Dead Zone

“You still think they’ll want me to get up close and personal?” Rich said, and struggled to pull on his pack. It was enormous on him—made for a full-grown man, not a fifteen-year-old. At least the army had made some allowances so that it wasn’t as heavy, plus Rich didn’t have a weapon to worry about.

  Jack nodded. “That’s what I heard—that they want you to help figure out what technology is knocking out the power.”

  Rich stood there quietly, waiting as Jack finished getting packed and dressed. Rich was a good kid. He was young, but he never used his age as an excuse—unlike Krezi, who was always letting people know she was only fifteen. Not that Jack could blame her. He wondered whether he’d be more like her than like Rich if this had happened a few years ago. After all, Jack still had his own doubts about himself as a soldier.

  Jack pulled on his rucksack. All together, the ruck and his weapon and his body armor and everything else weighed close to a hundred pounds. He’d done plenty of physical training in his time at the camp—he’d slogged through swamps carrying all of this—but the weight was still hard to bear. It seemed like he was in a movie, he thought. Like he didn’t belong, and was looking at everything from the outside.

  “Ready?” he asked Rich.

  “I guess.”

  By the time Aubrey got back to her tent, Tabitha, Krezi, and Josi were already there.

  “You know what we are?” Tabitha asked, folding a shirt and putting it in her ruck.

  “Our team, you mean?” Aubrey asked.

  “Yeah. The Fantastic Six. They’re going to have us go after the device. You, me, and Jack make the greatest recon team ever, Rich can understand any machine, so he can figure out what it is and how to stop it, and Krezi can shoot when the power’s turned off.”

  Josi looked up from her packing. “What about me?”

  “I haven’t figured you out yet,” Tabitha said.

  “At least we’ll have something exciting to do,” Aubrey said. “I’d hate to be the guy stuck in the back who can count really well, or girl who can make plants grow faster.”

  “If you call getting shot at exciting,” Krezi said. “At least you can turn invisible. Some of us don’t have that luxury.”

  Josi wrapped up a bag of toiletries and put them in her rucksack. “You can shoot. My superpower is getting massive post-traumatic stress disorder. Seriously, I think that’s all I’ll be good at.”

  “What would the therapist say about that?” Aubrey asked, scratching her chin. “Something about how you need to find a creative outlet for all the bad energy you’re absorbing.” She laughed. “You could take up flower arranging.”

  “Ooh—or cooking,” Krezi said. “We could use a better chef. We could use any chef. All we have now is a guy who knows how to use a can opener and a microwave.”

  Aubrey put the last of her belongings in the rucksack. “You guys ready? Because we’re going to war in”—she checked her watch—“four minutes.”

  “Ready,” Josi replied, slinging her rucksack onto her shoulder.

  Tabitha groaned. “I’ll be done in two minutes.”

  “You guys go ahead,” Krezi said, nodding to Aubrey and Josi. “I’ll wait for Tabitha.”

  Aubrey smiled. “Okay. Enjoy your last few minutes of peace.”

  NINE

  “DID YOU EVER THINK YOU’D be here, getting ready to go into combat?” Tabitha asked as she put the final items into her bag.

  “Not really,” Krezi said. “I mean, my brother’s in the air force, but he’s a mechanic. He never sees any action, and everyone is pretty happy about that.”

  Tabitha bent down to tie her shoes. She wanted to have a long, personal conversation, but she knew they had to get to the helicopter. “Does he have any kind of special ability?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s twenty-six. Wasn’t the quarantine just for people twelve to twenty?”

  Tabitha nodded. “I feel bad,” she said. “We’ve been living in the same room for six weeks and we hardly know each other.”

  Krezi shrugged. “Different training, different schedules.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to graduate,” Tabitha said.

  “No biggie.” Krezi headed outside, with Tabitha a few steps behind her.

  They weren’t supposed to cross the parade lawn, but they did anyway. It was the fastest way to get to the helipad, and Tabitha knew they were running late.

  She wanted just one person from the team to start questioning things, but they were all so patriotic that they couldn’t see common sense.

  “You’ve heard about the rebellion, right?”

  Krezi glanced over. “Sure.”

  “What would you say if I was thinking of joining it?”

  There was a long pause. It dragged out until they’d crossed the lawn and were heading up the road.

  “I’m not,” Tabitha finally said. “I was just wondering what you would do if you thought I was. Obviously you’re not a fan of the idea.”

  “If I could make a custom-built rebellion where I called all the shots, then I might join,” Krezi said. “Right now they’re too violent.”

  “I heard they’re democratic. They vote on every action they take.”

  “But I don’t want violence at all. I want a peaceful protest. And I’m only one vote.”

  “Wrong—they use the same system that the military uses. You’re a category Five-D, right? That means you’re a powerful weapon, so you get five votes. The strongest get the most power.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Time magazine,” Tabitha lied. “They had a whole article about it. It was all anonymous, of course.” The truth was that the rebels had tried to recruit Tabitha and she’d turned them down. They told her to contact them if she’d had a change of heart. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she might be having one. Maybe it was because she was afraid of the Russians. But she told herself she was afraid of the Americans. She’d seen Americans get killed by Americans.

  The helipad came into view. Tabitha touched Krezi’s arm, and when the girl met her gaze, she mouthed the word Jack.

  They were silent the rest of the way to the helicopter.

  TEN

  ZASHA STOOD ON THE ROOFTOP of a Seattle skyscraper. Fyodor lay sleeping on the hard surface of a helicopter platform beside her, exhausted from the drugs.

  It had been a long day—a constant fight against the American air force in the skies, coming at them from every direction in an attempt to pierce Fyodor’s bubble, and the army units positioned on the ground to defend the harbor.

  But now the Russian fleet had landed and was offloading its cargo, creating a foothold in the city. Russian fighters were patrolling the skies. And Zasha and Fyodor were finally able to rest.

  The others like Zasha—enhanced soldiers who had been raised and trained to participate in the maskirovka—would be taking over much of the work now. There was Otto, a boy with power over the weather, who would be heading south for the attack into Portland. Ekaterina, a girl who couldn’t exactly fly but was intensely strong and tough and could leap long distances, would be going north into Canada along with Natalya and Lyubov and a handful of others.

  Zasha was heading east with the main force, through a narrow pass in the Cascade mountains. She could see the peaks in the distance.

  Fyodor stirred. Zasha sat down on the helipad next to him and laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Zasha Litvyak,” he murmured, his words slurred. “Flying ace. How many Americans have you killed?”

  “You have killed them,” she said, the breeze whipping at her hair. “You’re the hero.”

  ELEVEN

  TWO MEN STOOD IN THE apartment building’s lobby, holding Alec’s ID between them and scowling. They’d done all they could to verify his identity; Alec didn’t speak a word of Russian. Back in Denver it was his job to blend in—to look like the all-American boy he was supposed to be. His “parents”—his handlers—had smuggled him across the border and now were living a perfectly av
erage life: he was a dentist and she was a midlevel manager at a railroad. No one had ever slipped up and spoken Russian in the home, or eaten any food that could have been thought of as Russian.

  That was not to say they hadn’t trained him. Some of the training was simple: how to build a house, so that Alec would be able to understand how to knock one down. Or the lunch when he and his mom had eaten in the grassy area by the power substation, while she described how each part of it worked. The harder thing was convincing Alec that America was a bad place. He’d only known the training school back home, and America seemed like a land of plenty. So they worked on that most of all. His dad came into his bedroom every night with newspaper clippings—stories about murders where the police used excessive force, about poverty, even a combination of the two: police violence against the homeless. Then his dad would speak wistfully about Russia, and the control their homeland had against crime.

  “You,” one of the men down the hall called. “Alec Moore.”

  Alec stood up.

  “Vy govorite na russkom yazyke?”

  Alec stood there and shook his head slightly.

  “Then we’ll have to do this in English,” the man said in a heavily accented voice. “Come with me.”

  He led Alec around a corner, another man falling into step behind them. Alec realized they were afraid of him. He could tell them they didn’t need to be, but that wouldn’t do any good. He could look like a spy easily, and be shot on sight.

  They led him into a cinder-block room and handcuffed one of his wrists to a radiator. It was hot, and he knew his wrist would burn soon.

  “My hand,” Alec said. “It will scald.”

  “Then it would be best if you answer the commandant’s questions.”

  The two men left and Alec stood up, looking everywhere for the pressure-relief valve. It was on the far side.

  He picked up his metal folding chair in one hand and swung it down against the valve. He missed. He tried again. A blister was already beginning to form on his cuffed hand. This time the chair hit the valve, but the little brass fitting held.

  He swung and swung again, the pain in his hand excruciating. Finally, on his seventh attempt, the valve broke, blasting steam like a geyser into the room.

  Alec set the chair back where it belonged, and sat down. There were four large blisters just below his wristband that declared him “healthy.”

  The door opened, and a tall man strode in.

  “It’s like a sauna in here,” the commandant said.

  “Broken radiator.”

  The commandant took a seat across from Alec. “Alexi Petrovich.”

  Alec had never been called that, not even by his fake parents. His surprise must have shown on his face.

  “New name for you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s set out some ground rules. You don’t play with my mind, and I tell you the truth.”

  “It’s a deal,” Alec said.

  The commandant began reading through the file. “You were assigned to Denver with Maria Proponov and Peter Ivanovich. Raised there since you were five. You have the power to implant memories in people’s heads. Most impressive.”

  “We all do what we can for the motherland,” Alec said.

  “Your last mission didn’t go as planned.”

  “My last mission? Oh, you mean with Dan and Laura. I considered the fires I started at the Bremerton oil reserves as my last mission.”

  “Tell me about Dan and Laura.”

  Alec frowned. “Betrayal. The American military was moving in. Dan created an avalanche and Laura was supposed to pick me up and run. She never did. I was caught in the quarantine.”

  “How long did you wait for them?”

  “I pulled myself loose from the rubble after an hour or two, but there was no sign of either of them.”

  “You’ll be pleased to know that they both—independent of each other—infiltrated a Green Beret team. Sabotaged the groups from the inside.”

  “Are they alive?” Alec asked. If they were alive, he’d kill them himself. You don’t abandon your leader.

  “They’re either dead or on the run. They tried to fill the entrance to a naval base with another avalanche. That was the plan, at least. According to highly placed sources we’ve been able to gather, they were fighting each other, and Dan created the avalanche to bury Laura. The Americans don’t have the manpower to clean up that landslide yet—every piece of work equipment is being used elsewhere. No one wants to dig through a few hundred feet of dirt to see if they survived.”

  Alec had tried to kill Laura, had blamed her for leaving him in the first avalanche. The fact that she had been trying to take down a naval base didn’t make him forgive her. He was her commanding officer.

  His eyes met the commandant’s. “What do you want me to do? Send me out there. Give me a job.”

  “You can implant memories, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find a car. I want you to join the exodus of people who are leaving Seattle. I especially want trouble caused at the mouth of Snowqualmie Pass. As long as that road is packed with civilians, the Americans won’t bomb it. Put roadblocks on alert. Tell them there’s a spy among them; tell them we—those damned Russians—have broken through in the south and are heading over to flank them.”

  “Is that true, sir?”

  “Of course not.” He unwrapped a stick of Rolaids and ate half of them.

  “Yes, sir.”

  TWELVE

  AUBREY DIDN’T THROW UP ON the helicopter ride, though it took all her willpower. She hated everything about it—the pounding of the rotors, the sharp banks, the sudden drops. It didn’t help that the pilot said this was one of the smoother helicopters to ride in—that just made her feel worse.

  Her eyesight grew blurry and she got all the same feelings as when she strained against invisibility—the fatigue, the clumsiness, the body aches. She clutched Jack’s arm through the whole flight, and she didn’t care who saw.

  If there was one person onboard who looked worse than Aubrey felt, it was Josi. She spent most of her time huddled forward, head in her hands. Aubrey still didn’t know how Josi’s powers worked, but if she had such a complete, all-encompassing memory, did that mean that she wasn’t able to block out any of the sensations?

  Rich seemed thrilled by the whole thing, completely at ease, like he’d flown in helicopters his whole life. Krezi also seemed relatively unperturbed.

  For her part, Tabitha wasn’t as annoying as usual. She was probably feeling airsick, too, and it cut her snark down. Or maybe she was using her telepathy to talk to someone else.

  It was dark by the time the helicopter landed. The pilot said something that Aubrey couldn’t hear as the door slid open and they all hurried out, hauling their heavy gear with them. Aubrey was wobbly on her feet, and Josi finally did throw up, just outside the door. Aubrey let go of Jack and put her hand on Josi’s side while Jack grabbed Josi’s ruck and hauled it with him toward the officer waiting at the edge of the helipad. Josi spit and coughed, and then moved along with Aubrey.

  “I’m okay,” she mouthed.

  “I’m impressed you waited until we landed.” Aubrey had to shout to be heard over the rotor blades. Already the door was being closed, and the Black Hawk was taking to the air.

  “I’m still vibrating,” Josi said with a weak laugh.

  The officer at the edge of the pad was a Green Beret. Aubrey had worked with the Green Berets before and she had learned to respect them. What they did was hard, and they got assigned tough jobs—like working with lambdas—because they were trained for it. These were guys who trained the Afghanis to fight; supposedly they could train fifteen-year-old lambdas, too.

  “Parsons and Cooper,” the man said, reading Aubrey and Jack’s Velcro name badges as they approached. He had a hard, boxy face and a slight New England accent. There was no disdain in his eyes the way there had been with her previous Green Beret captain. This soldier s
eemed to be taking in the whole scene, assessing the situation like it was a puzzle to be solved.

  “Let’s get out of the cold,” he said, and took Josi’s ruck from Jack. He flung it over his shoulder like it was a child’s kindergarten backpack, and led the way toward a collection of darkened tents five hundred yards to the—was it the south? Aubrey felt turned around.

  “What direction are we headed?” she asked Josi, not because she really needed to know, but because she thought it might help Josi to get her mind off the helicopter ride. If her mind was ever really off something.

  Josi stretched out an arm. “That’s north,” she said weakly. She seemed to be embarrassed she wasn’t carrying her own rucksack. “So we’re going southeast. Ish.”

  “The map in your head doesn’t happen to know where we are, does it?” Aubrey asked, a smile in her voice.

  “I couldn’t see how fast the helicopter was going,” Josi said, her voice finding a little strength. “But my best guess is we’re somewhere west of Yakima.”

  “How close is that to Seattle?” Aubrey asked.

  “About a hundred and fifty miles. It’s mostly mountains between here and there. You ever seen the Cascades? A couple of giant volcanoes with smaller mountains all around them. Fun.”

  The captain was holding open the door to one of the tents, and the six of them hurried inside. Rich looked like he was dragging already. He had as much gear as the rest of them, minus the weapons, and he was the smallest member of the group, even shorter than Krezi.

  Inside were two long tables, and the captain ordered them to drop their gear and take a seat. Six of the chairs were already taken by Green Berets. Josi sat next to Aubrey on her right, and Tabitha on her left. Rich and Krezi sat by Jack on the other side. Aubrey looked over at Jack. With his helmet on, she couldn’t see the scar on the side of his head that he had gotten on their last Green Beret detachment, when the team had been sabotaged.

  “Welcome to Operation Detachment Alpha nine-one-one-nine,” the captain said, addressing everyone in the room. “I’m Captain Gillett. We don’t have a lot of time for touchy-feely, get-to-know-you games, but if all goes well, we’ll get to know each other a lot better later. For now, I’ll just explain how this first op is going to work.”