He pointed to one of the Green Berets, a man with a baby face and bright red hair—the Green Berets weren’t wearing their helmets.
“This is Sergeant Sharps. He’s the youngest looking of the bunch, and he’s going to be leading this mission on the ground. Basically, we’re sending you in as a group of refugee kids, turned around and heading the wrong way.”
“The wrong way?” Krezi said. “As in, toward the battlefield?”
Aubrey froze. Krezi hadn’t asked for permission to speak, and Aubrey could see the crease form in the captain’s forehead as he debated whether or not to call out the infraction.
Captain Gillett leaned forward, resting his knuckles on the table, and looked at Krezi.
“You’re how old?”
“Almost sixteen.” After a moment she added, “Sir.”
“Fifteen,” he said, and stared down at her. She seemed to shrink in her seat under his gaze. Finally, he looked up at the rest of the team. “I want you all to start addressing each other the way that Lambda Torreon addressed me—without asking permission to speak, and without saying sir. For this assignment you are not soldiers and you’re not to act like soldiers. There will be no saluting, no military decorum of any kind. This is a recon mission.”
He pointed to Sergeant Sharps. “You can call him Nick. Like I said, he’s going to be leading you on the ground, and yes, Torreon—Lucretia—you are headed toward the front lines. That’s to be expected from a group of Green Berets, even when you’re fifteen.”
“Krezi,” she said quietly. “Not Lucretia.”
Gillett nodded slowly, his face expressionless. “Okay. Well, let’s start with you, Krezi. As you may know, the war effort is being seriously hindered by some unknown weapon that the Russians have that disables electronics.”
“Like an EMP?” Rich asked.
“No,” Gillett replied. “An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse that destroys electronics. This just turns everything off for a while. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Cars don’t work because their spark plugs don’t spark. Lightbulbs, wristwatches, computers, tanks, jeeps, airplanes, everything. Whatever this is, it has to have an impressive and mobile power source.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Krezi asked. “You said you were starting with me.”
Gillett pulled a plastic pen from his pocket and set it on the table.
“Show the team what you can do.”
Krezi grinned. “I can do a lot of things to that pen.”
“Surprise me,” Gillett said.
Krezi pointed one finger at the pen. Aubrey had heard about Krezi’s powers, but hadn’t seen them in action.
There was no flash of light, no explosion. Instead, the pen simply softened, like melting chocolate, losing its shape and turning from white to tan to brown, until it finally caught fire and burned in a slow, mellow mess.
Tabitha’s voice appeared in Aubrey’s head. “That’s . . . not impressive.”
Gillett looked up at the group. “What you just saw is the beginner course in Lucretia—I mean Krezi—Torreon. Krezi, what you bring to this group is firepower. When the power is out, you have power. They can’t fire their big guns at you, but you can fire at them. I’m told you can cut through plate steel?”
She nodded. “Slowly, but I can.”
“Slowly might be all that it takes. Plus, you’re much faster on smaller blasts. You can blow up a truck?”
Krezi thought for a moment. “I never have, but sure. I’ve split boulders in half.”
Tabitha’s voice came again. “Then maybe that’s what you should have done. Melting a pen? I’m really scared.”
Gillett spoke, his words cutting through Tabitha’s. “Krezi’s our artillery during a power outage. Next is the Trio, our primary recon team: Aubrey Parsons, Jack Cooper, and Tabitha Tyler.” Gillette looked at Aubrey. “Give us a taste of what you can do.”
“It’s not spectacular to watch,” she said.
“I don’t know how it couldn’t be.”
He didn’t understand how it worked. It wasn’t like she blipped out of existence.
“Here goes,” she said, and she disappeared.
There were all the usual looks of confusion on faces—not startled surprise, just the effects of her brain messing with theirs. She stood up and walked around to Jack’s side of the table. She watched as they began to look for her, but then got distracted as if she had never been there, and wanted to move forward with the meeting.
She reappeared. “Hi,” she said, with a little wave.
“What was that?” asked one of the confused Green Berets.
Aubrey shrugged. “I told you it’s not much to watch.”
“They don’t get it,” Tabitha said in Aubrey’s mind. Aubrey wished she could turn her off.
“She becomes invisible,” Gillett said, his face pleased but still stony. “Or more accurately, her brain sends the signal to your brain that she’s not there.”
“That’s why you were confused,” Aubrey said, returning to her chair and feeling a little embarrassed. “My brain confuses your brain.”
Sharps—Nick, the Green Beret, nodded approvingly. “Invisibility.”
“Limited invisibility,” Gillett corrected. “She still shows up on cameras, and her brainpowers only extend approximately one hundred and forty yards. If she’s farther away than that, you can see her.”
“Even so,” said another of the Berets, the name on his chest reading VanderHorst, “that’s killer recon.”
“Exactly.” Gillett pointed to Tabitha and Jack. “And with a spotting team like this, she’s a perfect spy. Jack Cooper, hypersensitivity. He can track Aubrey anywhere she goes, by sound and by smell—she wears perfume when she goes on a mission, if you can believe that.” He reached into his gear and pulled out a square box and handed it to her. “Your brand, I’ve been told?”
Flowerbomb. Just sniffing the box brought memories flooding back. Her first assignment catching a “demon” lambda; the catastrophe at the Space Needle; the avalanche.
She exchanged a smile with Jack, and set it down.
“Jack and Aubrey work well together—the two of them helped break the terror network—and now we have an added bonus: Tabitha Tyler. Tabitha is a telepath. So Jack can watch Aubrey, and Tabitha can pass intel and orders back to her. The perfect team.”
The Green Berets nodded, and Aubrey tried not to look disappointed. She didn’t want Tabitha in her head. The moments when Aubrey was alone and whispering to Jack—so far away that only he could hear—were some of their most intimate times together. Now Tabitha would be in the middle of that. Granted, Aubrey would be safer and more effective, but it was hard for her to let go of what had been.
“Next we have Richard Jefferson,” Gillett said. “He’s going to be central to everything we’re doing.”
Rich’s dark skin flushed, and he looked straight ahead—not at the captain or at the Green Berets.
“Richard can—well, how would you explain it? You can talk to machines?”
“Kind of,” Rich said.
“It’s just Rich,” Krezi said.
“Rich,” Gillett repeated, his face still mostly expressionless.
“It’s not that I can talk to machines,” Rich said, scratching under his helmet. “It’s that I can understand how they work. Just by touching them. I mean, give me any computer, and I can run it—I know the passwords, how to navigate the system, everything.”
Gillett nodded. “Or give you a car and you can drive it, or a clock full of gears and you can fix it, am I right?”
“Right.”
Gillett looked at the group, and then rapped on the table with the knuckles of his right hand. “Rich is going to solve our problem for us. We’re going to find the Russian device—this electronic-interference device—and Rich is going to explain how it works.”
There was a pause, and then Nick Sharps pointed at Josi. “What about the sick one?”
“Josi Sola,” G
illett said, nodding to her. “Imagine a photographic memory that isn’t just photographic but audio and sensory recording as well. She can’t forget a thing. I think she’s still trying to process the sensory input of the chopper ride, aren’t you?”
Josi nodded.
“Look at me,” he said, and she stared at him with weak eyes. “Tell me the names of all the Green Berets, their hair color, and something else about them.”
“Nick Sharps,” Josi began, and seemed to be fighting the urge to throw up. “Red hair with a little brown at the temples. He has an ink stain on his left index finger—I think he’s left-handed.”
“Good,” Gillett said.
“Chase-Dunn. Brown hair. Crooked nose like it was broken, I think. VanderHorst. Brown hair—kind of a muddy brown—and a mole under his right eye. Ehlers. Shaved head, but the stubble is light, probably blond. Tattoo of a sword on his wrist.”
“That’s Excalibur,” Ehlers said proudly.
“Lytle. Black hair. Scar along his chin. And Uhrey. Black hair and he’s cracked his knuckles eight times since we’ve been in this room.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then Lytle leaned forward. “So what is that for? I mean, no offense, darlin’, but do we need a Sherlock Holmes on our team?”
Gillett finally sat down at the end of the table. “She memorizes what Rich tells her. Let me lay out the plan for tomorrow. First of all, the goal: we want to get Rich in contact with one of the Russian vehicles. We figure that there’s something about their vehicles that keeps them immune to the effects of whatever device is interfering with our electronics. So Rich touches a truck or a jeep or a tank and figures out how it works and what makes it so special. You can do that, Rich?”
Rich nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Gillett cut him off.
“Rich relays the schematics of the machine to Josi, who won’t forget a word.”
Lytle spoke up again. “Can’t we just use a camera and a voice recorder?”
“Not if the power’s out,” Gillett said. “This team is designed to operate without electricity. We wouldn’t need Tabitha if we could rely on radios. We wouldn’t need Jack if we could rely on night vision. We wouldn’t need Krezi if we could rely on heavy firepower. As for Aubrey—well, she can turn invisible, and that’s useful whether the power’s on or not.”
Rich raised his hand. It made him look very young, like a kid in school. Which was exactly where they all should have been, Aubrey thought.
“Yes,” Gillett said, nodding to Rich.
“This may be a dumb question, but how am I going to touch a Russian truck? Isn’t there a war going on?”
Aubrey was glad that Rich asked it, because she’d been thinking the same thing. She could sneak up on a truck, but she couldn’t bring someone with her.
“It should actually be easy. Well, relatively easy. There’s no war front near Seattle—not anymore, not after the landing. There’re too many civilians, and they’re clogging the streets trying to get out of town. The Russians have pledged to drive all Americans out of Washington. In fact, rumor has it that they’ve asked us nicely to just leave.”
“How does that make it easy?” Rich asked again, clearly nervous.
“Because it’s not like you’re sneaking up on the front lines of World War Three. We’re going to be sneaking up—if you can call it that—on a roadblock in Snowqualmie Pass. Our forces are waiting until the civilians clear out and until we can isolate this electronic device to counterattack. There’s no shooting going on up there, except for the citizens who have taken up resistance fighting.”
It was Tabitha who spoke next. “So we’re just driving up to a roadblock—to the place where they’re looking specifically for soldiers?”
“It’ll be a panicked nightmare,” Gillett said. “A steady line of refugees on one side of the road and you guys on the other. You’ll run into the roadblock, they’ll probably turn you around, and you’ll mix into the sea of evacuees. Only Sergeant Sparks—Nick—is going with you. He looks young. The Russians will think you’re just another pack of teenagers in a minivan.”
“Do we have a cover story?” Jack asked.
“I don’t suppose you’ll need much of one,” Gillett said, “but we can hammer that out.” He unfolded a map across the table. Aubrey recognized the city names from when they’d fled Seattle, just over two months ago. It felt like she was going back into the lion’s den.
THIRTEEN
“JACK, I DON’T LIKE THIS.”
Jack had been listening for Aubrey all night but knew she wasn’t getting a lot of privacy. The girls’ tent was a hive of activity, with soldiers coming and going from several different units. It was only now, as Jack heard the crunch of gravel under Aubrey’s feet and smelled the splash of Flowerbomb perfume on her, that he could focus on her voice—and that he knew she could talk privately.
“I’m outside,” she said, and then laughed. “I probably don’t need to tell you that. I went for a walk. I can’t sleep. I hope you’re awake.”
He wished he could answer her, wished that he had Tabitha’s powers.
He wished he and Aubrey were getting in a car in the morning and driving to Mexico, not into a potential combat situation.
“I don’t like that Tabitha’s in charge,” Aubrey said. “I know that’s petty. But she and I are the same rank, and I don’t know why Captain Gillett chose her to be second-in-command.”
Jack thought he knew. It was because Tabitha was the one giving the orders to Aubrey via telepathy. Supposedly Tabitha would be watching over everything. Not that it mattered. They had Sergeant Sparks—Nick—with them. He was really in charge. He’d be calling all the shots.
“But that’s not the worst thing,” Aubrey said. “I’m supposed to clear a path for Rich to approach a Russian vehicle. What does that mean? Shoot people while I’m invisible? That doesn’t make me a soldier—it makes me an assassin. A cold-blooded killer. That’s not what I agreed to.”
It had troubled Jack, too, but Aubrey was leaping to the worst possible scenario. Ideally, she could just cause commotion on one side of the roadblock—spill a little gas, start a fire. Or puncture the tires on a truck and get the soldiers working on repairing them while Rich snuck in from the other side. It would be dark, and hopefully the guys manning the roadblock would have too much to deal with to notice Rich and Josi.
Aubrey had stopped now, no more rocks crunching under her feet. She let out a long, slow breath that sounded like it had a little shiver to it. It was almost Thanksgiving, and there was snow in the mountains between the camp and their target.
“Did we agree to this?” Aubrey asked, her voice quieter. “I mean, I know we said yes, but did we really know what we were agreeing to? Did we do this because we wanted to join the army, or did we do it because we didn’t want to be locked up in quarantine? I remember standing up and saying we’d join—we did it together—but why did we do it? Do you remember?”
He honestly didn’t. Maybe it was a surge of patriotism. Maybe he was thinking that they needed to protect their homes and families. They’d been shown pictures of everything the terrorists had destroyed—the collapsed bridges and the burned malls and the fallen skyscrapers. But was that why they had joined? In his heart, Jack wondered if he had done it to stay close to Aubrey. And he wondered if she had joined because she had nowhere else to go. Her father had sold her out when the army had begun searching for scattered teens during the initial roundup. Jack doubted if she’d ever go back to him.
“Ugh,” Aubrey said, and then laughed. “Sorry I’m so depressing. Maybe you’re sleeping and not hearing any of this and I’m just talking to myself. As if I didn’t already feel like a dork.”
She started walking again and Jack imagined he was walking beside her, holding her hand.
“Josi is doing better. A medic came and checked her out. Did you know they have medics who are assigned especially to the lambdas? They act like they have it figured out, although I don’t believe
it. Do you know what advice he gave her? To keep her eyes closed whenever she could, to sleep a lot, and to avoid stressful situations. Seriously. We’re going to the front lines in an hour and she’s supposed to avoid stressful situations.
“Anyway, you probably need to sleep and not listen to me. I should be sleeping, but I figure I can do that in the van on the way.”
She paused for a long time, not walking or talking. Just standing still. “I can’t believe it’s starting again,” Aubrey finally said. “We’re going to see people die again, Jack. We might die. You might die.”
Jack closed his eyes and wished he could say something to her. Something comforting and soothing. Something to make everything better. But there was nothing. She was right.
She might die.
“I’m going to get in out of the cold. Sleep good, Jack.”
Jack drove the van, with Nick sitting in the passenger seat. They were on the interstate headed through the mountains. The clock on the dash read 3:15 a.m., and they hoped to hit a roadblock sometime around five.
There were thousands of cars on the other side of the median, all fleeing from the invasion, but the westbound lanes were empty. Occasionally they’d hit a roadblock of American forces, and Nick would give them the proper passwords and authorization to get them through.
None of them were carrying any official papers, and they’d all removed their dog tags and left them with Captain Gillett back at the base. They were spies. If they were found out, they could all be shot according to the rules of war. Jack didn’t know whether that thought gave him any more or less fear than their mission.
Nick turned the heat up. He was wearing a sweater and jeans. Everyone else had coats—all commandeered from a department store in Yakima.
“I bet you didn’t know this,” he said, staring out the front window, “but it gets cold as hell in Afghanistan. You always think about it as a desert, but those are some high frigging mountains, and the wind can blow like a son of a bitch.”