The Always War (12 page)

“Keep your voice down,” Dek hissed at him. “And—tell us why we should believe you and not believe what we see with our own eyes.”

Gideon pointed toward the curve of water near the horizon.

“That’s Lake Mish,” he said. “And over there—see that line of blue leading to the lake?—that’s the Shargo River. I
know
this landscape. That’s exactly how Lake Mish and the Shargo River
are
. I’ve looked at this area a million times on spy satellite footage. I’ve done hundreds of simulation attack plans flying over it. I’ve done simulations dropping bombs on this very tower!”

“Simulations,” Dek said. “Not real.”

Gideon glared at her.

“In simulations,” he said, “everything is as real as they can make it, without actually having the planes in the air.”

Tessa was staring out at the field of grass, thinking about
the weird way the gravel was scattered all over it. She gasped.

“What would happen,” she said, “if people just abandoned a bunch of runways? Or—any area where there’s a lot of concrete? After a while wouldn’t it crack? Wouldn’t grass start growing up in the cracks?” She could remember seeing this back home in Waterford City, the way untended parking lots always sprouted weeds. “And then, wouldn’t the roots of the grass start breaking up the concrete? Until … eventually … it’s nothing but gravel?”

“You think the enemy would abandon their biggest airfield?” Gideon asked incredulously. “You think they’d abandon
Shargo
? Why?”

“Hey,” Dek said, “maybe our side’s really winning. Maybe we’ve already won.”

Tessa thought about everything they’d seen flying over enemy territory.

“Maybe they just show you old footage for simulations,” she said. “Just for your practice. Remember back on the plane, when you were getting all upset about seeing nothing but trees? There was one spot where I thought I saw something brick alongside one of the trees—like an old chimney, maybe?”

“There was a bombing raid there
yesterday morning
,” Gideon reminded her. “A tree can’t grow out of a chimney in one day!”

“Yeah, and according to the computer, there was a bombing raid right on top of us
this
morning down by Santl,” Tessa countered. “Sometimes computers can be wrong.”

Gideon sagged against the wall. Tessa didn’t want to think
about how much of the bird droppings were rubbing off on his white uniform.

“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Remember that video I showed you of the people dying in
my
bombing raid, in the battle I fought in?”

“Yes,” Tessa said, very gently, because somehow that seemed like the right way to speak to Gideon right now.

“Well, I was never supposed to see that. We pilots don’t have that kind of security clearance,” he said. “I had to hack my way in.”

“Huh,” Dek grunted. “And here I had you pegged as a total straight-arrow military type. Not
that
much of a rule-breaker. Definitely not a hacker.”

Gideon didn’t even glance her way.

“I had to see what I’d done,” he said pleadingly. “What I’d caused. What I was responsible for.”

“Okay,” Tessa said soothingly. “But—”

“So that’s proof, you know?” Gideon said. “What we saw of my raid, of the raid here in Shargo—that’s what the
generals
see! It’s real! It’s not some made-up simulation for fake pilots!”

He hit the wall again and twisted his head about even more crazily, his face going even more wild-eyed. He flinched just at the sight of the peaceful grass, the peaceful trees. He looked like he might do anything—jump out the window or attack Tessa and Dek or just collapse in a heap of huge, soul-racking sobs.

“Calm down,” Dek said. She took a step toward him, her hands up in the air in a gesture that was clearly supposed to
show that she, at least, was no threat. It was the same way someone might approach a dangerous animal.

“What do you know about any of this?” Gideon asked bitterly.

“Nothing,” Dek admitted. She took another step closer. “But I’m sure there’s some explanation, something we haven’t thought of because we don’t have enough information. You know that’s how the military works. The people at the top only tell the people at the bottom certain things, just enough to get them to do what they want.”

Tessa expected Gideon to argue with this. If nothing else, she wanted him to say,
I wasn’t someone at the bottom! I’m the hero!
But he only shrugged, probably grinding more of the bird droppings into his white uniform.

“That’s how the black market rings work too,” Dek admitted. “Sometimes, if you’re sneaky enough, you can find out things people don’t want you to know.” She flashed him a grin. “But you already know that, if you were hacking into top-secret video.”

Gideon didn’t answer. Dek kept inching toward him.

“The thing is, other times you just have to make do,” she said. “All you can do is pick a course of action based on what you do know, what seems most likely to keep you alive.” She reached Gideon’s side and put a steadying hand on his arm. She tugged him gently around to face the window once again. “This is one of those times. Do you see anything out there that looks like a jet-fuel tank?”

Gideon raised a shaking hand and pointed to the right, to a place where the grass was short and stubby rather than long and flowing.

“In all the simulations,” he said dully, “the fuel tanks were underground, right about there. We … we got bonus points if we dropped the bombs in a way that cracked the concrete, made the tanks explode. I did that once. That’s how I got promoted, how I qualified to go on real bombing raids.”

Dek started to pull him back away from the window, but he locked his muscles in place. He kept staring out at the peaceful grass with a haunted look on his face, as if his eyes were showing him an entirely different scene.

“That’s how I qualified to kill people,” he said.

Dek patted his arm.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. All that’s over now.”

Gideon turned and looked at her as if she’d just told him the biggest lie of all.

The fuel tanks were still there.

Tessa might have expected Gideon to gloat, to tell Dek,
See, I am not making all of this up! I do know what I’m talking about!
But he just stood there in silence, a vacant expression on his face, while Dek muttered on and on about how hard it was going to be getting any fuel out when all the pumping mechanisms had rusted and rotted away, and, “Even if we manage to draw some of that fuel up to the surface, how are we going to carry it over to the plane? And what if it’s too contaminated to be any good?”

Tessa didn’t even pretend to understand the strategies Dek came up with. Dek ordered both Tessa and Gideon around like slaves. She had them take apart pieces of the plane’s engine to carry over to the fuel tanks to reassemble into a makeshift
contraption for siphoning up the fuel. Curved pieces of metal from the plane’s wings became the carrying jugs to take the fuel back to the plane, one shallow, easily spilled load at a time. Tessa alone must have made thirty trips back and forth.

Even after just a few trips Tessa’s feet ached, her back ached, her arms ached. She got a nasty cut on her leg from the metal, and it burned when her own sweat ran down into it. Her throat burned too, because it turned out that there wasn’t enough water on the airplane, and Dek insisted on rationing it out in small sips.

Even Tessa’s fingernails hurt, because she still had to scoop up gravel to test out a safe path without any land mines between the plane and the fuel tanks.

Don’t think,
Tessa told herself.
Just walk.

And then that bothered her, because wasn’t that pretty much how people did things back in Waterford City?

She thought about Dek’s explanation of how the military worked, how black market rings worked:
The people at the top only tell the people at the bottom certain things, just enough to get them to do what they want.

As far as Tessa could tell, that was how the whole world worked. And she was so far down at the bottom that nobody had ever bothered to tell her anything except “Do this,” “Do that,” “Scrub this,” “Carry that.”

And she’d always gone along with it, until she’d met Gideon.

I was capable of figuring out that the gravel in the grass is the remains of all those military runways Gideon saw in his simulations,
Tessa told herself.
Why aren’t I thinking as hard as I can,
trying to figure out all the other mysteries we’ve encountered today?

Tessa’s brain started hurting too, aching just as violently as her back and her feet and her arms.

She decided to start with just one small bit of the whole puzzle:

Dek.

“How’d you get to know so much about airplanes and flying and fuel pumps and everything?” Tessa asked Dek on her next trip to the fuel tanks.

Dek balanced a piece of rubber hose that had come out of the plane engine at the edge of the curved metal Tessa was using to haul the fuel. She undid some sort of clamp she’d rigged up, and a thin stream of rusty liquid trickled out.

“My dad was a mechanic,” Dek said. “Even when I was a baby, he’d hand me motors and stuff like that to play with. So I was either going to die from choking on a bolt or a nut or a washer, or I was going to grow up knowing my way around engines. I guess it could have gone either way.”

The fuel was flowing so slowly it hadn’t reached anywhere near the rim of the metal piece. Tessa thought there was time for another question.

“So wasn’t your dad really proud when you were chosen for the military academy?” she asked.

Dek became very still.

“He was dead by then,” she said. “Both my parents were.”

“Yeah, but you could have honored him by joining up,” Tessa argued. “You could have dedicated everything you did in the military to his memory.”

Dek shut down the clamp on the hose.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said in a voice that was like a door slamming in Tessa’s face.

Tessa’s legs started shaking.

You’re a little kid
, she wanted to tell Dek.
You’re just a street brat. Working for criminals. Who are you to go around acting like you’re better than me? You’re no better than a flea. A gnat. A—

Tessa remembered that those were the same taunts that nasty Cordina Kurdle had flung at Tessa, back at Gideon’s awards ceremony. Was this what it felt like to be Cordina, to feel so worthless that you had to tear everyone else down too?

Tessa blinked back tears. She was hungry, she was thirsty, she was tired, she hurt—and she still thought there was a decent chance she and Dek and Gideon were going to get killed. Why did even talking to Dek have to be painful?

What in life wasn’t pain?

Gideon came up behind them just then, back from his own fuel-carrying trip to the plane.

“I think we should finish up, make this our last trip,” he said, casting an anxious glance toward the sky. “That fuel gauge says we’ve got half a tank now, and that’s more than enough to get us back across the border into Eastam.”

Tessa could tell he was worried about having to spend even a second longer here on the ground, exposed, in enemy territory.

“How long you think we’re going to need to stay in the air once we’re across the border?” Dek asked.

The glance that passed between her and Gideon was charged with an unusual undercurrent, some sort of understanding that excluded Tessa.

This made Tessa even madder.

I am not going to keep being the stupid person here,
she thought.
I can at least try to figure this out. Fuel … the border …

Then she understood.

“You think our own border guards are going to shoot us down,” she said.

Gideon wouldn’t look her in the eye.

“They’re trained to make split-second decisions,” he said. “We’ll be coming from enemy territory, we won’t be tagged in their system as one of their own returning from a legitimate bombing raid—”

“So hack into their system again and change that!” Tessa suggested.

Gideon shook his head.

“No way I could do that from enemy territory,” he said.

“But—our plane still has defensive shields, right?” Tessa asked.

“Not that work against our own missiles,” Gideon said miserably. “See, everything’s coded …”

Tessa felt dizzy, unable to take all this in.
Then … if it’s not safe to fly across the border, let’s just stay here,
she almost said. But they’d already run out of water, and Tessa didn’t think they had any more of the nutri-squares. And, anyway, they were in enemy territory. Even if the area around them seemed deserted, every moment they spent here was borrowed time.

“I would think … if it’s dangerous to cross the border … we’d want to have as much fuel in our tank as possible,” she said, still grasping for something hopeful to say. “So we can fly all along the border, until we find the safest place to cross.”

“As soon as we can see the guards, they can see us,” Gideon said lifelessly.

“And the more fuel we have, the more likely it is that our plane will explode when we get hit,” Dek added.

Tessa slumped, almost spilling the precious, dangerous fuel pooled on her piece of metal. Wasn’t there any possibility to hold on to, any reason for hope?

“We have parachutes,” Gideon offered.

Tessa thought she finally saw the full picture, with all the depressing details Gideon and Dek had agreed upon in a single glance. Gideon and Dek were almost certain they were going to get shot down. All they could hope for was that they could make it out of the crash alive.

And land on the proper side of the border.

Nobody spoke as they carried the last load of fuel back to the plane, along with the various pieces of plane parts that had been made over into a fuel siphon and were soon to be returned to their original purpose. Dek and Gideon worked together to reassemble the plane; Tessa stood nearby handing them screws and bolts and tools. Most of the time she gave them the wrong thing at the wrong time, but neither of them complained.