Bounders (26 page)

Waters turns to Bad Breath. “I had to walk by the hangar on my way to the briefing, so I thought I'd check in on your class.”

“Briefing?” Bad Breath says.

“Yes,” Waters says. “Didn't you hear the beacon?”

Bad Breath presses his pockets. He must have forgotten his com pin. And he yells at us because we can't get into our uniforms fast enough? What a hypocrite.

“If I need to be at the briefing, what am I am supposed to do with these clowns?” Bad Breath says. “The relay was a bust, and they need these scores for the rankings to be tabulated.”

“They're cadets, Auxiliary Officer. Not clowns. Not B-wads. You're to refer to them as cadets.” Waters glares until Bad Breath crumbles. “Today's scores will need to be voided,” he continues. “The briefing can't wait.”

Waters heads to the door, Bad Breath on his heels. Before he steps out, he looks up at Regis, still clinging to the rafters. “And someone bring him down, for earth's sake.”

Waters's interruption meant Mobility ended thirty minutes early. We were lucky. It gave us more time to plan our mission to the cellblock for tomorrow night. But not everything is rosy with the pod. Lucy holds a grudge against me. Even though I apologized before we left the hangar, she hasn't looked at me or spoken to me directly.

As we make our way from Technology class to the mess hall, she hangs back, arms crossed in front of her chest. I can feel her ice-cold stare on my back.

“Are you coming or not, Jennifer Lawrence?” Marco calls over his shoulder.

“Who's Jennifer Lawrence?” Cole asks.

“Twenty-first century? Famous Actress?
Hunger Games
?” When Cole stares blankly back, Marco just shakes his head. “Forget it.”

“Please tell Jasper he could have gotten all of us in big trouble,” Lucy says.

I stop in my tracks and throw up my arms. “Enough of the go-between talk.” I turn around to face Lucy. “We've been through this already. I'm sorry. What else can I say? And what exactly was I supposed to do? He grabbed me.”

She fixes me with her wide-eyed glare. “How about spending less time worrying about what Regis and everyone else thinks of you and more time focused on your pod?”

That's easy for her to say. She hasn't spent the whole tour being teased. Though, come to think of it, no one has said a single negative word to me since Mobility. Nobody but Lucy. Certainly not Regis. Mission accomplished.

I don't have anything else to say to Lucy, but there she stands, her arms still crossed, waiting. She reminds me of Addy when she's mad. That means a lecture about my horrible communication skills is coming next. Thankfully, I'm saved by a mini Spider Crawler.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Lucy jumps. “I hate those things!”

“That's because you aren't thinking creatively.” Marco crouches low, and just as the Spider speeds by, he springs, landing right on top of the black box. “Woo-hoo!”

Yes! We sprint to keep up with Marco as he clings to the robot.

“This is
awwwe
-some!” he shouts. “You're next, J! Run alongside!”

I keep pace with the robot. At the corner, Marco leaps off and I jump on. My left leg lands its target, but my right leg misses. I grab for the front of the speeding box and somehow manage to hold on and right myself. “Woot! Woot!” I barrel down the ramped hallway like a car on a roller-coaster track.

“Who's next?” I shout.

“Get off!” Lucy yells. “Or are you trying to get us in even more trouble?”

I hop off the robot at the next corner, two turns from the mess hall. “Come on, Lucy, that was fun. You would have loved it!” Lucy's face doesn't soften. “Look, I'm sorry. Let's finalize our plan to find the alien.” When we told the girls we wanted to break into the cellblock, Lucy seemed excited, especially when she learned the whole plan hinged on her acting skills.

“I'm not so sure about that anymore, Jasper,” Lucy fumes. “It seems like everywhere you go, there's trouble.”

“Cool it, Florine Wannabe,” Marco says as we enter the mess hall. “The blast pack high jinks are over, okay? Jasper's moved on. You should, too.”

“Since when are you the voice of reason? And speaking of reason”—Lucy lowers her voice as we sit down at our regular table—“what exactly is our reason for visiting the alien? If I decide to help you, what are we going to do once we break in?”

Marco and I exchange glances. It's a fair question, but I haven't really thought that far ahead.

“We have evidence tying him to the Incident at Bounding Base 51,” Cole says. “We're going to interrogate him.”

We all stare at Cole. Interrogate him? Really? We're not even sure he talks, let alone speaks the same language we do.

“Yeah,” I say, “what Cole said.”

Marco smiles, turning up the charm factor. “Think about it, Lucy. You're curious, aren't you? Just getting a better look at Green Lantern might give us more information.”

Lucy scrunches up her face like she's thinking. “Fine.”

“Good, we've got a plan,” I say.

Marco nods to the porthole on the far side of the mess hall. “Mira's the real wild card in all this, you know.”

Mira's been better about sticking with the pod, but you can tell it takes a toll on her. She needs space.

“Maybe we should just leave her behind,” Lucy says.

“No,” I say. “We're doing this as a pod.”

How many times do we need to have the same discussion about Mira? For better or worse, she's one of us. And as far as the bounding rankings go, she's carrying us.

So it's settled. The plan will go down tomorrow night. We'll sneak out after curfew. Lucy will run a diversion with the guard. Then we'll break into the cellblock, find the alien, ask some questions, and get out before the guard returns. We should be back in our beds with plenty of time to rest up for our big end-of-tour field trip to the Paleo Planet.

Everything just has to go as planned.

AS SOON AS I STEP INTO
the dorm, something slams into my ribs and knocks me onto my back. I'm winded. As I gasp for breath, I see things flying above me in the air. I must have hit my head.

My vision comes into focus. I didn't hit my head, and I'm not seeing things. It's Regis, Hakim, and Randall soaring across the dorm in their blast packs. When I try to prop up, Regis lands at my feet and shoves me back down.

“What do you have to say about these, B-wad?” Regis shakes his hands. He wears his gloves, and he grips the new silver pack straps.

“You cheated!” Hakim yells.

“We knew it was fixed!” Randall shouts. He hovers over me alongside Regis and Hakim.

Regis kicks me in the stomach. Then he crouches down inches from my face. “You think you can humiliate me again, B-wad? You won't walk out of here. They'll have to wheel you to the med room.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Marco skipping along the tabletop, his hands glowing with the light of his gloves.

“Regis?” I whisper.

He leans even closer. “Yeah, B-wad?”

“You stink. You smell worse than Bad Breath. Are you training to be an auxiliary officer?”

I laugh and then brace, waiting for the next blow. Marco raises his hands in the air. Behind him, Cole stretches his arms to the side. Then twenty pillows fly across the room and hit Regis and his sidekicks in the head, knocking them off balance.

I jump to my feet and whip my gloves from my pack. I hop up next to Marco. A dozen other cadets have climbed onto the table, too. Marco must have clued them in on some of the gloves' bonus functions. They lift the fallen pillows from the floor and fling them at Regis. Cole, the master
Evolution
strategist, shouts directions, and we stage a coordinated attack on the enemy. Half the cadets launch an assault from their stationary positions on the table. The other half suit up in their blast packs and dive-bomb the bullies.

Regis, Randall, and Hakim dodge about aimlessly. Fear colors their faces. They can't figure out what's making the pillows fly.

I direct my gloves at a pile of shoes by the door. One by one I hurl them at Regis. When the final shoe hits him in the head, he runs for his bunk and hides beneath his blanket.

Once we've defeated Regis and his foot soldiers, the master offensive disintegrates into the biggest pillow fight ever waged at the EarthBound Academy. Cole gets me good with a pillow to the face, but I surprise Marco with a triple-pillow combination from behind. Ryan and the other guys in Sheek's pod annihilate me with a coordinated strike. I can't even defend myself, I'm laughing so hard.

We know Ridders will show up eventually with his whistle. When he does, I hop down from the table, grab the closest pillow, and climb up to my bunk.

Before burrowing beneath the covers, I run my hand along my clarinet case. I can't believe our first tour of duty is almost over. This place isn't so bad after all. I'm a Bounder. I belong here. I'm excited to go home in a few days, but I'll be psyched to come back for our second tour. And I can't wait until next year when I can show Addy the suction chutes and the bounding ships and the Ezone. But most of all I'm excited to introduce her to all my friends at the EarthBound Academy.

The next night the kitchen pulls out all the stops in honor of the final rankings. They toss salads with the fresh romaine and tomatoes we grew in Subsistence. They dish out huge ladles of hot, gooey macaroni and cheese (the noodles might be tofu, but they're drowning in cheese, so I try not to think about it). The dessert is awesome—butterscotch squeezy tubes. Marco and I keep grabbing more when the cook's head is turned. I have five.

Nothing can undo the damage of the twenty-one meals of tofu dogs we've had since arriving at the Academy (fourteen lunches and seven dinners, but who's counting?), not to mention the thirteen servings of tofu strings, eighteen fluffed tofu breakfasts, seven lunches' worth of tofu nuggets, and last Saturday night's special, Tofu Surprise (don't ask), but it's nice to finish a meal without feeling hungry for once.

All the cadets sit with their pods. The mess hall hums with laughter and chatter. But the chatter has a sharp edge, because final rankings post after dinner.

Bad Breath held a Mobility make-up class this morning. By now everyone knows about the glove grips and has practiced with them in the Ezone. For the final relay, cadets got to choose which grips they wanted to use. Of course, I used the glove grips. Our pod won the relay fair and square. Not even Regis could come up with a complaint. Thank goodness those scores made it in for the final tabulation. We still have a shot at winning the competition.

After dinner the five of us huddle around our orange table. “Can you believe the first tour is almost over?” Lucy asks. “Only two days until our field trip to the Paleo Planet, and in three days we'll be back on Earth. It's flown by. Really, it has. I can't wait to get back home, but I'm bummed to go. I'm gonna miss all of you so much. It feels like I've known you forever.” Her voice cracks at the end of her speech.

“You'd win an award for that performance, Drama Queen,” Marco says.

Lucy smirks. “Aren't you a bunch of lucky boys? You have the Drama Queen and the Dancing Queen in your pod!” She pats Mira's hand. “I'm just teasing, sweetie.” Mira stares in the direction of the porthole. Did she even hear Lucy?

Lucy's a drama queen, but she's right. It will be hard to say good-bye. We won't see one another until the next tour of duty more than four months away. Cole and I talked about hanging out on Earth. We are only a few hours apart by rail in Americana East. But I don't really think it will happen. We'll be busy making up schoolwork, spending time with our families, and preparing to head back for our next tour this fall.

“I can't wait to see Earth again from space,” Cole says. “Maybe we'll make a polar approach so we can see what's left of the ice caps.”