The Always War

  Tessa wanted to say something, to get Gideon to turn around and notice her. But even in the sunlight she wouldn’t be gleaming. She could feel something caked in her hair—blood?—and her face felt puffy and bruised. She looked down and saw that both her sweatshirt and her ragged jeans were streaked with mud.

  She remembered what she’d been called the last time she’d seen Gideon in his uniform: gnat … flea … slug … Tessa calling out to Gideon now would be like a gnat trying to speak to a god.

  Gideon smoothed down his already perfect hair. Tessa realized the plane had stopped moving; everything was still. In the absence of any other motion or sound, Tessa was acutely aware of Gideon taking a deep breath. His shoulders rose, resolutely. He did not let the breath back out right away. Instead he took a single step toward the door and hit a switch.

  The door slid open, the light pouring over Tessa in even greater abundance. How could Gideon not see her now? But he wasn’t looking in her direction. He was standing in the doorway, facing out into the blinding light.

  Tessa saw him take another deep breath.

  “I am sorry,” he said in a booming voice. Tessa’s eyes were too light-dazed to see who he was speaking to.

  Gideon kept talking.

  “I came to apologize. You can arrest me, kill me—punish me however you see fit. I am the one who killed your countrymen in this place….”

  In a flash Tessa understood.

  Gideon had flown them into enemy territory.

  He’d flown them to the very spot where he’d killed all those people.

  He was willing to be killed too.

  No—he was asking for it.

  Tessa’s body reacted as quickly as her mind. Before she was even conscious of moving, she was already on her feet and running toward Gideon. Her legs tangled in the blanket, but she kept going, diving for Gideon. She knocked him sideways onto the floor of the plane, so if any of the enemy were already trying to shoot him, the bullets would just whiz harmlessly past. But this wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to tackle him, to hold him down, the mud from her ragged clothes rubbing off on his spotless white uniform. Guns could be reloaded, re-aimed, fired again and again and again.

  Tessa rose up and slammed her hand against the control on the wall.

  The door slid shut.

  CHAPTER

  13

  “What? Who? But … Tessa?” Gideon said. His eyes focused on her face, and he wailed, “Noooo … Now I’m going to be responsible for your death too!”

  He curled inward, almost in the same pose of despair Tessa had seen him in that day she’d taken him flowers.

  “No one’s going to die,” Tessa said, with more confidence than she felt. “Not me, not you—you’re going to get us out of here!”

  For a moment Gideon didn’t move, and Tessa had to tug him toward the pilot’s seat.

  “Fly!” she commanded.

  Gideon looked at her again, and he seemed to snap to, scrambling into the pilot’s seat under his own power.

  “Yes, yes, I have to try,” he mumbled. “I can’t let …”

  He didn’t even bother finishing the sentence. He was a flurry of motion, hitting levers, punching buttons, tapping the computer screen.

  Tessa cast an anxious glance toward the door she’d just slammed shut. She expected it to spring open again any minute now and reveal a cluster of evil-looking soldiers pointing guns at her and Gideon. She stumbled over toward the switch she’d hit before.

  “Is there any way to lock—”

  “It’s locked now,” Gideon snapped at her. “Get down! The window—”

  Tessa ducked.

  There were actually two windows: the one she’d had her face pressed against the night before, and another one on the other side of the plane, directly across from it. Those windows were the source of the light that had wakened Tessa so dramatically only a few moments ago. But, from this angle, she couldn’t really see out of them now. Tessa would have expected a third window at the front of the plane, so the pilot could see out to fly, but the computer screen lay there instead.

  The computer screen showed only words: System not engaged. Troubleshoot?

  Tessa didn’t like to see the word “shoot,” even on a computer screen. Then the real meaning of the message sank in: For some reason, the plane wasn’t springing back to life, soaring back into the air.

  Tessa cast another fearful glance at the two windows behind her.

  If the door is locked, the enemy will come in through one of those windows, Tessa thought. They’ll smash in with their guns, and Gideon and I will have to defend ourselves….

  “Do you have any weapon in that backpack of yours?” Tessa asked tensely. “Or should I look in that closet back there—?”

  Tessa pointed toward the rear of the plane, to the door handle she’d smashed her head against the night before. There seemed to be a tiny closet or cupboard built into the wall of the plane.

  Gideon grabbed Tessa’s arm and yanked her down lower.

  “Don’t go anywhere near those windows!” he commanded.

  “But—,” Tessa began. She realized Gideon wasn’t listening. He was peering at the computer screen in horror.

  “Why won’t the engine work?” he muttered. “Override! Override!”

  “What’s wrong?” Tessa asked.

  He flashed her a look of deep frustration.

  “I don’t know!” he screamed.

  He began hitting buttons again, typing in commands. The view on the screen changed rapidly, one screen shot after another, but nothing seemed to give Gideon the information he wanted.

  “I’ll have to tap into the overall system,” he muttered. His hands flew over the keys, code flashing across the screen. Tessa lost track of the number of times he was asked to provide a password.

  And then Gideon stopped moving. He just sat, staring at the screen. The color drained from his face.

  “No,” he moaned. “No. Not this.”

  “What?” Tessa demanded.

  “There’s been … a disabling signal sent out,” Gideon whispered.

  Tessa tried to absorb this.

  Be brave, she told herself.

  “Well, you really can’t blame the enemy for doing that,” she said, and the calmness in her own voice amazed her.

  “It’s not the enemy sending out that signal,” Gideon said. There was enough horror in his voice for both of them.

  “Not the enemy?” Tessa asked. “But—”

  “It’s our own country,” Gideon explained.

  On the screen a wavy line flickered. Tessa guessed this showed the frequency of the disabling signal.

  “Our own country?” Tessa repeated, confused. “Then—can’t you just ask them to stop?”

  “No,” Gideon whispered. “Because … You need to see this so you’ll know … so you can decide how to spend your last moments….”

  He typed something, and the view on the screen changed. Now there were blips of light that seemed to be flying in formation toward an X at the bottom of the screen.

  “This is how our military does things,” Gideon murmured. Just listening to the pain in his voice was agonizing. “We always send out a disabling signal before a bombing run.”

  “Bombing run?” Tessa repeated numbly.

  “Yes,” Gideon said, his voice like a sob. With one trembling finger he traced the blips of light on the screen. “It’s an entire fleet of bombers—they’re only seconds away from their target.” Now his finger brushed the X at the bottom of the screen. “And their target? We’re right in the middle of it.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  “I’m so sorry,” Gideon said, and now he was sobbing.

  Tessa rose up from the floor and grabbed Gideon’s shoulders.

  “Stop that,” she hissed, shaking him. “Stop apologizing and stop them.”

  She jabbed her finger toward the blips of light on the screen.

  “You can contact them and let them know w
e’re here,” she said. “They won’t bomb us. They’ll … rescue us.”

  Tessa liked this idea. It had sprung into her mind fully formed, a beautiful thing. She could see planeloads of men in uniforms like Gideon’s storming in, fending off hordes of enemy troops, carrying Tessa and Gideon to safety.

  She couldn’t understand why Gideon, who was supposed to be so brilliant, hadn’t thought of it first.

  But Gideon was shaking his head violently.

  “I already tried that,” he moaned. “It won’t work without hours of tampering. This is a stolen plane. All the tracking links were erased—I erased some of them myself. Any signal we send out will look like a decoy, the enemy attempting to impersonate one of our jets….” Gideon grabbed Tessa’s hand back from the computer and pressed it against his tear-stained face.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered again. “So sorry, so, so sorry …”

  Tessa stood frozen, her hand on Gideon’s face. On the computer screen the blips of light drew closer and closer to the X. Little dotted lines dropped down from the blips.

  “Those are the bombs,” Gideon murmured. “Forgive me!”

  He sprang from his pilot’s seat, knocking Tessa flat against the ground. He cowered over her, and dimly Tessa realized that he was trying to protect her, trying to make sure that, if anyone survived the next few moments, it would be her.

  I should have left my parents a note last night, she thought vaguely. I should have …

  The word that blossomed in her mind was “lived.” She should have lived a better life, a fuller life, a more meaningful life, while she’d still had the chance.

  “It’s okay,” she told Gideon. If there’d been more time, she would have explained what that meant: that she didn’t regret following him the night before. That the best moment of her life had actually been saving him—trying to save him—only a few minutes ago when she’d tackled him and slammed the door. At least she’d gotten a little taste of life before going to her death. Of heroism, even. A taste of being something more than a slug or a gnat or a flea.

  If there’d been more time, there was so much she would have wanted to say to Gideon. But there wasn’t more time. Gideon was burying his face against her collarbone, and counting off under his breath, “Three, two, one …”

  Tessa threw her arms around Gideon and held on tight.

  CHAPTER

  15

  Zero, Tessa counted off in her mind. She flinched, expecting explosions and flames and everything falling in on her.

  Nothing happened.

  Um … zero … now? she thought, still flinching, still holding on to Gideon for dear life. It figured that Tessa was so pathetic that she couldn’t even time a countdown correctly, that she finished with her noble, dying thoughts too soon and had to have one of her last thoughts be, Um.

  Still nothing happened.

  Tessa relaxed her flinch a little and tilted her head back. She could see the sunlight still streaming peacefully in through the window, lighting up the gold in Gideon’s hair.

  He was still holding on to her, still sobbing against her shoulder, “My fault, all my fault …”

  If there’s anything left of us to find after we’re dead, Tessa thought, people will think this is so romantic, us dying in each other’s arms.

  But it wasn’t actually romantic. It was awkward and uncomfortable and slightly embarrassing to be lying there like that, Gideon blubbering out his apologies.

  And somehow Tessa had stopped believing that they were about to die.

  Tessa pushed gently against Gideon’s chest, pushing him away.

  “Um, Gideon?” she said hesitantly. “Do you think maybe you might have been … wrong?”

  He stopped apologizing and lifted his head and looked at her, confused.

  “Look,” Tessa said, pointing toward one of the windows. “See any bombs?”

  Gideon stared at her a moment longer.

  “But—”

  He shook his head and scrambled up, back into the pilot’s seat.

  “You must have been wrong about the target’s location,” Tessa offered. “You were in a hurry. It’s easy to make a mistake at a time like that.”

  “I was trained,” Gideon said through gritted teeth, “to never make mistakes. Especially not when I’m in a hurry.”

  He was back to typing and tapping. Tessa crouched beside him and watched. The computer seemed to have gone into sleep mode, but Gideon brought it back to life. He froze the picture of the blips of light and the bombs falling over the X, and then he clicked on the X to get exact geographical coordinates. Then he moved that picture to the side of the screen and called up another image: the start of the video Tessa had first seen on her own computer in Gideon’s room, the one showing the bombs falling over the marketplace, with the mothers and children and babies dying on the ground. He froze this image as well and circled the numbers at the bottom that Tessa had ignored before. She stared at the numbers now and figured out what they were: the geographical coordinates of that bombing.

  “That was why I needed to watch the video before, back at my mother’s place,” Gideon muttered. “I needed to memorize the coordinates.”

  “Okay, okay, maybe this place and this place are the same,” Tessa argued, pointing at each side of the screen as she studied the numbers. They were identical. “But you must be wrong about where we are.”

  Gideon opened up a smaller portion of the screen, and typed in Give exact coordinates of this plane.

  A lengthy string of numbers showed up on this portion of the screen. Gideon circled all the numbers and enlarged them, stacking them one on top of the other. All three sets matched exactly, down to five decimal places.

  “Satisfied?” Gideon asked in a harsh voice.

  Tessa shook her head. She touched the dotted lines frozen mid-fall from the blips of light on the computer screen.

  “Then these aren’t bombs,” she said. “Or—they were all duds. Empty casings.”

  She was proud of herself for coming up with this explanation. There were rumors sometimes, back in Waterford City, about how the stories the military told about their glorious victories couldn’t all be true. “If they were, don’t you think we’d have won the whole war by now, not just a battle here and there?” some people argued.

  Gideon enlarged the bombing image so that it overshadowed the trio of matching numbers. He unfroze the image, letting the footage advance.

  “T minus three,” he intoned. “T minus two. T minus one …”

  On the screen the dotted lines streamed down to the X marking the target. Then the screen blanked out momentarily before flashing the words Direct hit! Direct hit! Direct hit!

  “See?” Gideon said. He began typing in yet another flurry of numbers and letters, bringing up even more indecipherable code. Though, now that she was watching more carefully, Tessa noticed that the code always included the geographical coordinates Gideon had shown her earlier.

  “All the data in the entire military system shows that we were incinerated three minutes ago,” Gideon insisted, returning to the same screenfuls of information again and again. “Everything shows that!”

  “Except that we’re still alive,” Tessa murmured.

  She glanced over her shoulder and confirmed that the sunlight was still streaming in the window. From this angle she couldn’t see much else, but—was that shadow a tree branch swaying gently in the breeze? Was that faint chirping she could hear actually birdsong?

  Tessa tapped one of the minimized portions of the computer screen, the stopped footage of the people dying in the marketplace.

  “Show me the video like this of the bombing that you say just hit us,” she said. “The video with all the details. Then we’ll see what really happened.”

  “I can’t,” Gideon said. “That always comes a day or two late, because it’s from spy satellites and we only get the downloads every other day. That’s why …” He was staring at the screen, at the image of the marketplace a m
oment before the bombs hit, when everyone was screaming and running as if they actually had a chance to escape. “That’s why I was so happy, at first, when I found out how many people I’d killed. It was … kind of a record for a single pilot, in a single day, and everybody was slapping me on the back and punching me on the arm and congratulating me…. I didn’t think of it as people, you know?” He touched the screen lightly, his fingers practically caressing the faces before him. “Not babies, not children, not … not anyone it’d be wrong to kill.”

  “Couldn’t you see any of that from your plane, flying overhead, right before you dropped the bombs?” Tessa asked, and she was surprised that her voice came out sounding so harsh.

  Gideon flinched as if she’d hit him.

  “I was never in that bomber,” he said. “Pilots in the military always fly their planes remotely, from computers hundreds of miles away. We’re sitting at a desk. We’re safe. All we see is what the military wants us to see, the X where the target is and the blips of different-colored lights for our planes and the enemy’s planes. That’s how it always is. Didn’t you know?”

  Tessa thought about this. Had she known that? Everything about the military and the war was always so vague and far away. So, “Look, everyone! Look at your great hero, Gideon Thrall!” Not, “Look, everyone! Wouldn’t you like to see and hear what he really did?”

  Her face twisted. She’d fallen for it too. Back at the awards ceremony she’d admired Gideon as much as anyone.

  She’d admired his “courage,” when all he’d done was sit at a desk playing a video game.

  A game that killed people.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Gideon said softly, clearly misinterpreting her grimace. “It’s not exactly a secret how things are done, but the military likes to make it sound like we’re always flying off into danger, risking our lives to protect everyone else….”