The Always War (11 page)

“The enemy’s ways are not our ways,” Gideon said, and once again it sounded like he was quoting.

Dek reached over and pulled Tessa’s hands back.

“It’s really better not to touch anything you don’t have to touch,” Dek said. “I mean, I’m not sure
why
there’d be land mines here, but still …”

“Land mines!” Tessa exclaimed, jumping back. She over-reacted, and teetered, almost falling down flat. “You—you think it’s possible that there might be land mines here, but you still … you just …”

She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

Dek shrugged, her ragged, oversized shirt shifting on her scrawny shoulders.

“Well, I have been trying to make sure I step in his footsteps,” she said, pointing to Gideon. “It’s safer that way.”

Gideon turned around. He seemed to be trying to look stoic and brave, but Tessa guessed that he hadn’t thought of the possibility of land mines either. When you were used to flying—and not even sitting in the plane—it wasn’t something you ever had to think about.

But Gideon just said, “Let’s keep moving, all right? The faster we go, the less time we have to spend here, and the less chance someone’s going to see us.”

He faced forward again and took another step. And another. And another.

Though she had to stretch her legs a ridiculous distance, Dek jumped behind him, landing each time on the same patch of crushed grass Gideon had just left.

She turned around to look at Tessa, who hadn’t moved since she’d heard the words “land mines.”

“See?” Dek said. “If he doesn’t blow up when he steps in that space, we won’t blow up either.”

Tessa made herself take a step forward. She stopped again.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

Dek and Gideon both looked at her.

“
Fair
?” Dek repeated. “You flew into enemy territory looking for things to be fair?”

All’s fair in love and war,
Tessa thought, remembering something she’d read a long time ago. She’d been a little kid and confused; she’d thought that the saying meant that love and war really did make everything fair.

But was that really the issue?

Tessa pushed the thought aside.

“No,” she said. “I mean, it’s not
right.
” Both of the others were staring at her, dumbstruck, but she bumbled on. “We shouldn’t just automatically assume that Gideon should be the one in the lead, the one at risk. We should take turns.”

“Hey,” Dek said. “He’s the one who got us into this whole mess. He’s the one that flew us into a war zone.”

“No,” Tessa said again, stubbornly shaking her head. “We each got ourselves into our own mess. I followed him. You stowed away on his plane. We’re both responsible for being here too.”

These were all such new thoughts for Tessa that it was
amazing she could find the words to explain. There was something about standing in this vast field of grass, something about seeing the wind blow each individual stalk, something about feeling the constant danger—all of that made Tessa see everything differently than she ever had back in Waterford City.

“Tessa,” Gideon said gently. “It’s all right. I’m military. I was trained for this.”

“No,” Tessa said. “You weren’t. I’m sorry, but all you were ever trained for was to sit at a desk and kill people hundreds of miles away by remote.”

Gideon stared at her. Tessa wasn’t sure what he saw in her face. Did he see mockery and blame? Did he think she was taunting him as a “fake flyboy” even more cruelly than Dek had? Or did he think she was forgiving him for not being the hero she’d longed to idolize?

Tessa wasn’t sure what showed in her face, because she wasn’t sure which thing she believed—or which she believed most strongly. All she knew was that she couldn’t walk the entire way across the field with Gideon taking all the risk.

“Okay,” Dek said. “It’s official. You’ve both got martyr complexes. You two want to take turns leading the way, fine. But let’s
keep moving.
You can trade off every twenty paces. And, here.” She scooped up a handful of gravel and dropped it into Tessa’s hands. “Whoever’s in the lead, you test the route you’re going to take by throwing rocks at it first.”

Tessa expected Gideon to protest—either to refuse to let Tessa ever take the lead, or to insist to Dek that she take an equal turn at the front too. But Gideon just squinted at Tessa
for a long moment, as if seeing her for the first time. Then he pointed off into the distance.

“That’s where we’re headed,” he said.

Tessa stood on her tiptoes, making herself nearly as tall as Gideon. Now she could see past the rippling grass, to a structure that barely topped the horizon. It could have been an excessively tall tree, an odd sight in the midst of all the grass.

Or—it could have been something man-made.

“I think that’s an old air-control tower,” Gideon said. “I saw it on our way down. It looks abandoned, don’t you think? We get up there, we’ll be able to see for miles.”

Tessa could tell he was being very careful not to add a depressing corollary:
Or, if there’s someone up there, they’re going to be able to see us a long, long time before we see them.

It was slow going. Every few steps the person in the lead had to throw out a handful of gravel, walk forward, then scoop up another handful to throw. It amazed Tessa that there was always more gravel around to throw. This seemed man-made too, or at least of human design. Nothing in nature would dump tons of gravel in a field of grass, would it?

Once they got close enough to the tower to see the windows at the top, they slowed down even more, stopping every few steps to watch for movement, to listen for the first hint of any shouted commands. Gideon began walking with his hands high in the air, back in the pose of a surrendering soldier. He walked that way for so long that Tessa was certain his arms must have gone numb, but he didn’t complain.

While Gideon was busy constantly surrendering, Tessa
took over the job of throwing out the handfuls of gravel to test the route ahead for him.

Tessa remembered the question Dek had asked her back on the plane, as soon as Gideon was out of earshot:
He your boyfriend?
She remembered the way Gideon’s mother had looked at her, as Tessa had walked into Gideon’s bedroom. She remembered the taunt nasty Cordina Kurdle from school had flung at her back at the auditorium the day of the ruined award ceremony:
If you and the hero are so
close,
why aren’t you running after him?

All that had made Tessa feel a little bit sleazy. She had run after Gideon. She had chased after him all the way into enemy territory. In her wildest dreams she might have hoped for a hug or a kiss from the glowing hero.

She never could have imagined how intimate she could feel, not even touching him but walking together in silence through a field of grass, throwing rocks out in front of him, trying to keep him alive.

Was it because I spoke up, and volunteered to risk my life too? Did that make us true partners?

Something moved at the top of the tower. In a flash Dek had her arm reared back and began throwing rocks toward the dark windows.

“Stop! Stop!” Gideon begged. “It doesn’t work for me to surrender if you’re launching projectiles at them! They’ll retaliate!”

A flurry of wings flapped out the tower windows.

“Guys, look! Stop arguing! Stop throwing things! It’s only birds!” Tessa cried, pulling back on Dek’s arm.

Dek dropped the rest of her handful of gravel and wiped her hand across her sweaty forehead, leaving a trail of dirt.

“Yeah, and we wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t flushed them out,” she bragged.

Tessa looked at Dek carefully. Dek had been the cautious one before. Why was she taking risks now?

“You already knew it was just birds, didn’t you?” Tessa asked. “How were you so sure?”

Dek shrugged.

“Educated guess,” she said. “Look at all the bird droppings coming down from those windows. I bet they’re even thicker inside. Nobody’s going to be hanging out in the midst of all that. Or—if they are—it’s not going to be somebody who’d know or respect the rules about how to treat a surrendering enemy soldier. So I
had
to go on the offensive.”

Tessa squinted up toward the top of the tower. Now that Dek had pointed it out, Tessa noticed the streaks of white and gray and brown running down from the windows. And Tessa could see now that all the windows were broken. Only a few jagged shards of glass remained in place, throwing off reflected light from the sun.

She looked to Gideon, wondering what brilliant deductions he’d figured out, staring at the tower.

“Still,” Gideon said stubbornly. He wasn’t looking at the tower. He was glaring at Dek. “Still. We have to make it look like we’ve come in peace.”

“But we haven’t,” Dek said. “We can’t. Not when our whole country’s at war.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. They
walked on, each step tense and fearful. It was a relief finally to reach the base of the tower, out of sight of the dark windows overhead. Tessa saw that a metal door hung open, rusted half off its hinges, revealing a flight of stairs inside.

“So we’re going to be really, really quiet climbing up there?” Tessa whispered. “Just in case?”

“Won’t work,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “We don’t have any weapons with us. If someone up there does …” He leaned his head into the stairwell, tilted it upward and shouted, “We surrender! We surrender!”

The words echoed back at him,
-ender … –ender … –ender …
But no other voice replied.

Gideon pulled his head back out into the sunlight.

“You two want to wait here while I go up?” he asked.

Yes,
Tessa thought. But somehow it seemed like it would be more frightening to stand around at the bottom of the tower, waiting.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

She turned toward Dek, expecting the other girl to say,
Okay! Let me know what you find up there!
But Dek was already headed for the stairs.

“I’m in,” she said.

Why?
Tessa wondered.
Why isn’t she letting Gideon and me take all the risk, like she did before?

Tessa noticed the stiff way Dek held her shoulders, the way she clenched her jaw as she walked.

Oh,
Tessa thought.
Dek doesn’t trust us. She isn’t sure we’d tell her the truth about what we’d see.

All three of them began climbing the stairs together. Tessa
guessed that Dek wasn’t worried about any land mines being left here, because she wasn’t making any effort to walk behind the other two.

Birds fluttered around them, darting for the open door.

Oh, yeah,
Tessa thought.
If there were any explosives around here, the birds would have set them off already.

She was proud of herself for figuring this out. She turned and looked behind her, and realized that she, Dek, and Gideon were leaving footprints in the thick layer of bird droppings.

And that’s another reason for Dek to be convinced there’s no one above us in this tower. Anyone else would have left footprints too.

This helped Tessa relax a little climbing the stairs. But it still wasn’t a pleasant experience. The bird droppings covered the stair railings too, so Tessa didn’t want to hold on, even in spots where the concrete of the stairs had crumbled away. The farther they climbed, the darker it got, since there were no windows actually in the stairwell. Two flights up, Gideon pulled a flashlight out of somewhere—and muttered, almost apologetically, “Standard military issue.” That helped a little. The three of them just had to cluster together, staying near the light.

Finally, panting and sweating, they reached the end of the stairs. Another door sagged from its hinges here, more rust than anything else, and Gideon shoved gingerly past it, into a wide open room.

“We surrender?” he said softly, but this was clearly pointless. The room held nothing but broken glass and twisted metal and the thickest layer of bird droppings Tessa had ever seen. With a complaining cry, one last crow swooped out the broken window.

Tessa startled at the noise, then bent over, her hands on her knees, and tried to catch her breath.

“What … a relief,” she murmured, her heart still pumping hard, but only from the exertion and the surprise of the crow. “We’re safe after all.”

Gideon didn’t pause even to take a breath. He strode directly to the window. He stared out it, horror spreading across his face.

“No, no, no!” he screamed. He pounded his fist against the concrete wall. “There can’t be this many lies!”

Tessa rushed over to see what he was screaming about.

The field of grass lay peacefully before them. Off in the distance she thought she could make out the round hump of the top of their airplane, but it looked totally undisturbed. Far beyond that there were woods, and, even beyond that, a glimmer of water.

Tessa saw nothing that was the least bit upsetting.

“What’s your problem?” Dek asked, in the exasperated tone that people used with tantrum-throwing toddlers.

“It’s all wrong!” Gideon exclaimed, shaking his arms for emphasis—his hands-in-the-air surrender pose transformed from showing meekness to signaling fury. “Everything in sight! I
know
where we are! This should be the main air-traffic control tower for the largest military air base in Shargo. Out
there”—he gestured wildly toward the field of grass—“there should be dozens and dozens of runways. One huge square of concrete after another. And over there”—he pointed at the woods—“that should be on-base housing for hundreds of pilots. And beyond that”—he gestured more broadly, indicating a farther distance—“we should be able to see skyscrapers. Skyscrapers! Do either of you see any skyscrapers?”

“No, but … don’t you think that means you’re probably … confused?” Tessa asked hesitantly.

“I’m not confused! Something’s really, really wrong here!” Gideon screamed back at her.

A bird starting to fly in the window saw his waving arms and flew back out.