Titan Base (22 page)

His rhinoceros beetle turned and its jets flared. He crashed into Ethan hovering there. He pulled him along as he accelerated away from the Seed Bank as fast as he could fly.

The other I.C.E.s of Sterling Squadron turned and followed.

The mountain exploded, but not from Ch’zar bombs. It exploded from the
inside
.

For a split second, as the mountain cracked into a million pieces, the brightest light Ethan had ever seen came from inside.

Filters instantly clicked into place over the viewscreen, but his eyes burned with jagged afterimages.

The mountain slopes blew out and up and became a fiery mushroom cloud that enveloped the Ch’zar carriers overhead and obliterated them. Roiling shock waves spread out along the ground, igniting thousands of army
ants, centipedes, and ant lions, each flaring like a tiny birthday candle.

Radiation warnings clicked within Ethan’s cockpit but quickly died down as he continued to rocket away within Felix’s grasp.

Over the radio channel, Ethan heard Felix sobbing, but Ethan couldn’t cry. Something inside him had broken and no tears came.

The mountain, the Seed Bank, it was all gone.

What remained was a rising pillar of flame that ignited the air around it, sucked in the surrounding oxygen as it kept getting hotter, and rose and rolled into a ball of pure destruction and unimaginable heat.

Colonel Winter had destroyed the Seed Bank rather than let the enemy take them.

That had been the right decision.

The only decision.

But it also meant she was gone. So were Dr. Irving and all the others.

The Resistance was over.

   
24
   
SECOND CHANCE

ETHAN WASN’T SURE WHERE THEY WERE
.

They’d flown south for an hour and landed in a scrub pine forest, in a clearing made by nine I.C.E.s flattening the trees and brush.

Ocean waves crashed beyond nearby sand dunes. That had to be the Gulf of Mexico.

Ethan didn’t care, though.

After the self-destruction of the Seed Bank, he’d gone numb and had barely been able to pilot his wasp and follow Felix to this place.

Felix’s rhinoceros beetle overturned a huge rock, revealing a concrete bunker underneath the size of a
swimming pool. Inside was a juvenile luna moth carrier. Its moon-silver scales were covered in dust. Ethan could barely sense the creature’s mind. The insect brain had been in deep hibernation mode for a long time.

The Resisters got out of their cockpits. Ethan fell to his knees on the leaf-covered ground, crawled to a mossy rock, and hunkered on it.

Felix jumped into the bunker and inspected the moth and a few dozen barrels marked
HYDRAZINE FUEL, AMMO, MRES, POTABLE WATER
, and
MED
.

Felix had explained Special Order 88 on the flight. Each Resister NCO memorized the location of one hidden supply cache for extended missions—or emergencies like this. Special Order 88 was an instruction to reach the cache and take everything you could grab.

Kind of pointless now.

Ethan felt like his insides had been scooped out with a spoon and now he was only a hollow shell of
Lieutenant
Ethan Blackwood.

For the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do, but he no longer cared. He’d failed the Resistance. Had Ethan found a new base or found some way to control the robots in New Taos, the Resisters might’ve had some sort of chance.

Now? It was futile.

Felix didn’t seem to get it. He kept moving, giving orders, getting the other pilots to set up the biomonitors and rouse the luna moth to a wakeful state. He organized the transfer of supply barrels into the moth and set watch using the radar in their I.C.E.s to track inbound enemies.

All Ethan had the energy to do was watch them, at least watch the Sterling kids work. Sure, they’d been horrified to see the Seed Bank get destroyed, but they didn’t have families there. In fact, the Sterling recruits had always been on their own. They seemed to thrive on this new impossible challenge. Even Angel was up and moving, although she still looked a little green. She was chewing bubble gum again.

Paul and Madison, though, sat huddled together. They looked like someone had knocked them on the head. They stared off into the distance with glassy eyes. Everyone they’d known—Madison’s grandfather and her parents included—had been killed today.

Ethan couldn’t guess what that felt like. He had no idea what to say to them.

And at that moment, he was glad he felt nothing.

Felix checked on Madison and Paul but couldn’t get them to stir. He shook his head and then walked over to Ethan.

“I need you to wake the moth,” Felix told Ethan. “I
know you can get a quick hot-wire mental link. I’ve seen you do it with your wasp. Otherwise it’ll take eight hours to run the start-up protocol. We don’t have that much time.”

“Try Emma.”

“I did. She can’t,” Felix told him.

Ethan stared at his friend. Felix’s face was covered with soot and stained from crying. Somehow, though, he looked stronger and more determined than Ethan had ever seen him.

Didn’t Felix realize that they’d all
lost
?

“How can you just sit there?” Felix whispered, almost pleading with him.

“How can
you
keep going, Felix? After everyone—”

Sudden anger flashed over Felix’s features, and Ethan shut up.

Felix sighed and his chin quivered. “Don’t,” Felix said, and stepped back. “If you can help me, then do it. Otherwise don’t talk about
them
.” He turned his back on Ethan. “I can’t talk about her. If I stop now, I’ll fall apart, Ethan. I won’t let that happen.”

Felix waited for Ethan to respond or get up and help.

Ethan had nothing to give his friend.

Felix marched off. He went to Emma, who was trying
to get the diagnostic computer hooked to the luna moth. They spoke, and Emma shook her head in disgust.

Thankfully she didn’t come over to chew Ethan out. He couldn’t take her hate on top of everything else.

Ethan didn’t understand his sister anymore. It wasn’t that she was a year older than him. She had more confidence than she’d ever had. New weird mental powers, too.

She and Felix should be leading them.

“I know you’ll find a way to make it. The Resistance will live on through you.”

Those had been Colonel Winter’s last words to him. She’d meant for
him
to lead the others.

That was impossible.

Ethan hugged his knees. He couldn’t deal with any of this. Besides the guilt over failing his mission to find a new base for the Resistance and the realization that everyone might be dead because of him, there was the
biggest
failure yet to deal with.

The human race was doomed.

The Ch’zar had won.

Even if Felix could make that food, water, and fuel last a long time, they were all going to grow up. Without an underground refuge to protect them from the Ch’zar mind control, one by one they’d eventually succumb to the aliens.

Or would they?

Emma seemed to be able to hold off the song of the Collective—for now. Could she and Ethan go on? Hide within a neighborhood like their parents had?

A strange mix of homesickness and anger flooded through Ethan. He missed his parents so much. He wished they were here to tell him what to do. He wished they’d told him
something
! He wished they’d given a clue how to survive before they’d abandoned them. Besides that stupid note.

He got up, went to his wasp, and opened the cargo hatch. He rummaged through the gear and took out a crumpled piece of paper.

He read his parents’ note for the gazillionth time.

Like any of that was different from the rest of the lies he’d grown up with.

There was something wrong with his note, though. Or, at least,
his
note was different from
Emma’s
note. Just little things, a few words changed, and there was a date on her letter but not on his.

Ethan felt the despair that had been filling him drain away.

Those changes on their notes had even been made on the draft he and Emma had found in their parents’ safe in Santa Blanca. They’d gone to
a lot
of trouble to make those changes—right when the mind-controlled adults of Santa Blanca were closing in on them.

Why bother?

Ethan’s strength returned and he clenched his fist.

He had an idea why his parents had done it—a crazy, impossible idea but an idea nonetheless, and the only one that made sense: there was a
second
Resistance movement out there, and they’d left him a message.

   
25
   
A CODED MESSAGE

ETHAN LAID OUT HIS AND EMMA’S NOTES SIDE BY
side on the rock. A tiny beetle crawled over the pages, and Ethan gently brushed it aside.

“I don’t see it,” Emma told him, refusing to even look.

He’d gotten his sister and her note, and taken her away from the others. He could feel her irritation toward him, bristling like a venomous porcupine.

“Just
look
at them,” he told her. “Compare the words.”

Emma sighed like this was the biggest imposition in the universe and sat down next to him with a thump, finally glancing sideways at the pages.

First was the note Ethan’s parents had left him: