Titan Base (4 page)

Ethan wasn’t sure if he disagreed. But Angel had left Sterling to help them fight the Ch’zar. She was part of the team. Ethan had a responsibility to help her, didn’t he?

But what if Angel caused an accident? Got someone killed?

Ethan stared into Madison’s green eyes … and got a weird feeling this wasn’t entirely about Angel.

Madison inched closer, so close he felt her breath on his face. “Just be careful out there, Blackwood. If anything
happens to you, well, I mean, I … the rest of us, the Resistance needs you.”

Ethan felt himself flushing even hotter in the broiling desert heat. Something like adrenaline shot through his blood (but not exactly adrenaline).

It had to be the jitters about this upcoming mission.

“I’m coming back,” he whispered to her. “Count on it, Corporal.”

Madison leaned even closer, so near that Ethan felt her body heat on his skin—then she whirled around to face Felix, who had walked up behind her.

Felix looked at both of them, suddenly embarrassed. “Oh … sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Madison said, flustered. She punched Felix halfheartedly in the gut. “Just bring these rookies back, okay?”

Felix nodded. “I always have.”

Madison cast one more glance back at Ethan, frowned, and jogged to Paul and the others.

Felix raised an eyebrow at Ethan as if to ask what that was all about.

Ethan shrugged in reply. He didn’t have a clue.

They walked over to Emma and Angel. The two girls helped each other strap down their packs.

Angel’s black wasp watched Ethan and opened and snapped shut its jaws with a
snikt
.

“We’re good to go,” Emma said.

“Sure, we’re great,” Angel said. “A march over open ground in broad daylight, in the middle of enemy territory. What’s not perfect about that?”

“It’s actually smart,” Felix told her. “No one detected enemy radar locks in that missile barrage. They must’ve used thermal imagers to home in on our I.C.E.s’ body heat, which runs boiling hot in flight mode, not to mention the heat from our jet engines.”

Emma wiped the sweat off her freckled face. “I get it,” she said, a slight bit of approval in her tone. “In this desert our thermal signature should blend into the background heat.”

Ethan nodded. That wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. He just figured if the enemy had more missiles and could detect them, then they would’ve
already
blasted them into atoms.

Paul, Madison, Kristov, Oliver, and Lee then gathered before them.

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Paul said, and then muttered, “You’re going to need it.”

Ethan wondered if he and Paul would ever be friends. Probably not. But he knew Paul would do the right thing,
because they were on the same side fighting the Ch’zar. Maybe he wasn’t a good friend, but Paul was a decent person under all his scars and attitude.

Ethan snapped off a salute, gave Madison a long look (she glanced down, unable to meet his eyes), and then turned, and the scouting party marched into the desert … toward that ghost city.

   
3
   
DIFFERENT

I.C.E. FLIGHT SUITS WERE MADE FOR HIGH-G COMBAT
maneuvers, not strolls in the desert at midday. It was like walking through an oven wearing a plastic bag. The internal moisture pads were soaked and squished with each step Ethan took.

Of course, Ethan and his team had to keep the suits on for the extra radiation protection.

Dr. Irving had also upgraded their flight suits so the insect chromo skin cells adapted to their surroundings. Ethan’s suit, normally yellow and black to match his wasp, had transformed into sand brown and red stone patterns.

From a distance he bet he blended perfectly with the desert.

Ethan looked over his shoulder, squinting in the heat.

Marching single file behind him were Emma, Angel, and Felix—all semicamouflaged, all looking as miserable as Ethan.

They trudged along like that for a half hour. Around them were sand dunes, broken rock … and Ethan could barely see the mesa wavering in the heat where he’d left the rest of his squadron.

He held up a hand and said, “Break.”

They stopped and guzzled water from their bottles.

Ethan had a faint buzzing sensation in his head.
It must be the heat … or the radiation
.

He consulted his map for the tenth time in the last few minutes. Ethan traced the dotted line that marked their progress. The map had a compass and sensor that counted their steps and could give their position to five decimal places in terms of latitude and longitude. Their path couldn’t be a straight line because they had to dodge radiation hot spots or get cooked.

So far he’d done an okay job. The counter on his wrist hadn’t ticked up once toward the lethal red line.

He swallowed. Despite the quart of water he’d just
chugged, his mouth still felt like sandpaper. This was like walking through a minefield.

Ahead on the map were more hot spots. They blocked the Resisters’ path with vile green poison splotches. They’d have to go west to avoid one, and that’d lead them to a strange red-black patch on the map. Ethan couldn’t zoom in on that area and tell what it was, because their map no longer received data from the satellite network overhead.

“Come on,” he told his team, “we’ve got to keep moving.”

“How about a rest, Captain Gung Ho?” Angel said. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees. Her sweat-soaked black bangs were plastered to her forehead.

“Yeah,” Emma said, and closed her eyes. “Just five minutes. We’re going to get heatstroke in these suits.”

“We can’t,” Ethan told them. “Our map isn’t getting any updates, so I can’t read the wind patterns. One stray gust could blow radioactive dust right into our faces.”

Angel grimaced, stood, and staggered, but shook her head to clear it. “Right,” she whispered. “Move and get heatstroke … or stand still and get cooked by radiation.”

Felix moved closer to her, ready to catch her if she fainted.

She didn’t, though, and marched ahead of Ethan. She was stronger than she looked.

Ethan folded his map and caught up to her. He would have felt sorry for Angel if she wasn’t always saying stupid things like that. He needed to tell her to keep her demoralizing opinions to herself. Before he could say anything, though, she spoke.

“I don’t get you, Blackwood.” She looked him over, disapproval etched across her face. “You don’t fit.”

Ethan tugged at the collar of his flight suit. “What are you talking about?”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You stuck out at Sterling. It was so obvious you weren’t one of
us
.”

Angel glanced back at Felix. “But you’re not one of
them
either. Those Seed Bank guys—all duty, all the time. You do a fair imitation, but I can tell that you and your sister are … different. You’re different from
everyone
. There’s more to it than just coming from a neighborhood, isn’t there?”

He was about to tell her to save her breath for the hike, but she was right.

Ethan wasn’t a delinquent like the other Sterling kids. A lifetime of living in rule-bound Santa Blanca had guaranteed that.

But he
did
break rules.

It’s how he’d stayed alive. How he’d won against the Ch’zar.

That wasn’t the way the Seed Bank Resisters worked. They followed orders.

So what were he and Emma? Why were they here?

His parents had said Ethan and his sister weren’t like anyone else. They were smarter. Tougher. And they were able to think for themselves.

“We’re just trying to make the best of it,” he finally told Angel. “Trying to stay alive and keep our minds.”

“Right, Blackwood. Look, why don’t you just admit it?” She cast a sly glance his way. “Then you and I can be ‘different’ from the rest of these losers together.” She winked at him.

Ethan didn’t answer her. He kept walking.

He couldn’t stop thinking, though, about what Angel had said.

One reason he’d joined the Resisters was to find answers to why he was different—and why his parents were different. They’d been adults living inside the Ch’zar Collective and somehow keeping their minds.

If he’d really been true to the Resisters, he would’ve told Dr. Irving or Felix or Madison about
that
. At first he’d thought the Resisters might study him or suspect he was a spy for the aliens if they knew about his parents. But they wouldn’t do those things now, after all he’d done.

So why hold back?

They marched over a sand dune, and just ahead Ethan saw what that red-and-black splotch on the map was: a field of junk.

It was the size of a city block and was filled with old robot suits like the ones Ethan had piloted when playing soccer back at Northside Elementary. There were stacks of refrigerators and piles of tin cans. Some objects he barely recognized, they were so rusty—and they crumbled into dust as he approached.

“Creepy,” Emma whispered. She grabbed her braid and fiddled with it.

“At least those athletic suits aren’t active,” Felix whispered back.

Ethan said nothing, remembering how they’d battled teachers in similar suits at Sterling. He imagined these rusted hulks coming to life, chasing and crushing them.

Angel inhaled and tensed like she was gathering her last bit of energy for a fight.

But the long-dormant suits lay there, inert.

Ethan led them through stacks of spooled copper wire, plastic barrels filled with ball bearings. He skirted a pile of broken glass the size of a house, emerging on the other side of the junkyard.

They faced a thirty-foot wall of smooth stainless steel. This was the edge of New Taos.

From a distance, the place had sparkled like a gem in the desert. Up close, though, streaks of rust painted the metal wall, and up and over that wall, Ethan could see the glass domes had spiderweb cracks and the crystalline spires were covered with bird poop.

The city felt completely empty.

As if she could read his mind, Emma leaned closer and said, “But we saw
something
moving inside those domes. It can’t all be empty. We just have to get over that wall. We can’t see anything from down here.”

Angel moved to the wall, reached out, and then jerked her hand away. “Too hot!” she hissed. “Even with gloves.”

Felix smoothed a hand over his shorn head. “It’s sunny on this side,” he said. “There has to be shade on the other, right?”

Ethan nodded and they stomped around to the opposite side of the city. Any chance of Paul and the others seeing them through binoculars vanished as they rounded the curved wall and went out of sight.

Since their radios didn’t work because of the intervening radiation, the only way Ethan could get help was with the signal flares in his pack—which would also alert any potential enemies.

On the plus side, as they crossed into the shade, the desert heat dropped ten degrees.

Angel reached out once more and touched the metal wall. “Still bloody hot,” she told him, “but it should be okay for a bit.”

She shrugged off her pack and pulled out a rope with a gecko-grip grapple. Without waiting for orders, she tossed it over the edge of the wall. It stuck on the first try.

She started up the rope, but Ethan set his hand over hers. “I’ll go,” he told her. “Lieutenant’s prerogative. You take a breather.”

The real reason Ethan wanted to go first was he didn’t know what she’d do up there by herself. Something crazy.

Angel jerked her hand from his. She stared at it and then at him. Her heart-shaped face crinkled with anger … then confusion … and then she took a step back, and Ethan could’ve sworn she almost looked afraid.

Ethan had never seen Angel look scared.

She acted like no one had ever touched her.

Could that be true? What if the only time Angel had ever let anyone else touch her had been at Sterling—with their fists in those mock combats? She’d said Ethan was “different” and that he “stuck out” … but what was
her
story?

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Angel nodded, seeming to accept the apology (but she nonetheless rubbed her hand).