Titan Base (24 page)

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I want to help, Ethan, but there’s nothing left inside me.” She rested her head on her knees and started to cry.

Ethan took her hand and gave her a gentle pull.

“I need you,” he said. “I can’t make this work without you, Madison. You’ve been with me from the start. You have to be with me when it ends.”

She looked up, tears glistening in her eyes, her pixie face contorted with grief.

But she nodded and let Ethan help her to her feet.

Wordlessly she hugged him. He hugged her back, and then she gently pushed him away and trod to her waiting dragonfly.

Ethan stared after her, and then at the note and map he held.

There had better be something out there in the middle of nowhere.… His people couldn’t take another disappointment. Otherwise, this would be the last flight of the last of Sterling Squadron.

   
27
   
MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

FIVE HUNDRED MILES AND NO SIGHT OF ANY
Ch’zar in pursuit.

Ethan didn’t trust that. He’d have thought there’d be patrols looking for the last surviving Resisters.

Of course, the Ch’zar had lost three command carriers, dozens of squadrons, and thousands of ground I.C.E.s when Colonel Winter had detonated a nuclear device inside the mountain.

Ethan curled inward, trying to cradle his aching stomach in the confined space of the wasp’s cockpit. He still felt like he’d been kicked in the gut. He couldn’t stop replaying the vision of the Seed Bank erupting like a volcano.

A proximity warning chimed. He had drifted within thirty feet of Kristov’s locust.

Ethan blinked, course-corrected, and refocused. There was no room for bone-numbing grief when piloting a three-ton insect at five hundred miles an hour. He pushed his thoughts of Colonel Winter, Dr. Irving, and all the others aside. He still had his squadron, and right now they needed him.

Ethan brought up the satellite image of West Texas.

Dry riverbeds snaked through an arid desert. Tiny oases dotted the southern part of the area, but Ethan detected radiation hot spots there, which looked like lime-green measles on his map.

He also spotted fifty-foot-high towers, but when he zoomed in on the image, Ethan found they were nothing but columns of eroded dirt.

“What are those?” Ethan asked on the squadron’s radio channel.

“Termite towers,” Felix said.

“There are Ch’zar out here?”

“Not exactly,” Felix replied. “We’ve seen colony chimneys before in the deep desert. There are never any termites, though, even when we blast deep. I think they were part of a failed Ch’zar experiment.”

Ethan switched to the infrared spectrum and saw no
thermal variations in the terrain under the towers. Empty, like Felix said. Still … he couldn’t stop thinking of the possibility of a million mutated termites seething underground. Gross.

He gazed west. The sun was low in the sky. That’s where they needed to go.

Ethan couldn’t say why he felt like he had to get there. Maybe it was some mental link to whatever was at those coordinates. Maybe it was wishful (and foolish) thinking. Or maybe the things shaping his brain were also driving him nuts.

“Disengage weapon safeties,” he told the squadron. “I don’t want to get surprised up here.”

Felix opened a private radio channel. “Am I missing something?” he asked Ethan. “I don’t see anything.”

“We might
not
see anything,” Ethan replied on the secure frequency. “Remember when we approached the Seed Bank? The Ch’zar had some way to jam our signals. I don’t trust their satellite feeds either.”

“Roger that,” Felix said. “My weapons are hot.”

Ethan flipped off his stinger laser interlocks and started the warm-up cycle.

They had to be ready for anything. A Ch’zar ambush. A secret city filled with hostile robots. Missiles dropping out of the streaks of cirrus clouds overhead. Anything.

They were just a few moments away from the designated coordinates.

Still nothing on the satellite network or his external cameras other than dry riverbeds that merged into a huge white alkaline plain.

His navigation system pinged. They were directly over the spot.

“Real nice,” Paul said. “Is that a flock of wild geese I see down there?”

“Cut the radio chatter,” Ethan snapped.

But Paul was right: this was turning into a wild-goose chase.

What had Ethan done wrong?

“There’s nothing on the satellite image,” Madison told Ethan.

“I can see—”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” she said. “I mean, there’s
nothing
down there. I’m not even seeing the dry lakebed. The satellite feed shows only dunes and a few cactuses.”

On Ethan’s starboard cockpit display, Madison arranged side-by-side images: one from the satellite feed, the other from her camera that gave a real-time view from thirty-five thousand feet.

Ethan should have been seeing the same patch of desert.

He wasn’t.

The dry lakebed was missing from the satellite image. Why would the Ch’zar send a false image through their satellite network?

Or maybe it wasn’t them generating the fake image.

Maybe it was someone
else
hiding such an obvious feature from them.

“Squadron, go winged flight,” Ethan ordered.

His jets cut out and the wasp’s wings buzzed. The I.C.E.s slowed and filled the air with blurred wings as they circled back to the lakebed for another look.

“Okay,” Ethan murmured to himself. “What’s so special it needs hiding?”

“We’re landing,” he told the others.

The squadron fluttered to the desert floor, kicking up dust and salt as the I.C.E.s landed.

Ethan powered down but left the wasp’s laser in preheat mode. This still didn’t feel right.

He jumped out of the cockpit and his boots crunched over dried mud scales. This place hadn’t seen water in decades. He tasted salt on his lips and smelled an alkaline battery scent in the air.

There wasn’t a single footprint or tire tread as far as he could see.

His squadmates gathered around him.

Paul looked smug and his smile drew the scars on his face tight. It was a
told you so, stupid
smile.

Ethan wanted to wipe that smile off Paul’s face with his fist, once and for all.

Emma glanced around, transfixed for a moment, and then said, “Come on, it’s this way.”

“
What’s
that way?” Paul asked, looking at her like she was crazy. “There’s nothing here!”

Ethan, Madison, and Felix followed Emma as she jogged across the dry lake.

The Sterling kids seemed uncertain what was going on—or who to follow.

Ethan felt it now, too. That magnetic attraction he’d experienced in the air, only ten times stronger down here. Whatever the truth was, Emma was on to
something
.

He ran to catch up with her.

“Hey!” Paul called after them. “What the heck are you running to?” He threw up his hands in disgust.

Kristov and Angel started after Ethan and the others, and then so did Oliver and Lee.

Paul, left standing by himself, finally let out an exasperated growl and trotted after the rest of the squadron.

Ethan jogged alongside Emma. With every stride, he became more sure that what he was searching for was here.

There
was
something out there. A line. No, a shadow. Something or someone stood in the middle of the dry lakebed.

Ethan sprinted ahead. Emma caught up like this was a race.

He got a crazy idea that it had to be his mom or dad … waiting for them.

The outline wavered, became bumpy and lumpy, and turned out to be a stack of stones only four feet tall.

The sensation in Ethan’s head got stronger with every step toward those stones. It made no sense.

“Just a pile of rocks,” he whispered. “All this has been for nothing.”

“A pile of rocks
stacked
here,” Emma corrected. “Someone had to do that.”

That was true. Nowhere else on the lakebed were there stones like this.

“Another clue?” Ethan asked. He gazed at his sister, who nodded, and together they knocked over the stones, moving rocks, looking for whatever was drawing them to the spot.

The last rock sat atop a rusty metal plate. On the surface of this plate were the words
TITAN POWER DISTRICT
—
METER 09112
.

“An electrical meter?” Emma said, utterly disappointed.

“This place might’ve once been a neighborhood,” Ethan offered.

He refused to believe it was just an ancient power meter. He pulled off the cover and inside found a single electric switch. It was the kind with a double contact, like you’d see in some old Frankenstein movie.

He closed the circuit. It sparked to life.

Paul and the others finally caught up. “What’d you find?” he said, panting, crowding closer.

“Some switch,” Ethan explained, and pointed halfheartedly at the box in the ground.

“There’s nothing out here to power up,” Oliver said.

Ethan trembled. He wasn’t sure if it was anger at Paul, or at himself because this was all for nothing, or maybe he shook because he was still trying to cope with losing the Seed Bank and everyone in the Resistance.

His head felt like it was splitting apart, too.

Dust rose from the dry lakebed.

A crack appeared ten paces from where they stood. Air sucked into the space.

The split elongated, unzipped along the desert floor as quickly as Ethan could follow it—a hundred feet long and then two hundred feet across.

The crack pulled farther apart, yawning like some giant mouth, sand spilling into the darkness beyond.

The feeling that had been building inside Ethan’s head up to this point seemed to click in place and stop.

As the gap widened, titanium plates dilated open, and as the fading sunlight penetrated deeper, he saw a man-made tunnel, bristling with missiles and anti-aircraft gun turrets that spun to life … and aimed at them.

   
28
   
TITAN BASE

ETHAN AND EMMA HUDDLED AROUND THEIR
lantern and watched the power panel. LED indicators pulsed with barely visible flickers.