The Resisters (13 page)

The train rocketed toward the tunnel.

He had to time this just right. He’d get one, and only one, shot.

Of course, Ethan knew very well that he’d pay for this one shot.

His wasp wings clicked into place at a minimal angle, laid nearly flat back against the insect body. On either side jet engines popped out and roared with fire and power.

The train was seconds from the tunnel.

Drones banked toward Ethan’s wasp and opened fire.

Laser flashes filled the air and burned his side. He twisted into a barrel roll.

Dozens of ant lion turrets aimed at him. There were eruptions from the earth.

Thunder and black clouds blossomed around him.

Shrapnel slashed through the wasp. Half his view screens went dead. Something punctured his leg and sent a wave of white-hot pain through his body.

He kept going.

He was pure blinding speed, pointed at where he thought the train would be in a few seconds.

“Ethan!” Madison cried. “Pull back! I’m here.”

He smiled. “Thanks,” he whispered to her, “for finally using my first name.”

The engine entered the tunnel—the second car—the third, half of it anyway—until Ethan grabbed it.

His wasp latched on with all six hooked limbs, flared its wings, angled its jets up, pulled and strained and flew as hard as it could.

He ripped the train off the tracks and crashed it into the tunnel mouth—then released it and arced up into the sky.

Ethan caught a split-second flash view of the rest of the high-speed bullet train piling into the wreckage, fountaining sparks, ramming derailed cars farther into the tunnel, compacting metal, and then an explosion mushroomed out of the tunnel.

It was a complete and glorious mess!

He’d done it! It would take forever to clean up and clear the tracks and tunnel.

Emma would be safe … for a while.

But his happiness lasted only a fraction of a heartbeat—then an artillery shell hit him square in the thorax.

The world detonated into black stars.

ETHAN HADN’T EXPECTED TO WAKE UP
 … so when he did, he did so with a grin on his face.

He was alive—definitely alive, because when he shifted, the pain in his leg turned that grin into a grimace.

He’d slept facedown. His pillow was stained with drool and a little blood. As he struggled to sit upright, he felt his busted lip and one eye tender and swollen.

Ethan’s smile faded as he saw
PROPERTY
OF
NORTHSIDE ELEMENTARY
stenciled on his pillow.

His heart sank.

He was back in Santa Blanca. They’d caught him.

A gentle hand helped him sit up. It belonged to an old man sitting in the chair next to his cot. The man had long white hair and a crooked smile, and he wore a white lab coat.

The room they were in was tiny. There was just space enough for the cot, a sink, a toilet, a locker, and the chair.

“You had quite a bang-up,” the old man said. “We weren’t sure we’d find anything alive when we popped open the Infiltrator I.C.E.”

Unlike when Ethan woke up yesterday with his memories scrambled, today he remembered everything—Coach Norman showing him how the Ch’zar had “saved” the world—the bus ride toward Sterling Reform School—escaping thanks to Felix and Madison—and then their mission to destroy the train.

Which he’d done … and now had to pay the price for it.

No matter what they did to him next, Ethan had won some small victory.

There were some questions he wanted answered, though.

First, he was curious about the old man. He was older than anyone Ethan had ever seen. His skin had wrinkles on its wrinkles. He creaked when he moved. But his eyes glittered with the same wild intensity that shone in Madison’s eyes.

Ethan hadn’t seen anyone like him in Santa Blanca. He’d been told that when people got this old, they retired to some resort in the tropics.

That had to be a lie, of course. What did the Ch’zar do with old people?

The second thing on Ethan’s mind was his leg.

It hurt. He was in shorts, and the exposed bruised and scraped thigh had a large yellow-spotted bandage wrapped around it.

He poked at it.

The bandage squirmed!

Ethan jumped and yelped.

“Don’t fiddle with that,” the old man told him. “It’s alive, but it’s perfectly safe. A bit of technology we picked up from our ‘friends.’ Presently it’s repairing a nick on your femoral artery … and keeping you alive.”

Ethan withdrew his hand.

Was it a caterpillar? A slug? Ick! He tried not to gag.

“You’re probably wondering what happened after the train.” The old man eased back into his chair. “Let me begin by introducing myself. I am Dr. Gordon Irving, chief scientist and head curmudgeon of this facility.”

Ethan didn’t know what he meant by “this facility,” but he did know what a curmudgeon was. He’d studied that word for last month’s spelling bee: C-U-R-M-U-D-G-E-O-N.

It meant a grouch, but that didn’t seem to fit the half smile on the old man’s face.

“If you expect me to tell you things,” Ethan said, gathering his courage, “I can save you the trouble. I’m not going to tell you mind-controlled slaves anything.”

Dr. Irving chuckled. “Good. Very good. But relax, young man. You’re not in Santa Blanca.”

Ethan picked up the pillow with the
PROPERTY
OF NORTHSIDE
ELEMENTARY
stenciled on one side and presented it to Dr. Irving.

“Oh, that. We occasionally ‘liberate’ supplies from the neighborhoods.”

“So … where am I?” Ethan asked, perplexed. “What happened?”

“You wrecked the train and lost consciousness,” Dr. Irving told him. His smile was gone. “You almost died. The Infiltrator suit switched to autopilot and flew back to base with help from the rest of your team.”

Ethan remembered. Felix had programmed his suit to escape—and if it couldn’t, to self-destruct.

He gulped and sat up straight. “Felix? Madison? They’re okay?”

Dr. Irving pulled a notepad from his lab coat and turned it on. A holographic view screen popped into the air. “Are you two still there? Our new friend is up and ready to say hello.”

Madison’s and Felix’s faces crowded on the monitor.

“Ethan!” Felix said, relieved. “They said you lost a lot of blood.”

“They said severe brain damage,” Madison added sarcastically. “It’s the only way we can explain the numskull stunt you pulled!”

“Mr. Blackwood doesn’t need to hear that,” Dr. Irving told her. “He has to debrief the colonel as soon as he can walk.”

“Of course,” Felix said, and immediately looked serious. “Ethan, we’ll catch up later. You’re in good hands.”

Behind him, Madison made a looping “you’re crazy” gesture at her head.

Dr. Irving turned off the display and slipped it back into his lab coat. “Can you stand? Colonel Winter doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

There was a chill in the doctor’s tone that made Ethan believe you didn’t keep this colonel waiting … not unless you wanted serious trouble.

Ethan tested his leg. It ached, but in a good way, like he’d worked out hard and needed to stretch. “I can walk.”

“That’s the spirit. While we’re walking, I’ll show you around, and I’ll answer any questions you have … which I surmise are numerous.”

Ethan didn’t trust Dr. Irving, but he didn’t feel immediately threatened, either. Considering everything that’d happened in the last two days, that was a huge step in the right direction.

“Thanks,” Ethan said. “Answers have been in short supply.”

“Such is the nature of the universe.” Dr. Irving got up and opened the door.

Ethan limped outside.

He and the doctor stood on a long catwalk, a row of steel doors on one side, a railing on the other. A hundred feet below rolled a landscape of farms and irrigating streams, apple orchards and vineyards. It stretched as far as
Ethan could see, but it was strange because there were walls as if this land was a room, a huge room.

Ethan gazed up and saw a ceiling far overhead, crisscrossed with lighted globes so bright, he had to squint to look at them.

“We grow our food here,” Dr. Irving explained. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Far below, people tended the fields, rode electric tractors, herded sheep and cattle—even ostriches and ibex and zebra, species that Ethan thought were supposed to be extinct.

How could this place exist?

“This way,” Dr. Irving said, and guided him by the crook of his elbow down the catwalk.

Ethan limped along.

“Felix told you of the Resistance? How when the Ch’zar came, a few people underground were able to resist their mind control?” Dr. Irving made a grand gesture. “
This
is that underground place.”

“I don’t get it,” Ethan said. “If you made this place, or if it was some government base, wouldn’t a bunch of people on the surface know about it? And then the Ch’zar would’ve taken them over and known about it too. Why haven’t they come here? Or bombed you from orbit?”

“Indeed …” Dr. Irving escorted Ethan onto a circular staircase.

They climbed up the stairs hewn through the solid rock.

“If anyone on the surface
had
known where we were,” Dr. Irving said, “we would have been destroyed.”

He paused on the stairs to catch his breath. “You know that long ago there was a war among people, all nations fighting one another, half the Earth in flames?”

“Some adults in Santa Blanca told me about it when they tried to get me to talk. It was true?”

“Yes. I was there.”

The staircase ended, and they walked down a hall as big as the Geo-Transit Tunnel. On either side were metal doughnuts the size of houses. Electrical arcs and sparks danced on their spiky condensers.

“We darn near blew the world into radioactive bits,” Dr. Irving said. “But then some very rich people decided to preserve what was left. This place was built to be a Seed Bank—a haven where plants and animals were to be kept safe. When the war was over, the Seed Bank was to provide the means to renew the Earth. Perhaps it will yet.”

Dr. Irving waved at the enormous energy reactors. “The founders provided power, water, and food to last for a hundred years. They also provided for men and women to take care of the Seed Bank.”

“So these caretakers were underground when the Ch’zar came?”

“Yes,” Dr. Irving replied, “but more important, no one involved in the Seed Bank project—even its rich founders on the surface—knew the location. That was the point. If
anyone on the outside knew, some enemy government might destroy us.”

“So the Ch’zar couldn’t read anyone’s mind to find you.”

“Precisely. When the Earth was invaded, it took us weeks to piece together what had happened … and figure out that the adults here could never go outside. Only our children.” Dr. Irving sighed, then looked at Ethan. His face brightened. “Come, you’ll enjoy this.”

They emerged in a huge chamber that could have been an aircraft hangar. Purple light flooded the room from tubes on the walls. Instead of planes or helicopters, though, the hangar had I.C.E. fighting suits, hundreds of them—beetles and dragonflies, moths with silk wings the size of hang gliders, dog-sized aphids … and wasps.

Technicians in white coveralls clustered around the suits. They attached computer monitors and adjusted exoskeleton parts with power air tools. Radiation and bio-hazard warning stickers were everywhere.

Ethan knew which suit he’d used—its exoskeleton chipped, one antenna broken, and one slender diamondmembrane wing ripped. It had living bandages plastered all over it just like the one on Ethan’s leg.

There was a fist-sized hole in its thorax. Shrapnel must have punctured the suit and Ethan’s leg, and if it’d been a little higher … he would’ve been killed.

Ethan felt a pang in his chest as if he’d been hit in the same spot. He took a step toward the suit.

The wasp’s one remaining antenna lifted toward him.

“Better not, young man,” Dr. Irving whispered. “You apparently have a strong bond with that Infiltrator suit … an unusually strong one. We need to study it a bit before you fly again. When it comes to human-insect telepathic connections, we’ve learned to be cautious.”

Ethan
had
made a connection. It’d been easy to sink into the wasp’s mind. Ethan had felt safe … part of something larger than himself. It would’ve been very easy to stay inside that thing’s head.

He shuddered and shook off the feeling.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right about that,” he whispered. “How many I.C.E. suits do you have?”

“Hundreds,” Dr. Irving said. “With thousands more in the incubation bins. We’re always finding new species and experimenting on enhancing their capabilities.”

Ethan wanted to see them all. Sure, they were gross and weird, but powerful, too … and he had to admit he could get very used flying them.

“We always need good pilots,” Dr. Irving said, and his crooked smile returned. He nodded at a set of elevator doors across the hangar. “We’ll take a closer look another time.”