Extraction (41 page)

“Hey,” Oliver says.

“Hey,” Beechy says. “How are you feeling?”

Oliver doesn’t answer. He’s looking out the window, staring at the moon for the first time in his life. It’s thick with the fog of moonshine. It’s hard to tell whether there’s even a solid surface underneath, or just fog and fog and more fog.

I prefer to look at the stars. They shimmer reds, purples, and blues in the distant reaches of the universe. They’re tiny specks of light, but each one is a sun or a planet. Marden must be somewhere out there. I can’t tell which speck it is, though.

“Why are we flying to the moon?” Oliver’s voice cracks. He clings to my shoulder like he’s scared of the moon and I can protect him.

“Charlie turned off the acid shield because we hijacked the bomb,” Beechy says. “Now we’re transporting the bomb to the generator that makes the acid, so we can blow it up.”

Oliver’s eyes have never been wider. He opens his mouth and closes it twice, no doubt trying to figure out which question to ask first.

“Generator,” he repeats. “What generator?”

“That generator,” Beechy says, pointing out the window.

41

There’s a spot on the moon’s surface where the fog clears a little. It’s far away and tiny, but I can still make out something unnatural there, something with a color darker than the fog. It might be the top of a massive structure. A generator that pumps acid into space, for some of it to float into Kiel’s atmosphere and kill people.

Kill me. It’s going to kill me.

“You knew about this?” Oliver asks, pulling away from me. He looks from me to Beechy and back again.

“No,” I say. “We had no idea. I found out in Karum.”

“You’re serious? Someone just built a generator on the moon. That’s where all the acid came from.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” Beechy says. “I’ll explain.”

Oliver grumbles, but I can tell he’s having trouble standing anyway. So he slips into the chair I was sitting in, the copilot seat.

I stand there behind the two of them while Beechy starts telling him about Marden and Charlie’s war and everything we discovered. I wring my hands and swallow the lump rising in my throat. It refuses to budge.

I glance at the timer on the dashboard:

00:19:01

Nineteen minutes.

We’re going to be close enough soon. We’re going to be close enough for me to detach the escape pod and transport the missile to the generator without the timer running out. I think. I hope.

But I have to slip away first. I have to figure out how to fly the escape pod.

I have to say good-bye to Oliver and Beechy without really saying it.

The seconds tick by. I pretend Beechy’s smiling instead of staring out the window with emotionless eyes. I pretend Oliver’s hoarse voice is laughter. I pretend we’re flying to the moon to see the sights instead of on a suicide mission.

I’d pretend forever, if only I had more time.

But the timer is down to seventeen minutes and thirty-five seconds.

I tuck the curls behind my ears and take a shaky breath. “I’m going to check if there’s a restroom,” I say, interrupting Beechy.

“Okay,” he says. “There should be one attached to the bunk room.”

“Thanks.” There’s a lump in my throat, and my voice almost cracks, but I fight it. I glance at Oliver one last time. His cheeks are pale. He thinks these seventeen minutes are all he has left.

But there’s wonderment in his eyes too—dull, but it’s there. Because of the stars, I bet. He always wanted to see them. He always wanted to fly in a spaceship.

I think he’s going to be okay.

Beechy continues talking. My heart thumps against my ribs. It might shatter one or all of them if I keep standing here, so I turn and hurry away.

I don’t look back.

*   *   *

I press the button on the wall, and the doors to the escape pod slide open, one after the other.

There’s the screen where I tried to type in the code to disable the bomb and failed. There’s the window showing me the moon. There’s the floor separating me from the missile, from the weapon Fred built that will blow me to smithereens in fifteen minutes and seven seconds, and, I hope, the generator too.

I sit in the pilot seat and put my head in my sweaty hands. My whole body is shaking.

I need more time. Fourteen minutes isn’t enough, not at all. I need to say good-bye to everyone. To Logan especially. He said he’d wait for me on the hangar, but I left and I’m not coming back.

Logan, oh Logan, I hope you’re okay. I hope you’re not dead.

I wish I hadn’t left him. But then he’d be dead for certain; he would’ve been blown up with me when the bomb went off. This way, maybe I can save him.

Please, please, let me save him.

Outside, I can see the top of the generator now. It’s a tower, thin and rectangular, peeking through the clouds. A red light flashes on the top of it. It could almost be my school building on the Surface, or that tower I tried to climb the day I met Laila.

When I die, I’ll be with her again. That’s something good, at least. I’ll die out here with the stars and the dust in the moonlight. The bomb will take me out. That’s better than dying from the acid. I won’t feel any burning; I’ll just be gone. My ashes will float off to the stars. To Marden, maybe.

Maybe that won’t be so bad.

The dashboard starts beeping. I stare at the timer. Ten minutes.

Focus.

I have to figure out how to fly this thing.

I scan the dashboard. Most of the buttons and controls look the same as the ones in the main cockpit, there are just fewer of them.

I flip a switch and a dim blue light comes on overhead. I flip another and the dashboard powers on. The buttons light up yellow and red and purple like the stars.

“What are you doing in there?” a voice says.

Oh, no
. I haven’t shut the transport doors yet. I think I was waiting until the last second.

I turn my head. Oliver is at the top of the ladder down the short passageway, staring at me, bewildered.

He shouldn’t have come looking, but part of me is glad. Part of me is relieved. Now I can say good-bye to him.

I swallow. “I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna fly this pod to the generator, so I can deploy the bomb and you two can get away. We’re close enough now that I’ll reach my target.”

“No, you’re vruxing not,” another voice says. Beechy hoists himself up the last rung of the ladder.

“Yes, I am.” I reach for the button to seal the doors.

Oliver blocks the entranceway. “You can’t.”

“You’re not.” Beechy pushes past Oliver.

“Get out.” I press hard against my seat, afraid one or both of them will rip me out of it. “Please leave me alone.”

Beechy grabs my shoulders. I kick hard against his legs, forcing him back a step. Then Oliver grabs me too. I’m not stronger than both of them. They wrench me to my feet. They’re ruining this. They’re ruining everything.

“Stop it!”

They don’t stop. They drag me out of the transport into the passageway.

“Let me
go
!” I yell. I didn’t want this to happen. I wanted to save them both. “We’re running out of time!”

“If anyone’s going to sacrifice himself,” Beechy says calmly, “it’s going to be me. Oliver, please help Clementine down the ladder. You two can fly the ship home.”

“No!” I shake my head, panicking. “No, no, no, you can’t do that. I’m supposed to do that. You have to let me.”

“You can’t fly the pod.”

“You can tell me how!” I push against him and kick as hard as I can. Oliver has let go of me, so maybe this is working.

“Clementine,
stop
,” Beechy says.

There’s a loud sound of suction. I stop struggling and whip my head back to the transport door.

The escape pod has been sealed shut.

Oliver is inside it.

Beechy lets go of me now. Maybe they planned this, maybe he knew this was going to happen because he doesn’t move. Or maybe he doesn’t know what to do.

I run. We’re right near the doorway, but I can’t get there fast enough.

“Oliver!” I scream.

He’s sitting in the pilot seat. He runs his trembling hands through his hair. I can’t see his face. I need to see his face.

I jam a finger on the button and press it. I pound a fist against the cold glass. The door won’t budge.

“Stop!” I scream again, hitting the glass so hard my hand might break.

He leans over the dashboard, tapping several buttons in consecutive order. A faint
whir
catches my ears. The engine turns on.

“No, please…” I blink fast.

He glances at me with red, watery eyes. “It’s okay,” he says. The glass muffles his voice to almost nothing.

“It’s not.”

“Someone has to do this.” He takes a shaky breath. “Beechy has Sandy and his kid. You have someone, but me, I’ve got no one.”

“You have me.”

“I’m glad,” he whispers.

I spread my fingers apart on the window. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“Don’t be.”

There’s another sound of suction, louder this time. The escape pod detaches from the part of the ship where I’m standing, revealing its round black body with K-I-M-O painted on one side and the missile head poking out of the other. There’s only one glass door left between me and the vacuum of space.

I don’t hear Oliver crying, but I can see the tears running from his eyes. He turns away and grips a lever to maneuver the pod to the left, toward the generator, until I can no longer see his face or his ship from this window. Until he’s left me behind.

I spin around. Beechy’s gone; he must’ve already gone back to the cockpit to fly us away.

No no no no …

One rung at a time, I haul myself down the ladder until my feet touch the floor. The world tilts. I think it’s just my head. But I don’t stop running.

Beechy sits in the cockpit, fiddling with dials and easing back the flight clutch. His hands fumble; there are dots of sweat on his face, or maybe they’re tears. Our ship turns away from the moon and the generator. The one-man transport flies past us to the right and pushes onward.

The numbers on the dash read:

00:05:03

“We have to stop him.”

Beechy doesn’t say anything at all.

I don’t take my eyes off the window. When our ship turns around all the way, I switch the weapon monitor to the rear guns so I can still see the pod.

In my ears, the beep of the countdown grows louder and louder. Amidst the hazy pink darkness of space through the monitor, the round ship moves farther and farther away, ever closer to the steel tower surrounded by mist.

I can’t tell when he gets there, when he reaches the generator. I pray he got close enough.

A cloud of gray smoke erupts from the generator site, consuming everything around it, all the acid gas and the space dust too. The smoke spreads far, far out, and I’m afraid it’s going to swallow us whole. But we’re moving fast enough to escape it.

Oliver isn’t. He’s gone.

When we’re safely on course, Beechy stands and wraps his arms around me, and I shake my head over and over and sob into his shoulder. I don’t know if he gets it. I don’t know if he understands.

Oliver is gone forever, this isn’t another test. Oliver, who tried to save me from Sam. Oliver, who helped me feel better when I was scared about everything.

It’s partly my fault he’s dead.

Words tumble into my head and play over and over, and make me cry even harder:

To the krail’s caw, to star song

In the field, love, we’ll dance

‘Til the moon is long gone

Until the world ends

42

Our ship rockets away from the moon, back to Kiel. I see the stars in the rearview monitor and picture Oliver’s body floating among them. But in truth, his body is broken. He’s gone someplace I can’t follow.

I cry until I have no tears left. I imprint his face in my head because I don’t want to forget it: his messy brown hair; the eyeglasses he insisted on keeping; his wide eyes the color of a blue sky.

I hope he’s someplace better. I hope he’s safe, wherever he is, maybe even happy.

I hope Laila and Ella will take care of him.

*   *   *

We’re nearing Kiel’s atmosphere when I see it: a shimmering dome enclosing our bluish-golden planet. The acid shield is back up.

But beyond the shield, the sky is still riddled with acid. It paints the clouds a dark pink color, like a deadly sunset. I wonder how much acid seeped into the atmosphere before Charlie turned the shield back on. I wonder how long it will take for all of it to clear from the air.

I wonder how many people already died.

Not Logan, please
. I swallow hard and count to three hundred to fight back the worry.

The mountains below us grow larger through the window, until I could touch the snow on their peaks if I could reach the glass.

“Where are we going?” I ask Beechy.

“A rendezvous point in the mountains,” he says, easing the clutch sideways so we won’t hit the snow. His jaw is tense, and his eyes red. “Whatever rebels are left will meet us there. And we’ll figure out what our next step is.”

I stare at the acid shield in the rearview monitor, my stomach churning with acid of its own. I already know what I’m going to do. I’m going to kill Charlie.

I’m going to make him pay for everyone he stole from me, and all the lies he told.

Below us, the mountains dip to form a river valley lit by rays of red sunlight. White rapids swirl in the water, tumbling over rocks. Trees with black leaves and thick, gnarled branches form a small forest.

This valley looks untouched by humans, almost impossible. Like something out of a dream.

We hover to a landing in a forest clearing beside the river. Beechy turns the engine off, and the cockpit falls silent.

My heart still beats too fast. One hundred and thirty-two beats per minute, I count, and breathe to try to slow it down because it’s not good for me. I must continue to focus.