The Resisters (12 page)

“Once it’s in hibernation,” Madison said, now defeated, “it takes a team of technicians hours to wake an I.C.E. suit.” She removed her hand from the insect, hesitating as if it physically hurt to part with it.

Ethan realized it wasn’t just the suit she had to leave behind.

The suit had belonged to the lost third member of their team … someone who had obviously meant a lot to Madison.

He wasn’t happy about destroying the suit either, but he understood Felix’s point about keeping it from the Ch’zar.

Ethan was, in fact, itching to finish this, get to Emma, and warn her. He wanted to figure out if his parents were part of the creepy Collective, too.

And yet, seeing Madison on the verge of tears … he
had to
help her somehow.

Ethan marched to the wasp. He knelt next to it and pounded on it like he had when it had first opened for him.

“Get up!” he demanded.

“Don’t …,” Madison said. “There’s nothing anyone can do.”

As his fist touched the armor, something clicked in his mind.

A connection.

It was like Ethan was dreaming and struggling, swimming
upward through sleep to wakefulness … and when he finally opened his eyes, he stared at himself and Felix and Madison and saw every single tool and shelf in the shed … because he was looking through the compound eyes of the wasp.

He and the wasp stood.

Fluid pumped through his limbs, his vision filled with blinking status lights, and even the stinger-laser on his tail heated to standby mode. He felt strong enough to tear through the shed.

Ethan released the armor plates that covered the cockpit.

Now let me go
, he thought.
And thanks for waking up
.

His mind detached from the wasp.

But part of the insect’s mind clung to him. It was like a warm coat he’d put on to protect himself from the cold. It was like a friend. Like a part of himself that he didn’t want to leave.

Was this what it would feel like being in the Ch’zar Collective? Only instead of joining with one, you’d be surrounded by millions and millions of minds. You’d feel totally safe. Perfectly welcome.

Completely lost.

He could drown in that feeling, lose the Ethan Blackwood that his parents had taught to be strong and make his own choices.

Ethan snapped out of it.

He found himself standing in the shed. Cold and alone.

But himself.

Madison and Felix stared dumbfounded at him.

“You can’t do that,” Madison whispered.

Felix snapped his thick fingers in front of Ethan’s face. “Are you with us, Blackwood? You spaced out for a second.”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” he said.

“No one has ever force-started an I.C.E. from hibernation,” Madison breathed. “He’s a freak.”

“Or a prodigy,” Felix murmured.

Felix and Madison looked at each other.

Felix shook his head no at the same time Madison’s face brightened and she nodded yes.

“It should be easy to get the suit out,” Ethan said, obviously not in on their secret, silent conversation. “Right?”

“You can
really
fly it?” Madison asked. “Fight? Everything?”

“I did before,” Ethan told her, “under a lot more pressure.”

“Don’t …,” Felix told Madison.

“But now we can complete the mission.” Madison glanced at her watch. “We have twelve minutes. That’s just enough time for Blackwood to fly us back to the barn. We get our suits and the three of us stop that train.”

“Train?” Ethan said to himself.

How could he have forgotten? Emma and a half-dozen other students had been accepted into Early Honors Admission. That train would take Santa Blanca’s best and
brightest away—kids thinking they were about to start the rest of their lives, when in reality their lives as individual people were about to end.

“You know how important this mission is,” Madison went on, almost pleading with Felix. “Santa Blanca is the train’s
first
transfer. We stop it before it gets here, and it saves kids in nine other neighborhoods. We can throw the entire Ch’zar harvesting apparatus into chaos. Maybe retrieve some of the—”

“No,” Felix said. “I’m in charge of this mission. We lost one member of the team already. We almost lost one of our suits. Twelve minutes isn’t time enough for us to get back, scout the area, and set up a proper operation.”

These two could argue all day, but Ethan had to do
something
. His sister’s life was at stake.

He could go to her—assuming no adult found him, and also assuming he could convince her that he wasn’t crazy—and he could stop her from getting on that train. But even if he could, that’d just delay the inevitable.

Emma was a year older than him. She’d change sooner. Become an adult … and be absorbed into the Collective no matter what he did.

He had to do something better. Bigger.

Like stop the Ch’zar.

In a soccer match, sometimes the field cleared of defenders all the way to the goal, and you took the shot.

Ethan saw this was the same thing. He was going to take his best shot.

He went to the wasp and put his legs into the creature. “I’m going,” he told them. “My sister’s supposed to get on that train. I’ll do whatever it takes to stop it.”

Felix grabbed his arm. “I can’t let you do that.”

Ethan stared at his grip. “Can you stop me?”

Their eyes met.

Felix didn’t blink. Neither did Ethan.

Ethan knew the big guy could pull him out of the suit and knock him silly if he wanted, but something was different between the two of them now.

Standing inside the wasp suit, Ethan felt … not exactly invulnerable, but at least an equal match for powerful Felix.

Felix let go and tapped a few controls inside the wasp.

He turned back to Ethan and flashed him an angry look. “I
can
stop you,” he whispered. “I’m not going to, though, because Madison’s right. We were sent to stop that train—it’s important to the Resistance—and we’re going to do it. But we’re going to do it
my
way, understand?”

Ethan nodded. He listened. He had a feeling his life might depend on what Felix told him next.

“I set your autopilot to turn on if you lose consciousness,” Felix said. “It’ll access the parts of your brain that regulate breathing and heartbeat to fly the suit back to our base. If the armor gets compromised, though, or if you die … then the suit will self-destruct. Do you understand?”

Ethan swallowed. “Yeah. Got it.”

“Good. Fly over the mountains. Keep low. If you’re not
spotted, watch the tunnel entrance. We’ll meet you there. If you see the train, do
not
engage it. It’ll be too heavily defended. Instead, fire on the train tracks. Blow those up, and it’ll have to stop. That will give us time to get to you. Now, repeat that back to me.”

“Fly over the mountains,” Ethan said. “Watch the tunnel entrance. Shoot the tracks. Wait for you. I got it.”

Felix set one of his hunormous hands on Ethan’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’m not sure if you’re brave or monumentally stupid like Madison says, but either way, Ethan, good luck. We’ll catch up as soon as we can.”

Ethan felt like he was going to be sick, but he had to hold it together a little longer … for his sister.

“Thanks,” he told Felix, and then looked at Madison.

She pursed her lips, opened her mouth, and looked for a second like she was going to say something encouraging—then finally told him, “Don’t mess this up, Blackwood!”

She and Felix darted out of the shed.

Ethan didn’t think he’d ever understand Madison … or any girl.

He closed the armor. The wasp hummed to life around him.

He crouched and jumped out of the shed, destroying the roof in the process.

The wasp’s wings snapped into place and he shot straight into the air.

ETHAN DID EXACTLY AS FELIX HAD ORDERED
—he flew low. The truth was, as soon as he started flying … he was too scared to do anything else. He dodged and rolled past tree trunks and rocks and branches, keeping low and out of sight. If he hit one of those (flying, he guessed, at two hundred miles an hour), he’d be bug paste.

The acrobatic moves soon became easy, though. It felt like Ethan and the wasp swam in slow motion underwater, able to slide and roll and carve through the air with precision.

What wasn’t easy were the doubts that caught up with him.

He tried to focus on his sister, on how much she depended on him … even if she didn’t know it.

But his thoughts drifted back to his parents.

For the first time in his life, he
wanted
them to be
different—different because they had only four children when everyone else in the neighborhood had eight or nine—different because they’d raised him and Emma to think on their own and not care what anyone else said about them—and different because with all his heart, Ethan hoped that they weren’t part of the mind-controlled alien Collective that would make them … well,
not
real parents.

He crossed the mountain ridge and zoomed down the barren slope.

He’d be easy to spot, so he quickly ducked into a crevasse. From there he could see the desert wasteland where the Geo-Transit Tunnel emerged.

Nothing had tried to stop him … so he figured nothing had seen him.

So far, so good.

Although there were plenty of things out there
to
see him.

At least twenty drones patrolled the airspace along the train tracks. He spotted a few of the smaller red-and-black wasps darting by too. Those worried him. Madison’s dragonfly had fought those. They were nimble and fast.

He wondered if his wasp’s stealth mode affected other wasps. Was the stealth mode even on? He wished this wasp armor came with an instruction manual.

There was a glint of silver on one view screen by the tunnel entrance.

Ethan squinted. The wasp magnified the image for him.

It was nothing but a mirage ripple.

But then colored filters and strange symbols and targeting circles swarmed over the ghostly form. The monitor turned black and white and Ethan saw the outline of an ant lion. Its silver armor was near-perfect camouflage.

The last thing he wanted to see was one of
those
things again.

He shuddered … and got a bad feeling.

“Pull back the view,” he told the wasp.

The black-and-white image on-screen zoomed back out.

Ethan gasped.

There were a dozen ant lions clinging to the side of the cliff, clustered around the tunnel. Also, on the ground, set every fifty feet along the train tracks, there was a dimple in the dirt. In the center of each depression were silver camouflaged jaws, black beady eyes staring out, and the snout tip of an artillery cannon.
More ant lions
.

This was bad. Anything that got close to the train tracks or the tunnel would get blasted before it could shoot back. He’d imagined he’d be able to blow up the tracks by lining up a shot—fly down the track’s length so he wouldn’t miss and would cause maximum damage. The way those ant lions were positioned, though, he’d be lucky to get one flyby shot before they took him out.

“Felix? Madison? Can you hear me?”

There was a burst of static; then Felix answered, “Roger that, Blackwood. We just got to the suits. Stand by.”

“Well, stand by is all I
can
do. When you said the train
would be guarded, you weren’t kidding! Ant lions are everywhere—around the tunnel, and covering the tracks as far as I can see.”

There was a long pause, and then Felix said, “Madison’s ETA is sixty seconds. Hang tight.”

Ethan nodded. That was a dumb thing to do because no one could see him. “Got it,” he said.

Two of his cameras swiveled and focused on the horizon. They showed a magnified image.

A train.

It magnetically levitated over the tracks, a speeding blur that Ethan knew had a top speed (thanks to last Thursday’s science class) of 350 miles per hour.

“Train’s coming,” he said, and heard his voice waver. “It’ll be here in a lot less than a minute.”

“I’m kicking in my afterburners,” Madison said over her radio, and the channel filled with thunder. “Revised ETA thirty seconds.” In the distance a sonic boom echoed.

But the train was already halfway to the tunnel. Ethan guessed it’d be there in
ten
seconds.

“It’s safe once it’s in the tunnel,” Ethan whispered.

“Don’t panic,” Felix said. “If the train goes in, it’ll eventually come out. We have time. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“When it comes back, it’ll be full of students … and my sister. We can’t risk destroying it then.”

Ethan pushed off from his hiding place and took to the air.

“Sorry, Felix, I’ve got to do this, even if it is stupid.”

“Ethan, don’t!”

He flew as fast as he could.

Ethan had to destroy the train
before
it got to the tunnel—destroy it in such a way that the Ch’zar couldn’t just clear the tracks and send another.

The world around him blurred with speed.