“Almost there,” Janeice announces as we head three blocks out of the main part of town and toward the YMCA. The Y seems the most logical and least conspicuous place to park a school bus other than an actual school, and the closest one of those is miles away. Once we’ve parked, we split up into groups of five, heading out toward the compound that we saw in the crystal. It is surrounded by three rural streets: Spring, Cromwell Harbor Road, and Kebo. Lyle and I head with three others to the Spring Street side. When we get there, we see woods, a hill with granite outcroppings, and a bunker deep in the woods.
The bunker is very World War II Nazi cliché, dark concrete walls hidden in a dark forest. Men and women in black clothes and bulletproof vests range around the perimeter. They have assault rifles in their hands—American, not alien, guns.
“She is in here?” I ask Lyle because for some illogical reason, I’m overwhelmed with self doubt. “You’re sure? I mean. We aren’t making a mistake are we? We all saw this, right? This is—”
“This has to be it.” He bites at the edge of his lip.
Our team is bizarre-looking. The Futures’ clothes are a hodgepodge of fatigues and punk rock, American Eagle preppy and hunter camo. But they all have steely gazes and look as ready as they can be.
“This is going to be the second time I have to rescue her,” I announce.
“My turn next?” he quips.
“Don’t even.” I fist-bump him. He fist-bumps me back. And then I climb on his back. The plan is to have everyone create a diversion on the right flank of the building. Then, Lyle will run in with his super-speed, which doesn’t quite merit superhero status but is pretty damn fast—faster than a human—and I will fend off any attackers with my sonic boom or whatever the hell it is that happens when I drink caffeine.
“Got the Coke?” I ask.
“Root beer.”
“Lyle!”
“It’s the kind with real sugar and not corn syrup, and it’s full of caffeine. Not all root beer is created equal. It’s time you got to taste the caffeine kind.”
“That is sweet of you.”
He becomes all big-eyed. “Sweet of me! Get it? Sugar? Sweet?”
“Lyle, I get it. I’m the one who said it.”
He just laughs and passes me the plastic bottle of root beer. I gulp it down.
“Not too much, Mana!”
“I want to be sure.” My heart is already racing so fast. I pass the bottle back down and as Lyle replaces the cap, I press my hand to my chest.
“How does it feel?” he asks.
“Like my heart is going to explode,” I admit, trying to sound cocky and not terrified. “So, perfect.”
I give him a noogie on the top of his head just as shouting starts. There is an explosion to the right, deep in the woods, but the smoke is visible, hurling dark and green toward the sky.
“Now?” he asks.
“Now.” I tighten my legs around his back as he leans forward and starts to run, darting between the trees. A good two-thirds of the people milling around protecting the front entrance have rushed off to the right, toward the explosion and our diversion, but there are still another third here, protecting the entrance.
Behind us run the rest of our troops, the infiltration team, but they can’t keep up with Lyle when he runs. Nobody can. Well, maybe me with my flying/bounding thing, but that’s not what’s happening here. Others will approach or are approaching from the other streets.
We push forward, fast and swift and not human, so far from human. My cells electrify, power courses through them, and this feeling? At first it was scary, this power—but it’s also good to feel so alive, to feel like I have some sort of purpose or meaning or something. And it feels good to be part of a group of beings who all have the same goal.
We howl silently through that frozen forest. We rage inside ourselves as we run; we scream. We are soldiers—some of us older, some of us younger; some of us brand-new at this, some of us who have seen violence before—but when we run, the motion of our need propels us forward, focuses us, makes us zero in on the raw nature of who we are and what we want; yes, we want to save our friend, but more than that, we want to survive.
We move through the trees, behind the boulders, separating on the frozen, broken earth. We cling to our orders—distract, for most of us; defend, for others; attack, for Lyle and me, as we’re the ones with the closest ties to Seppie. We bring with us our need for closure, for questions to be answered, and for our friend to be with us again, safe. She has to be safe or else this is all pointless. We leave behind our worries as we rush through the patient, long-standing woods. We triumph in our approach. Almost there. Almost there. Guns sound to our left. Screams pierce the air to our right.
“Hold on,” Lyle says.
We blast into the open space in front of the bunker. A head-on assault seems foolhardy, ignorant, and pretty egotistical, which is why everyone voted in favor of it when we had our tactics discussion on the bus. And the noises put the remaining guards on alert. They stare with focused eyes and raise their guns.
“Lyle!” I scream as he keeps rushing forward, straight at them. I yank him up and backward as they shoot, pulling us into a huge, double-person back handspring. The bullets fly and something hits my arm, but I almost don’t feel it, I’m so full of power and rage. We land a few feet backward and the men are there, raising their guns again.
This time it’s Lyle who screams my name and I lift my hand, focusing. The energy whooshes out almost like a shock wave. Bullets stop and drop to the snow. The guards topple backward. We run forward to the door, which has a keypad.
“Did you kill them?” Lyle asks.
“I don’t know.” I touch the keypad, focusing, breathing hard. Numbers fly through my head as I try to descramble the entry code before the guards come alive again (if they are still alive) or their reinforcements come. The code … the code …
2754*76
I hit the sequence that rushes through my head.
She comes.
“There’s a voice in my head,” I tell Lyle. “Male.”
“Is that how you got the code?”
“I don’t know.”
“It could be a trap, Mana. This could all be a trap.” His eyes are wide and panicked, and for some reason his panic makes me more confident. We have been through a lot, Lyle and Seppie and me. No matter how often we mess up, we will always love each other and have each other’s back. So, now … now that he’s panicked, I will be strong for him and for her.
I say as calmly as I can, “I know that. You know that. It’s obvious.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t really know that.”
“Sweetie, you’re supposed to be the smart one. I think you knew it, deep inside.” A tiny bit of my anger peels away as I go up on tiptoe and kiss his cheek right before I kick the door open to reveal a hallway that branches into two different corridors. The walls are sterile, metal and concrete. Like a hospital wing in a poor hospital. Like a bunker.
We scurry down the hallway, sticking to the sides, and then it opens into a huge room, big and dark and full of staircases that resemble fire escapes, connecting one level of catwalk to another. Behind those catwalks are other rooms and two more hallways. At the lowest level are cars of all types and value, Kias and Subarus and Ford trucks and Lexuses. Guns line the walls, set in racks. I stare past the weapons and at the enormity of the space.
“This place is huge,” I whisper. “We’ll have to split up.”
“I don’t want to split up.”
“We have to. We’ll never get through it fast enough.”
“You’re never supposed to split up. It never goes well! I could cite a million times in movies and TV shows where that—”
I kiss him full on the lips. They are rigid beneath mine, but after a split second they yield to softness. I’ve shocked him. Good. That was my point. I break away. “Be fast then, Lyle. Be fast and safe.”
“You, too! No heroics.”
“Of course not.” I give a cocky smile that is still totally the opposite of how I’m feeling. He rushes right and I move left. Seppie could be in any of these cars, tucked in a trunk, smooshed into a backseat, but it doesn’t feel right. I decide to save the bottom floor to search last, and instead head up to the rooms off the first catwalk. I search room after room. They’re all bunks and sleeping areas on this level. Men sleeping. There is a man peeing. I lock him in his room.
An alarm goes off, and thundering footsteps immediately sound below and above me. I bypass the stairs, pulling myself up onto the lower level of a catwalk as men run beneath me. None of them looks up. People never look up. As soon as they pass, I swing myself up to the next level, praying that Lyle is being careful, praying that one of us will find Seppie soon.
I try to focus, like I can feel Seppie somehow, but that’s silly. I do, however, get a gut reaction: to go up to the fourth level. I listen to it. I sneak and run and crawl and scurry up three more metal staircases, trying to be invisible, and then I get to the fourth level, where I run smack into a woman with angry eyes and principal hair. She’s got a gun. Of course she does. Everyone has a gun; it’s the United States.
“Have you come for your friend?” She smiles. Her mouth is full of blood. “You’re too late.”
That’s when I recognize her.
“Mrs. Sweet?” I may actually gasp.
“So shocked. You never were the brightest student, were you, Mana? Not compared to Lyle or Seppie.”
Wow. Seriously? Could people stop talking about my supposed lack of intelligence eventually?
“The world isn’t about being the best at taking tests and memorizing information,” I counter, looking for a way to get by her. She has a gun pointed at me, but she’s sort of casual about it, like pointing a gun at a student is just an everyday sort of thing. No big.
“Oh, really?” Her smile drips sarcasm. “What’s it about, then? Friendship? Loyalty?”
“Sometimes.” I shrug. “Sometimes it’s about kicking butt and taking names. Sometimes it’s about passing your world history test. Sometimes it’s about finally having a reason to knock your pain-in-the-butt school principal unconscious and not have to worry about getting suspended and having it on your permanent record.”
She laughs. “So much bravado, Mana. Yet, I see you’re still talking.” She moves closer with the gun so that it’s within my reach. “Let’s get going.”
“Where?”
“Time to take you to my leader.”
“You’ve always wanted to say that, haven’t you?” I quip, just to get her off her game.
“Always.”
The gun is in my face and I hope for the best, trying to channel everything Seppie taught me about gun defense, which she allegedly had just started to learn at those Krav Maga classes that she was allegedly taking. I know that’s a lie now. It doesn’t matter. The first rule is to redirect where the gun will hit, the next is to control the weapon, the third is to counterattack.
So I smack my arm down on top of Mrs. Sweet, pushing her gun arm toward the ground, and clamp my hand on the inside of her wrist—which is larger than I imagined, and my hands are small. I move my other hand down along her arm as fast as I can until it touches the barrel and then I slant forward. The gun fires. It misses me, but my ears ring from the noise of it and I grunt, grabbing the gun.
“Where’s your super-alien powers?” she snarls at me through her gritted teeth. I yank the gun out of her hand and point it at her.
“Don’t need them.”
“Life would have been so much easier if you just went home when you were pretending to be sick at school.”
“Why is that?”
“We had an ambush waiting for you there. Then we had an exterminator follow you to the woods. You left. Then it followed you to the hospital. You all killed it. It’s been such a ridiculous forty-eight hours. And it’s your fault. I’m tired of the chase.” She raises an eyebrow. “You’ll have to shoot me.”
I shrug like that’s no big deal. She lunges toward me, but I flip up and away, down a hallway. I slam the door shut behind me, triumphant. I lock it and hope she doesn’t know the code. She probably does.
This hallway is whiter than the others, like it’s less used. I run down it. She’s banging on the door behind me, calling for help. Lovely. I need to hurry. I give up all hope of not being detected in here.
Honestly, though, I’m not the best fighter. I haven’t been trained to fight. I kind of suck at it and my hands hurt from just that gun defense.
“Seppie!” I yell and then do it again. “September!”
I listen.
Nothing.
I slam open a door. A medical room of some sort? There is a hospital bed. Restraints. But no Seppie.
But this is it … This was the room I kept seeing … the room with the man with dark hair. Panic fills me. What have they done to her?
I barge out into the hallway. There is more noise at the door. Banging. So much banging. I don’t have much time and I don’t want to use my power again because I honestly don’t know how to actually control it. I don’t know if I’ll run out of juice. I know nothing. Nothing.
I hate knowing nothing. I pause and take a sip of root beer, just in case I need to recharge. The buzz of the caffeine seeps through me. I can do this. Moving faster now, I yell Seppie’s name, throwing open every door that I come to. It’s the eighth one that I come to. That’s when I find her.
Seppie is alone in a dark room. Sunlight barely slants through a window full of bars. She’s strapped onto a table, fully clothed—thank god, because I did not want to take her out of here naked. She would hate that. Plus, it’s cold. Her eyes stare up at the ceiling and she’s mumbling numbers that don’t make any sense to me.
Rushing to her, I start unbuckling the straps holding her down. It takes too long. I rip them off her instead. The caffeine has definitely made me stronger.
“Seppie? September?” I tap her face.
Her eyes focus. “Mana?”
“You’re alive.”
“You’re … observant?” She gives a faint little smile.
I wrap my arm around her waist and heave her off the table. “Can you walk? We have to go. We’re attacking the base but—”
“We?”
“Me. Lyle. Some people we recruited. Well, Lyle recruited. Your camp friends or pretend Krav Maga friends or something … I don’t know. The future agents. The Futures. That’s what you call yourselves, right?” I tighten my hold on her as I steer her out of the room and back into the corridor. There are shouts to the left, so I peel back toward the right and the door that the principal is still trying to break through.
“No,” she says. “The left is the way out. It’s … yeah…”
Her voice breaks my heart—there is so much weakness in it.
“What did they do to you? Who are these people?” I ask, even though I’m not sure I want to know.
“They—I think—I think they were trying to get you. They did experiments?”
“Aliens?”
“No. People. Definitely people. Except one. One is like you, I think.” She pushes off my arm and hobbles next to me. “I’m not much of a pacifist anymore. Just so you know. So if you see this guy, you have my permission to kill him.”
“Good to know. I’m not much of a pacifist anymore either,” I admit and hurry down the corridor, checking to make sure she’s behind me. Her back is a little bent like she’s in pain—a lot of pain—but she keeps up.
“There are stairs … to the right…”
We clang down iron stairs, our feet making so much noise. Below us is grass, but it’s a couple of stories down. Smoke from small fires ripples through the air. I have no idea what has been happening out here, but my heart worries for Lyle and the others. The stairs give the impression of forming a U shape of platforms around what might be a garage for super-tall cars. Each landing wraps around and is bordered by pipes and fences so you don??
?t fall out. It’s very industrial feeling, grimy and dark. This place is so huge. We didn’t know what we were getting into. I pray for the others, for Lyle, for us, for the dozens of stories of fighting that are going on right here, right now, stories that are so close to me but I will never know. So many people and so many lives and dramas and needs. All right here. Struggling to win. It makes me dizzy to think of it.
“Your arm is bleeding,” Seppie announces.
“I got shot. I think it’s a graze or something.”
She freaks out.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s so not fine,” she whispers.
“Honestly, it hurt more to do gun defenses with Mrs. Sweet.”
Her mouth drops open in shock.
“I should have practiced more with you.”
“I told you.”
We’re only half a flight down when a voice rings through the building. “Oh. Little Mana. How lovely! I’m so glad you joined us.”
A man stands all the way across the giant room, standing on another platform, smiling and slightly smudged, but obviously not worried about his safety, not considering me a threat.
Which means …
Which means …
He’s not a good guy. Shock ripples through me. I trusted him. I worried about him. He played me?
“Wharff?” I don’t move. China’s quick guide to situational awareness runs through my head. What did he say? The first sign of danger, you should run. But where? Up the stairs? Down? The second option is to hide. Again, where? The third option is to fight. But the enemy and his little principal BFF are across the landings, so far away. I’m not sure if my sonic-boom thing can work that far.
I go four more steps down to the catwalk and then lean against the railing, super-casual, as if I’m unworried. Seppie follows me, still not standing upright all that well.