Omega City (21 page)

“Tram!” Nate called, pointing at a sign. “This way!”

L minus five minutes.

We sprinted out the door of launch control, down a short hallway and out onto what looked like some kind of underground parking garage. The paved floor was painted with yellow stripes and there was an odd-looking tram car backed up against the far wall. I stared down the dark tunnel ahead of us. Three miles. Five minutes. Yeah, that was possible. Barely. If the tram worked.

“How does it go?” Nate asked. “Is there a key?”

I pointed at the round metal rings where the tram met the wall. “I think these are springs, just like on the buildings underground.”

“So it's spring-loaded?” Eric asked.

L minus four minutes.

“No time to waste,” said Nate, all bossy again. “Everyone in.” We piled into the cab, which was when we saw it again. A big red button, just like the one inside the boulder. We all looked at Howard.

“Hold on tight,” he said. He pressed it and we were all instantly thrown back against the seat.

“Steer!” Nate screamed as the walls of the tunnel rushed past us at enormous speed. Howard panicked and grabbed the wheel, steering us up an unsteady path in the gently sloping tunnel.

L minus three minutes.

“Hurry!” Savannah said. “Hurry!”

But if anything, the tram was slowing down.

L minus two minutes.

“Let's take a vote,” Eric said, to break the silence that had descended in the cab as it sped forward. No one was talking or even moving, just sitting there, feeling the tram getting slightly but steadily slower, staring at the blackness ahead of us as if we could beam ourselves away by will alone. “Who prefers burning over drowning?”

No one laughed. Or voted, for that matter.

L minus one minute.

Fifty-nine.

Fifty-eight.

Fifty-seven.

Fifty-six.

“That voice needs to shut up,” said Savannah. “It needs to shut up right now.”

But it didn't. Recordings didn't stop because Savannah Fairchild ordered them to, just like spring-loaded tram cars traveling on an upward slant didn't speed up on their own.

Thirty-five.

Thirty-four.

Thirty-three.

Thirty-two.

Thirty-one.

“I see it!” Howard cried. “The exit.”

Nate leaned forward. “Really? All I see are rocks.”

Seconds later, those rocks went flying as we burst through the pile marking the end of the tunnel and the tram car bumped along for a moment, then came to a stop in the sweet, fresh, outdoor air.

Fifteen.

Fourteen.

Thirteen.

Twelve.

Eleven.

Ten.

“We made it.” Savannah slumped in her seat. I turned around to face her, and caught sight of the fireball erupting in the tunnel behind us. We weren't out of the danger zone yet.

“Run!”

We scrambled out of the tram and started sprinting. I don't think I'd ever moved so fast in my life. We were in a field of some kind, covered with tall yellow grasses, each and every one of them a firestarter. Everything was ablaze as far as I could see. If the rocket was lifting off, I couldn't tell through the blinding light.

“Don't look!” Eric shouted over the roar of the flames and the jets. “Just run!”

Columns of fire erupted all over the place, and everyone was running as fast as they could, but through the visor of my helmet I could see the blades of grass all around us turning black and singeing from the heat before a single flame touched them. My feet felt hot, like the rubber was melting on my soles, but I kept running.

Behind me, I heard a massive groan, as the very earth opened up and a wall of flame shot skyward. The rocket was lifting off.

A split second later, something blew me off my feet and across the boiling grass. For a moment there was nothing but the roar of flames, and then I felt a hand clutch mine. I don't know whose it was, but I held on for dear life as a tsunami of fire drowned the world.

IT ENDED WITH A FIRE. A BLAZING HOT FIRE THAT DEVOURED EVERYTHING it touched, and left five kids in silver suits lying in an empty black field. A bright, gleaming fire that turned into a comet and arced through the night sky, containing all the dreams and secrets of a man the world thought it had lost long ago. A shining, beautiful fire that brought cops, paramedics, and firemen down the lonely dirt road where so many hours earlier, Nate had parked his truck.

At least, I think it used to be his truck. Right now, it looked a little bit like one of Dad's failed pot roasts: charred and smoldering.

The fire faded as quickly as it started, and after a
minute, we all sat up in the grass, unharmed except for some seriously ruined sneakers. Far above our heads, the rocket glowed orange, then yellow, and finally white as it ascended.

“Everyone okay?” Nate asked in a shaky voice.

“Yeah,” I said.

Eric nodded.

“My arm is killing me,” said Savannah.

Howard just stared up at the rocket heading for the stars.

When the cops first arrived, they weren't all that happy to see five people in silver suits standing around as the heat evaporated into the cold fall night. But once we took off our hoods and they realized we were a bunch of kids, the accusations went from “crazy space aliens” to “delinquent arsonists.” That didn't last for too long, though, since even the most resourceful delinquent arsonist couldn't launch a four-hundred-foot rocket into space. So while the paramedics were treating the minor burns on all of our feet, and Eric's jaw (just bruised, but the broken teeth are going to have to get fixed), and Savannah's arm (actually broken), we did our best to explain where we'd come from and how we'd found ourselves in the middle of an unauthorized rocket launch.

Obviously, they didn't believe us.

While the paramedics were stabilizing Savannah's arm, the police search parties turned up three very disoriented
would-be thieves. Fiona, Clint, and Travis were found wandering what was left of the woods, a little singed and stone-cold deaf. Under all the soot, their descriptions matched the ones we'd already given of the three “stalkers” who'd chased us through the woods, threatened us with guns, then set off explosions in the underground bunker we'd found in order to smoke us out.

I guess, in the end, they were the ones smoking. I wish I could take credit for that line, but you know where it's from, right? Eric, of course.

After a while, someone got the brilliant idea to call our parents and have them come get us, so they took the Nolands, Eric, and me to the police station and Savannah to the hospital to set her arm. I guess her mother went there to get her. The police station was basically a two-room office building and so we had to sit next to the cell where they were holding Fiona and her men. She kept yelling at me—“Gillian! Gillian!”—in an earsplitting tone until the police officer threatened to tase her unless she stopped bothering us. It was extremely awkward, and that was before Eric started trying to get her to start up again.

“I've never seen anyone get tased,” he explained.

The whole time, they kept playing the TV, where the television news anchors were having a ball with the story of the rocket.

Local officials say the flight is an unmanned, amateur suborbital rocket of modest size, and that any videos you may have seen indicating otherwise are certainly faked
.

Eric rolled his eyes and smirked at me from the side of his face that wasn't buried under a cold pack. I couldn't help but smile back. This was one story he couldn't be skeptical about. It was safe to say his mainstream phase was officially over.

The police officer in charge kept grilling us for details about what we'd been doing, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to talk to Dad about it first. I kept thinking about what Dr. Underberg said, about how there was no way to be free of the Shepherds. He obviously wanted them to think he was dead.

And maybe he was. The rocket had gone up all right, but I had no idea what had happened afterward, and I could already see that any news I'd hear about it would be nothing but spin.

On the plus side, Dad still had a chance to break the story himself. That was, he would have, if I could have provided him with all our proof.

At last Dad showed up, along with Nate and Howard's parents. The Nolands went to hug their boys, and Dad beelined toward us and gathered us close.

“What have you been doing?” he whispered against my hair. “And where did you get this suit?”

“It's Dr. Underberg's,” I said softly.

Dad gave me a sad smile. “Sweetie, he never even got to the prototype stage of his survival suit. You know that.” He went to examine Eric's injuries, leaving me alone on the chair.

But there'd been a whole stack of them in the city. The city that Dad hadn't exactly known about, either. And the suit was absolutely functional, as the scuba diving and rocket launch and everything else had proved. The world might not know it, but Dr. Underberg had gone far beyond the prototype.

Well, later I could show him the video I'd kept. I patted my pocket, and beneath the bulky rectangle of the tape, I could feel something cylindrical. I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of our flashlights. That's right. I still had my flashlight. I'd traded Savannah my head lamp back when we were in the water. The flashlight I'd tossed back in the silo was hers.

Wait a second. My fingers clenched around the flashlight in my hands. Funny—we'd used them for hours in Omega City and not a single one had dimmed or gone out or gotten ruined in the water. That was nothing like the flashlights Dad took with us when we were camping. They were total battery hogs. You could barely use them for a
few hours before they went dead.

Far beyond the prototype
.

I looked up at Dad but he was still with Eric, tilting his head into the light to examine his broken teeth.

I was wrong anyway. I had to be.

I held my breath and opened the case of the flashlight, shaking the batteries out. Instead of the D battery I'd been expecting, a trio of silver spheres the size of ping-pong balls fell into my hands. Each was marked with polarity points and the Ω symbol.

Stupid Gillian. I'd been looking for the prototype. But we'd had the Underberg battery all along.

I looked up to see Fiona staring at me from behind the bars of her jail cell. Her manicure was utterly destroyed and her hair was a burnt mess. They hadn't even given her towels to wash the soot off her face. But her eyes were like missiles that had locked on to their target.

“You found them,” she rasped. “Give them to me!”

I shoved the batteries back inside the case and jammed the flashlight into my pocket.

“She has them!” Fiona banged her fists against the bars. “She has them!”

Dad looked up from Eric's mouth. He glanced at me for a moment, and then at Fiona. Then he walked over to her cell and stood between us. Fiona's face went from excited to coy to scared in a matter of seconds.

“You stay away from us,” Dad growled at her, in a deep and ringing tone I'd never heard before. A voice she could probably feel in her bones. “You stay away from me, and you stay away from my kids. If you ever come near anything that is mine again, I'll make you sorry, I swear. This is over, do you hear?”

“Well, no,” Eric pointed out. “Actually, she doesn't.”

But she seemed to get the picture anyway, as she lowered her gaze to the floor and dropped her hands to her sides.

After that, there was a lot of paperwork to fill out, but I guess we got off easy. No lectures, no interrogation. Nate didn't even get a ticket for illegally parking his truck all day, which was kind of sweet, considering he now had to buy a new truck.

We got in Dad's car to drive home, and we weren't two minutes on the road before he started in on us. “Okay, you two. What really happened back there? And what's up with the rocket?”

“I told you,” I said. “It's Dr. Underberg. We found him for you, Dad. And we found these.” I pulled the batteries out of my pocket.

He almost drove the car into a ditch.

WE GOT A chance to tell him the whole story over the next few days. It helped that we had the proof—not just the batteries, but the suits and the grappling guns and the one
remaining videotape filled with Underberg's lecture and images from the building and development of Omega City. Dad even drove us out to find the bunker again, but overnight, the whole field and forest had been surrounded with a massive fence topped with tangles of barbed wire and a sign reading:

NO TRESPASSING.
VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT.

There was a symbol on the sign, too: a pair of crossed, upside-down Js over the shape of the Earth, just like the Arkadia Group symbol that had appeared on the packaging of the silver jumpsuits.

“What is this, Dad?” I asked him, pointing at the sign. “We've seen it before.”

“I have too,” Dad said. “On stuff from Underberg's early life.”

“Fiona told me she once worked for the Arkadia Group, whoever they are.” And so, apparently, had Dr. Underberg. So if she knew about the city from her old job, was that because Dr. Underberg had been building it when he worked for Arkadia—or when he was, as he put it, a Shepherd?

With the barbed wire and everything, we couldn't get back into the city, but that was okay. I'm not sure how
much would be left, between the flood and the fire. Dad believed us and everything—he just wanted to see it himself. Something about primary sources being important for the writing of history.

I said I thought I was a primary source now. After all, I'd been there. I'd witnessed the destruction myself.

Going back to school on Monday was kind of a letdown. Sure, first everyone oohed and aahed over the bandages on our feet and asked to sign Savannah's cast. There was a little bit of a scandal when she let Howard sign it first and he decided to draw a big omega symbol in red Sharpie. And he was wearing his silver jumpsuit to school. It might not have been so bad if he hadn't also insisted on wearing the hood up. They made quite a picture, there in the crowded lunch room. The old Savannah would have been mortified, but the new one just shrugged off the stares.

“I love it,” she said to Howard when he finished. “It's like a designer logo.”

That's when I realized that all the popularity Savannah always harped on was actually good for something, because no one said a single word when he put his lunch tray next to ours every day that week.

We didn't hear much more about the rocket. The newspapers treated it like a matter of local interest—just an amateur rocket enthusiast who got a little too big for his britches. But in Dad's circle of friends we heard other
stories. Stories about how the US government tried to shoot it down and failed, about how it was hiding out even now on the dark side of the moon, and about how it wasn't a rocket at all, but the disc-shaped spacecraft of a subterranean alien species.

Eric may have a point that Dad needs to find some new friends.

But he didn't have a whole lot of time to spare. After all, he's busy working on a new book. This one is about Underberg's later years—his lost years, when he worked for the Arkadia Group and built an underground city. Though it was really hard to find any information about the Arkadia Group, which, as far as Dad could tell from the papers they filed to enclose the Omega site, was nothing more than a real estate development firm that bought the property to build townhouses.

If they thought we'd buy that story, they hadn't met Dad.

THURSDAY NIGHT WAS still pizza night at the cottage, but now Dad stayed home, too, to write down all our stories about Omega City.

“He's here!” Savannah cried when the doorbell rang. “Good, I'm starving.”

Eric answered the door to see Nate and Howard on the steps, balancing pizza boxes. Their mom's car was parked
in the driveway. Nate did in fact quit his delivery job, but it's not like he had a truck anymore, anyway.

“Are those two golden disks of the seven heavens?” Eric asked.

Nate rolled his eyes. “Don't start with me.”

“Plus egg-roll calzones,” Howard added. He was still wearing his jumpsuit. He always wore it now.

“Nate, Howard!” Dad called out. “Come in! I had a few questions about where you went on the Training Level while my kids were diving . . .”

Nate let out a pained sigh. “Can we eat anything other than pizza next week?” he begged.

“Trust me,” said Eric. “If you've tried my dad's cooking, you'd know Chinese pizza is a step up.”

Howard leaned over to set the pizza on the table, and we all drew back a foot as a wave of stink hit us.

Dad waved a hand in front of his face, eyes watering. “Wow, son. You . . . did you, uh, did you step in something?”

“Good luck with that, doc,” Nate said. “I've been trying to convince him for a month that ‘waterproof' is not the same as ‘unwashable.'”

“There are no washing instructions on the suit,” Howard said, crossing his arms over his chest. “And I'm not going to risk destroying it until I know how it can be properly cleaned.”

“Lunch
and
dinner with Howard,” Savannah whispered to me. “Aren't we lucky?”

I was very careful to breathe through my mouth. “Dry-cleaning?”

Howard looked offended. “Gillian, you of all people know the danger of letting a piece of technology like this out of your sight. You guys can do what you want with your suits. I'm keeping mine on my person. It's the safest way.”

“Sure,” said Eric. “Until you get the plague.”

Dad considered this for a moment. Over the past few weeks, he'd gotten to be almost as good at talking to Howard as Nate was. I'm sure their shared love of the space race helped.