Sterling Squadron (7 page)

Madison was in a trance, her eyes full of the reflection of the map.

He gave her a shove. She snapped out of it, shot him an irritated glare, and one delicate hand involuntarily curled into a fist.

“We are
so
dead,” she said. “We only have twenty-seven flight-ready pilots.”

She looked angry and brave, but underneath, Ethan could see she was scared out of her mind.

Like him.

“Wait a second,” Ethan said. “Just twenty-seven? I’ve seen hundreds of I.C.E. suits in the hangars.”

“Don’t be so thick, Blackwood. There are hundreds of
suits
. That’s never been our problem. There’re just so many of us born underground and free. And only about a third of the kids here have the mental strength to control the insect mind in an I.C.E. unit.”

Ethan turned back to the map and lost himself in the sea of red bug symbols and numbers.

Even if they flew perfect missions against the enemy, had kill ratios of a hundred to one, they’d be vastly, enormously,
fatally
outnumbered.

“I’m beginning to rethink you,” Madison muttered, looking at him through slitted eyes.

“What does
that
mean?”

“It means that even though you’re a total pain, Blackwood, we could use a dozen more numskull, super-stubborn neighborhood kids like you to fight for us.”

“I thought Dr. Irving said I was the only one from a neighborhood to ever get an I.C.E. suit to fly.”

She didn’t answer, staring at the map as if some new fact might pop up that would change the odds.

“What about Paul?” Ethan asked. “Colonel Winter said she should have ‘left him where they found him.’ What’d she mean by that?”

Madison faced Ethan, confusion crinkling her nose. “That’s right. Paul isn’t from the Seed Bank. No one said where he was from. It was this big secret. But we all stopped asking when we saw how he could fly.”

They looked at each other—then at the computer terminal—and both raced to the keyboard.

Ethan got there first.

The way Paul acted, a total brat, Ethan bet he’d
never
been raised in a neighborhood. Wherever he came from … maybe there were more like him to help the Resistance.

He closed the map and transferred to a folder marked
PERSONNEL
.

The password shield splashed across the computer screen.

Ethan typed in Dr. Irving’s code word, and it vanished.

There were hundreds of files with serial numbers.

Ethan opened them all.

Faces and birthdays and test scores spilled across the screen.

Madison, not content to watch, sat on the seat next to Ethan and scooched him to one side.

He felt her body heat next to him and inched away, uncomfortable.

Madison hit the command to sort the files. Her hand brushed over his, sending chills up Ethan’s arm. It was strange because the feeling wasn’t totally unwelcome. It was kind of … nice.

Too weird.

The files reorganized on-screen, and he snapped his attention back to their task.

His record popped to the top.

Place of birth: Santa Blanca.

Memories of a family, school, homework, soccer games—a normal life—flooded Ethan’s thoughts.

He pushed them aside. He had to.

Besides, there had never been a “normal” anything in his life. It’d all been lies.

His Resister file had a picture of him taken after he
got out of boot camp. Any trace of baby fat that had once rounded his face had been pounded out of him by the physical training. He looked harder and meaner. He still had his dad’s proud Cherokee jaw and his mom’s smooth, golden Filipino skin, but he looked older … and there was something about the face that stared back at him that Ethan didn’t recognize.

“Tab ahead,” Madison told him. She reached for the key.

Ethan blocked her. “Wait, I want to read my file.”

Madison looked like she was about to say something stupid, like this was “confidential,” but then she pulled her hand back and looked away.

Ethan scanned his test flight scores (impressive), but then found:

Ethan, supercurious to know what Madison thought of him, skimmed ahead.

Physical Assessment: … Up to our standards. But barely.

Skill Assessment: … Great instincts in a dogfight.

Comments (Staff Sergeant Hicks, P.): … Blackwood is a show-off … wants to prove he’s better than anyone born in the Resistance.… He’s going to get himself or his wingmates killed.

Ethan felt as if he were in a falling elevator—that dizzy, vertigo, out-of-body sensation.

Those last comments had to be Paul just hating his guts. He turned to Madison to ask what she really thought.

“It’s true,” Madison whispered before he could even ask. There was no anger in her voice. “You’re a great pilot. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen. But
only
solo. If I put you on a squadron? On my team? I’d spend half my time watching out for whatever crazy stunt you’d pull next—instead of fighting the enemy.”

Ethan barely heard her as he stared at the assessment on-screen.

Recommendation: FAIL

Was
he trying to prove he was as good as anyone else in the Resistance? Taking foolish risks to do it?

“Don’t look like I just kicked you,” she told him, somehow sounding hurt, too. “Read ahead. There’s more.”

She hit the
NEXT PAGE
button. On-screen appeared:

Four weeks ago we recruited Blackwood into the Resistance.

He has had to accept: (1) Aliens kept his family and friends prisoners in the perfect neighborhood of Santa Blanca. (2) When kids reach puberty, their brain chemistry changes and they get absorbed into the aliens’ mentally controlled Collective. (3) His parents were part of that uncaring Ch’zar Collective.

Boot camp was hard on Blackwood, too, especially the hand-to-hand combat classes (one tooth knocked out and replaced). Living in perfect, “safe” Santa Blanca just hasn’t prepared him for this.

Suggest he be reassessed after two weeks. Blackwood deserves a break.

Madison’s extra comments didn’t make Ethan feel any better about the overall recommendation, though. FAIL.

Was she right about that?

In soccer, Ethan
had
to be the star because he was the youngest and came from the smallest family in Santa Blanca. He’d struggled to get good grades because he wanted to be an astronaut and because he thought he didn’t measure up to the other neighborhood kids.

Maybe he was just trying to do his best again here. And maybe other people were just seeing that as showing off.

Maybe.

“Whatever,” he told her. His tone was icy.

Madison sighed and looked like she wanted to say more.

He turned away and tabbed ahead. “Let’s just find Paul’s record.”

The next record had
SEED BANK
filled in for place of birth.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Madison said, and punched the
FILE DOWN
button a half-dozen times.

Paul Hicks’s record sprang into view on-screen.

The place of birth was blank.

Ethan’s heart practically stopped beating as he read what had been written
under
it.

“We have to talk to the colonel,” he whispered. “This is
exactly
what we’re looking for.”

Under the empty place of birth entry was:

  8  

ETHAN HIT THE ELEVATOR CALL BUTTON
for the thirteenth time in the last half hour.

Madison leaned against the corridor wall, her arms tightly crossed over her chest, and shifted from foot to foot. “This is moronic.”

“We can’t just stroll into C and C and talk to Colonel Winter,” he told her. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not on her ‘favorite person’ list lately.”

“So we’re supposed to wait here and call
every
elevator coming down from the Command Center hoping she’ll be on one? We’ll be—”

The elevator bell pinged. The doors opened.

Colonel Winter stood inside. Alone.

“Well?” She frowned at them. “Are you two getting on or not?”

She looked distracted. Ethan didn’t think she even recognized him.

“Yes, ma’am!” Ethan and Madison said together.

They stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed.

The
last
thing Ethan wanted to do was to talk to the colonel, but he had to. All their lives might depend on his plan.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Colonel Winter took a good look at him and finally realized who he was.

“Don’t you have duties, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Yes, ma’am. Clogs in the semisolid waste facility. I was just on my way.”

Technically this had been true—before he had made his discovery in Dr. Irving’s lab.

“I was thinking, though, ma’am …”

Colonel Winter raised one eyebrow at him as if to say “thinking” might be a new activity for Ethan.

How did Felix stand that look? How hard was it for his friend to have the commander of a military base as a mother?

Ethan pressed on. “I was thinking we could really use some new pilots.”

“What makes you think that, Mr. Blackwood?”

He had to be supercareful. Ethan couldn’t say that he had seen Dr. Irving’s dire Ch’zar population studies by hacking into a top-secret computer.

“Replacement pilots,” Madison said, quickly covering for Ethan. “Because so many kids are out with the flu.”

“I see …,” the colonel said.

“Dr. Irving told me that no other neighborhood kids had ever piloted an I.C.E. suit,” Ethan said.

The colonel exhaled. She glanced at the numbers over the elevator’s door, as if she was hoping this ride would soon end so she could get away from “troublemaker” Ethan Blackwood.

“There is another place where the kids”—Ethan cleared his throat—“might have the independent streak to make a good connection with the insect fighting suits.”

The colonel’s eyes locked on to Ethan.

“Sterling Reform School,” he told her.

She took a step closer to Ethan. “And what do
you
know about
that
place?”

Ethan took an involuntary step back. He couldn’t help but take a long look at the ivory-handled pistol strapped to her hip.

He took a deep breath and reminded the colonel how exactly he knew about Sterling Reform School.

Ethan had been shipped off to the place. After he discovered the truth about the Ch’zar (that his neighborhood wasn’t the safe, happy place he’d thought), the mind-controlled adults of Santa Blanca captured him and put him on a bus for Sterling.

Before that, he’d heard rumors about the school growing up. He explained to the colonel that Sterling was where they sent the rule breakers and troublemakers. Some said it was where they sent kids who were mentally unstable and couldn’t be treated.

On the bus ride, he’d seen a welcome video about Sterling. If the video could be believed, the kids there fought mock battles with padded sticks, exploded things in chemistry lab, and were actually
encouraged
to be out of control.

If it hadn’t been for a last-minute rescue by Felix and Madison, that’s where Ethan would be right now.

“It seems to me,” Ethan said, “those are exactly the type of kids who could pilot I.C.E. suits. Why not rescue and recruit them?”

He very carefully left out that he knew that the Resister’s star pilot, Paul Hicks (also apparently their star troublemaker), had come from Sterling.

The colonel punched the elevator’s
STOP
button.

She stepped even closer to Ethan and told him, “Mr. Blackwood, I want to make myself perfectly, one hundred percent understandable on this. So if there’s something you’re not absolutely clear on, please ask.”

Ethan gulped. Her fake nice tone made his spine crawl.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m giving you a direct order. You are not to mention the Sterling School to anyone else.” She cast a glance at Madison. “That goes for you, too, Corporal Irving.”