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“Well, you just got one, Corporal Nugget.”
I place the edge of my hand to my forehead. His chest pops out, his chin comes up, his eyes burn with the ol’ Sullivan fire. He returns the salute smartly.
On the porch, the sarge is having a heated debate with her second-in-command. The topic’s no mystery; you can hear them clearly through the open door. They’ve completed the mission, the 2IC argues, time to off these bastards and return to base. Capture and contain, the sarge shoots back. My orders don’t say nothing about offing anybody. She’s wavering, though; you can hear it in her voice. Her 2IC comes back with my point about the bomb-shitting beast in high orbit: Whatever she decides about the Dorothys, they have to return to base before dawn or enjoy a front-row seat to Armageddon.
The screen door bangs open and she charges right up to my face, close enough for me to catch a whiff of perfume. It’s been so long since I smelled any that my headache disappears in a single, wondrous instant.
“How’s she gonna do all this?” she shouts. “How can one person . . . ?”
“It only takes one.” My quiet answer in counterpoint to her loud question. “Just one, and the world changes. It’s not unheard-of, Sergeant.”
She stares at me with those dark, flinty eyes filled with a hundred daggers of light. “Corporal,” she snaps to her 2IC without looking away from my face, “we’re bugging out. Escort the prisoners to the chopper. They’re gonna take a little trip down the rabbit hole.” Then to me: “You remember Wonderland.”
I nod. “I sure do.”
87
BLACK BIRD RISING, the Earth falling away—from the air, the caverns are invisible. The farmhouse and the fields shine silver, and the blast of cold wind is like the voice of the world screaming. The last time I rode in a chopper, I was heading back to a different camp, on a mission to save the kid who sits beside me now, whose once-round face is now lean and stern and full of grim purpose. One day he’ll ask his grandkids, Ever tell you about the time I was promoted to corporal at the age of six?
His grandkids. According to Ringer, they’ll be fighting the same war he is. So will their grandkids and their grandkids’ grandkids. The war that can’t end while the enemy’s ship sails serenely over our heads. How could it end when all our descendants have to do is look up?
Like Sergeant Sprinter watching me from across the narrow aisle of the hold. The perfectly scary and scarily perfect thing about their plan is it doesn’t matter that she knows I’m Ted-free. Whoever’s not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This time it has.
I look away from her face to the screaming world outside the chopper. I can’t see the ground. Just the thin black line of the horizon, the congregation of a million stars, and the green eye-shaped orb that hangs just above the line separating heaven from Earth.
Someone’s touching my thigh. And it’s not the someone I expect. Dirty, scratched-up hands, chipped nails, pencil-thin arms, pinched face, a headful of tangled hair despite Sullivan’s valiant attempts to keep it combed. I touch that hair, drawing it back to tuck behind her ear, and Megan glances shyly at me but doesn’t pull away. The last time she rode in a chopper, the people she trusted had just placed a bomb inside her throat. The same people she was going back to now. How do you deal with something like that? How do you make it make sense? I almost say it; the words push against my lips and almost escape. Not going to let it happen, Megs. This time you’re safe.
The sergeant is shouting something over the headset. I catch only about 10 percent. Go four? Go four, you sure? And We got the juice for that? And a bunch of expletives you really can’t include in the percentage. At hearing the words Go four, the other recruits in the hold tighten up. I don’t know what the hell Go four means, but it doesn’t sound good.
Not good at all.
88
RINGER
FROM THE ROOF of the command center, I hear the window shatter two hundred yards away. A body tumbles out and writhes in the dirt beneath the broken window, its uniform speckled with shards of glass, groaning in pain. I can’t see her face—but even from this distance, I recognize the tangle of strawberry curls.
I sprint across the rooftop, leap forty feet to the roof of the adjacent building, then jump three stories to the ground. Sullivan sees my boots hit the grass a foot from her head and screams. She fumbles with her sidearm. I kick it out of her hand and haul her to her feet. Her uniform is soaked. Her eyes are swollen and red, her face pockmarked with angry crimson boils. She’s shaking uncontrollably, going into shock. I’ll have to act fast.
I throw her over my shoulder and sprint toward a small storage shed located on the back side of the building. The door’s padlocked. I bust it apart with one kick and carry her inside. The hub processes the data transmitted by the olfactory drones: something in the water, something toxic.
I strip off her jacket. Rip off her shirt and undershirt. Slipping in and out of consciousness, she barely resists. Boots, socks, pants, underwear. Her skin’s inflamed and clammy to the touch. I press my hand against her chest; her heart slams against my palm. I look into her weeping, unseeing eyes and shove my way into her. The toxin won’t kill her—I hope—but her terror might.
I tamp down the panic to slow her heart. The primitive part of her brain pushes back: The fight-or-flight response is older and more powerful than the technology I contain. The struggle continues for several minutes.
Our hearts, the war.
Her body, the battlefield.
89
I THROW MY JACKET over her bare shoulders. She pulls it tight across her chest, a good sign that I haven’t lost her yet.
“Where. The hell. Were you?”
“Watching this entire camp bunker-dive,” I tell her. “They’ve cut the power . . .”
She laughs harshly, then turns her head and spits. Her spittle is flecked with blood, and I think of the plague. “Did they? I hadn’t noticed.”
