Walking Ghost Phase (23 page)

When the last drop cleared the bottle
's rim, Emily said nothing and walked into class. Matt and Sarah arrived two minutes later.

“
Morning class,” Stallings said, and went to his computer.

“
Morning, sir,” everyone replied.

“
Another fine night in the ACES, if I must say so. Let's get to your times.”

Sarah twitched on her stool and bumped Emily
's shoulder. She showed her teeth in an exaggerated smile

“
What?” Emily whispered.

With the ridiculous expression still on her face, Sarah nodded toward Stallings, who cleared his throat.
“What happened, Private Peters?” he asked. “You went from a consistent first all the way to dead last. Twelve minutes, eight seconds.”

Emily
's jaw dropped. “You didn't,” she whispered.

“
Kill him? No.” She sounded offended at the idea.

“
A fluke, sir,” Damon replied.

“
In a real battle, flukes will kill you and your squad. Don't let it happen again.”

“
Yes, sir. It won't.”

Stallings ran through the next fourteen soldiers, which included Emily but not Sarah or Matt.

“Looking good so far,” Emily whispered.

“
In second place,” Stallings said, “Private Holcomb at two hours, thirteen minutes, forty seconds. Not bad, Private.”

“
Thank you, sir,” Matt said.

“
Thanks, Matt,” Sarah whispered.

“
And taking top honors—” Stallings said,

No way.

“—the first soldier at Greaver to complete one-hundred percent of the objective—”

No way.

“— Private Winston.”

At first, Emily
's classmates just looked at one another. Perhaps, like her, they waited for the punch line.
Good one, Captain. You sure got us.
Maybe they had suffered from the same confusing dreams as Emily and expected the morning alarm to wake them any moment.

“
Excellent job, Private,” Stallings continued. “You should thank Private Holcomb for clearing the area. But I must say, fine shooting.”

No, it had actually happened. Emily
that knew for certain when Stallings began his lecture on proper formations in open areas, when Matt took his usual notes and when Sarah doodled on her notepad. Too much normalcy for a dream.

In the mess hall, soldiers congratulated Sarah on her victory. Several offered to finish her lunch, and soon a bidding war broke out at the table. Three days of no lunch. Make it four. A week straight. A lanky young man even shouted that he would take a beating for her during the morning run. This all came with a price, of course. Bribes intended to make Sarah reveal her winning strategy.

Sarah smiled, seeming to enjoy the attention. She motioned for the soldiers to gather around her as if she wanted them—and only them—to hear the answer. “Here's the secret, boys.” She paused for obvious dramatic effect. “Pure skill.” At once, her admirers moaned and returned to their tables, their heads lowered, eyes defeated. Emily wondered what they contemplated more: their actual failure to squeeze the information from Sarah, or the inevitable night in darkness
because
they failed to squeeze the information from Sarah. The burning flame across flesh. The feeling of losing one's sanity. Sarah's lunch started to look more appealing.

Emily reached over the table and grabbed Sarah
's wrist. “You are going to tell me how you did it, right?”

“
How many beatings are you willing to take for me?”

Emily rolled her eyes.
“Just the one the MPs give me for dragging you back to the pharmacy. Come on, tell me.”

Instead of answering, Sarah looked at Matt.

“Don't bring me into this,” Matt said. “You killed the snipers.”

“
Only because you told me where I should position myself. Sorry they got you first.”

Emily elbowed Matt in the ribs.
“See? I knew you'd finally come around and make a good teammate.”

“
Oh,” Sarah said. “He wasn't in my squad.”

“
What? How?”

“
I twisted my ankle on the way up the stairs, so my squad went ahead without me. They got creamed at the top. It sounded bad, too. Explosions, screams—not much gunfire, though.” She lifted her hands and made air quotes. “Amazingly—” She dropped her hands. “—my ankle didn't hurt anymore, and I ran back to the lobby as fast as I could and hid in a closet. The four defenders that came after me were getting close. Right when I think they're about to kill me, all four get their brains blown out by this lone soldier.” She nodded once at Matt. “He cleared the rest of the roof but got shot in the process. Before he died, though, he told me where to shoot from. Those moronic snipers never saw me.” Sarah closed one eye and held an invisible rifle against her shoulder. “Picked them off one by one. Sweet justice if you ask me.”

Damon was walking through the aisle, when he paused behind Emily, his eyes still forward.
“Good job, Winston. Nice to see you're doing okay, Heath.”

Emily nodded and waited for him to take a seat three tables down.
“He must have messed up bad to get last place.”

Matt snorted.

“What did you do?”

“
Nothing,” Matt said.

“
No, you don't get off that easy. You know something.”

“
Yeah,” Sarah said. “Tell us.”

“
I'll take it to my grave,” he said.

His cheek didn
't twitch.

A familiar face waited for Emily at
vat 1220.
Does he put in a request for me?
She also doubted the pervert would fall for the inhaler excuse again. No, she needed a new lie—something simple yet believable. After climbing into the gel unassisted, she batted her eyes at him and showed off her best flirty smile. “I really need to pee.”

“
Tough.” He shoved the breathing tube in her mouth, almost dislocating her jaw. “Ready on 1220.” When she reached up to see if he had busted her lips, her hand smacked the hard visor surface.

A view of tan speckles filled Emily
's eyes. She stepped back and studied the frame of an adobe shack, which rose a few feet above her head. Clumps of clay and footprints dotted the unpaved streets, and not a cloud hung in the sky to shield her from the sun.

She peeked around the shack.

Whoa…

In the center of the city, an adobe tower loomed, looking down on the residential hovels as if they were specks of sand on a beach. With the sun
setting on the far side, the building's black shadow eked closer to her. She ducked behind the wall, out of the enemies' view, although she hadn't actually seen them. She didn't need to. The only way the OPS team could have made the defenders' location more obvious would be to program a cartoonish red arrow that floated in the sky and pointed at the colossal structure.
Defenders Here!

Two shacks down, a flash of black caught her at
tention, and for the first time she watched the insertion of her squad. They materialized out of nothing, grainy like the static of a television and then three solid forms. She joined them as they huddled around A1, a girl.

“
Our objective is to clear the center building of all defenders,” A1 said. “For now, let's stay on the outskirts and scout.”

“
Yes, ma'am,” Emily said.

The other two soldiers nodded.

They strayed back, far from the battle, and crept through the empty outskirts. Faint gunfire crackled somewhere near the city center, the intensity of which would increase for a moment and then die down to a few sporadic shots. As Emily moved with her squad, the central building's shadow receded in the background, disappearing on the other side of the town.

Now that the defenders stared
at the sun, A1 stopped. Emily ducked behind a small cobblestone wall, pulled out her binoculars and surveyed the target building. Twenty defenders—the full allotment—rushed to each corner of the roof. In their elevated position, they could view the entire battlefield and pick off any approaching targets with relative ease. Emily was witnessing it right now.

The other squad charged the building. Within seconds, the defenders crowded the roof ledge, dangling their rifles off the side. The result didn
't seem fair; the attacking squad, which ran in a perfect line, fell dead on the ground in the same perfect order. Not one of them had the chance to raise a rifle and take aim. Four bodies now rested in a patch of bloodstained dirt.

Then, less than fifty feet in front of Emily, chunks of dark-brown mud exploded from the earth. The dull crackle of gunfire reached her a split second later. She
and two of her teammates dropped below the wall, but A2 remained standing in full view of the defenders as if he taunted them. “We're out of range,” he said.

Emily flinched at the sound of Matt
's voice.

“
That's a lot in one place,” A1 said. She picked up a broken twig and dragged it through the mud, creating a square and several dots near the outside edges. A vague representation of the city. “Here's the plan. We'll strafe between these outer buildings and pick them off one by one.”

“
Bad idea,” Matt said.

“
I'm in charge here. We'll do this my way, and you'll follow my orders.”

Like I haven
't heard that before.

“
We can do it if we stay on the move,” A1 continued.

“
They'll figure out your strategy in no time, if they haven't already.” Matt looked through his binoculars. “Those defenders have the high ground and the numbers. They'll wear us down until we're dead. Even if we manage to get lucky, we might kill ten—”

“
That's half,” A1 interrupted. “I can live with those results.”

“
So you're here to lose? Good luck.” He backpedalled along the wall, away from the squad.

A4 lifted his rifle and aimed at Matt.
“Should I?”

“
No,” A1 said, and pushed down the barrel. “Let him go. We can prove him wrong.”

Matt, now a distant spot of black on the horizon, paused at the corner of a remote shack and stared at the squad. No, his gaze centered on Emily. It was a silent plea. She felt pressure on her heels. A short jog. That
's all it would take.

She looked at her squad-mates. They would be down by two allies, adding to an already unfair situation before the fight even started. Still, she knew that going with Matt was the common-sense choice. He had won—or made Sarah win. But an image of Raven
's lifeless face, of her coffin, flashed in Emily's mind and burned at her memory. Maybe Stallings was right. Had she actually done anything wrong? Could she have prevented Raven's death?
If I leave them…and something happens?

She crouched beside A1 and closed her eyes. When she reopened them, Matt was gone.