They were trapped. It was his fault, too.

Ethan felt like he was in a whirlpool, getting pulled deeper, about to drown.

One kid in the crowd waved at him.

He should have ignored her, thought of a scheme to get them out of this, or heroically sacrificed himself for the others like Felix had done, but it was that
crazy
girl, the one in the gang who’d almost beat them up in Fiesta City, and the same one who’d then rescued him on the P.E. field.

She flicked her fingers through her short hair, popped bubble gum, and grinned at him.

If
anyone
deserved to be in a mental hospital like Ward Zero, it was her.