Authors: Robison Wells
AUBREY DIDN’T THROW UP ON
the helicopter ride, though it took all her willpower. She hated everything about it—the pounding of the rotors, the sharp banks, the sudden drops. It didn’t help that the pilot said this was one of the smoother helicopters to ride in—that just made her feel worse.
Her eyesight grew blurry and she got all the same feelings as when she strained against invisibility—the fatigue, the clumsiness, the body aches. She clutched Jack’s arm through the whole flight, and she didn’t care who saw.
If there was one person onboard who looked worse than Aubrey felt, it was Josi. She spent most of her time huddled forward, head in her hands. Aubrey still didn’t know how Josi’s powers worked, but if she had such a complete, all-encompassing memory, did that mean that she wasn’t able to block out any of the sensations?
Rich seemed thrilled by the whole thing, completely at ease, like he’d flown in helicopters his whole life. Krezi also seemed relatively unperturbed.
For her part, Tabitha wasn’t as annoying as usual. She was probably feeling airsick, too, and it cut her snark down. Or maybe she was using her telepathy to talk to someone else.
It was dark by the time the helicopter landed. The pilot said something that Aubrey couldn’t hear as the door slid open and they all hurried out, hauling their heavy gear with them. Aubrey was wobbly on her feet, and Josi finally did throw up, just outside the door. Aubrey let go of Jack and put her hand on Josi’s side while Jack grabbed Josi’s ruck and hauled it with him toward the officer waiting at the edge of the helipad. Josi spit and coughed, and then moved along with Aubrey.
“I’m okay,” she mouthed.
“I’m impressed you waited until we landed.” Aubrey had to shout to be heard over the rotor blades. Already the door was being closed, and the Black Hawk was taking to the air.
“I’m still vibrating,” Josi said with a weak laugh.
The officer at the edge of the pad was a Green Beret. Aubrey had worked with the Green Berets before and she had learned to respect them. What they did was hard, and they got assigned tough jobs—like working with lambdas—because they were trained for it. These were guys who trained the Afghanis to fight; supposedly they could train fifteen-year-old lambdas, too.
“Parsons and Cooper,” the man said, reading Aubrey and Jack’s Velcro name badges as they approached. He had a hard, boxy face and a slight New England accent. There was no disdain in his eyes the way there had been with her previous Green Beret captain. This soldier seemed to be taking in the whole scene, assessing the situation like it was a puzzle to be solved.
“Let’s get out of the cold,” he said, and took Josi’s ruck from Jack. He flung it over his shoulder like it was a child’s kindergarten backpack, and led the way toward a collection of darkened tents five hundred yards to the—was it the south? Aubrey felt turned around.
“What direction are we headed?” she asked Josi, not because she really needed to know, but because she thought it might help Josi to get her mind off the helicopter ride. If her mind was ever really off something.
Josi stretched out an arm. “That’s north,” she said weakly. She seemed to be embarrassed she wasn’t carrying her own rucksack. “So we’re going southeast. Ish.”
“The map in your head doesn’t happen to know where we are, does it?” Aubrey asked, a smile in her voice.
“I couldn’t see how fast the helicopter was going,” Josi said, her voice finding a little strength. “But my best guess is we’re somewhere west of Yakima.”
“How close is that to Seattle?” Aubrey asked.
“About a hundred and fifty miles. It’s mostly mountains between here and there. You ever seen the Cascades? A couple of giant volcanoes with smaller mountains all around them. Fun.”
The captain was holding open the door to one of the tents, and the six of them hurried inside. Rich looked like he was dragging already. He had as much gear as the rest of them, minus the weapons, and he was the smallest member of the group, even shorter than Krezi.
Inside were two long tables, and the captain ordered them to drop their gear and take a seat. Six of the chairs were already taken by Green Berets. Josi sat next to Aubrey on her right, and Tabitha on her left. Rich and Krezi sat by Jack on the other side. Aubrey looked over at Jack. With his helmet on, she couldn’t see the scar on the side of his head that he had gotten on their last Green Beret detachment, when the team had been sabotaged.
“Welcome to Operation Detachment Alpha nine-one-one-nine,” the captain said, addressing everyone in the room. “I’m Captain Gillett. We don’t have a lot of time for touchy-feely, get-to-know-you games, but if all goes well, we’ll get to know each other a lot better later. For now, I’ll just explain how this first op is going to work.”
He pointed to one of the Green Berets, a man with a baby face and bright red hair—the Green Berets weren’t wearing their helmets.
“This is Sergeant Sharps. He’s the youngest looking of the bunch, and he’s going to be leading this mission on the ground. Basically, we’re sending you in as a group of refugee kids, turned around and heading the wrong way.”
“The wrong way?” Krezi said. “As in, toward the battlefield?”
Aubrey froze. Krezi hadn’t asked for permission to speak, and Aubrey could see the crease form in the captain’s forehead as he debated whether or not to call out the infraction.
Captain Gillett leaned forward, resting his knuckles on the table, and looked at Krezi.
“You’re how old?”
“Almost sixteen.” After a moment she added, “Sir.”
“Fifteen,” he said, and stared down at her. She seemed to shrink in her seat under his gaze. Finally, he looked up at the rest of the team. “I want you all to start addressing each other the way that Lambda Torreon addressed me—without asking permission to speak, and without saying
sir
. For this assignment you are not soldiers and you’re not to act like soldiers. There will be no saluting, no military decorum of any kind. This is a recon mission.”
He pointed to Sergeant Sharps. “You can call him Nick. Like I said, he’s going to be leading you on the ground, and yes, Torreon—Lucretia—you are headed toward the front lines. That’s to be expected from a group of Green Berets, even when you’re fifteen.”
“Krezi,” she said quietly. “Not Lucretia.”
Gillett nodded slowly, his face expressionless. “Okay. Well, let’s start with you, Krezi. As you may know, the war effort is being seriously hindered by some unknown weapon that the Russians have that disables electronics.”
“Like an EMP?” Rich asked.
“No,” Gillett replied. “An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse that destroys electronics. This just turns everything off for a while. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Cars don’t work because their spark plugs don’t spark. Lightbulbs, wristwatches, computers, tanks, jeeps, airplanes, everything. Whatever this is, it has to have an impressive and mobile power source.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Krezi asked. “You said you were starting with me.”
Gillett pulled a plastic pen from his pocket and set it on the table.
“Show the team what you can do.”
Krezi grinned. “I can do a lot of things to that pen.”
“Surprise me,” Gillett said.
Krezi pointed one finger at the pen. Aubrey had heard about Krezi’s powers, but hadn’t seen them in action.
There was no flash of light, no explosion. Instead, the pen simply softened, like melting chocolate, losing its shape and turning from white to tan to brown, until it finally caught fire and burned in a slow, mellow mess.
Tabitha’s voice appeared in Aubrey’s head. “That’s . . . not impressive.”
Gillett looked up at the group. “What you just saw is the beginner course in Lucretia—I mean Krezi—Torreon. Krezi, what you bring to this group is firepower. When the power is out, you have power. They can’t fire their big guns at you, but you can fire at them. I’m told you can cut through plate steel?”
She nodded. “Slowly, but I can.”
“Slowly might be all that it takes. Plus, you’re much faster on smaller blasts. You can blow up a truck?”
Krezi thought for a moment. “I never have, but sure. I’ve split boulders in half.”
Tabitha’s voice came again. “Then maybe that’s what you should have done. Melting a pen? I’m really scared.”
Gillett spoke, his words cutting through Tabitha’s. “Krezi’s our artillery during a power outage. Next is the Trio, our primary recon team: Aubrey Parsons, Jack Cooper, and Tabitha Tyler.” Gillette looked at Aubrey. “Give us a taste of what you can do.”
“It’s not spectacular to watch,” she said.
“I don’t know how it couldn’t be.”
He didn’t understand how it worked. It wasn’t like she blipped out of existence.
“Here goes,” she said, and she disappeared.
There were all the usual looks of confusion on faces—not startled surprise, just the effects of her brain messing with theirs. She stood up and walked around to Jack’s side of the table. She watched as they began to look for her, but then got distracted as if she had never been there, and wanted to move forward with the meeting.
She reappeared. “Hi,” she said, with a little wave.
“What was that?” asked one of the confused Green Berets.
Aubrey shrugged. “I told you it’s not much to watch.”
“They don’t get it,” Tabitha said in Aubrey’s mind. Aubrey wished she could turn her off.
“She becomes invisible,” Gillett said, his face pleased but still stony. “Or more accurately, her brain sends the signal to your brain that she’s not there.”
“That’s why you were confused,” Aubrey said, returning to her chair and feeling a little embarrassed. “My brain confuses your brain.”
Sharps—Nick, the Green Beret, nodded approvingly. “Invisibility.”
“Limited invisibility,” Gillett corrected. “She still shows up on cameras, and her brainpowers only extend approximately one hundred and forty yards. If she’s farther away than that, you can see her.”
“Even so,” said another of the Berets, the name on his chest reading VanderHorst, “that’s killer recon.”
“Exactly.” Gillett pointed to Tabitha and Jack. “And with a spotting team like this, she’s a perfect spy. Jack Cooper, hypersensitivity. He can track Aubrey anywhere she goes, by sound and by smell—she wears perfume when she goes on a mission, if you can believe that.” He reached into his gear and pulled out a square box and handed it to her. “Your brand, I’ve been told?”
Flowerbomb. Just sniffing the box brought memories flooding back. Her first assignment catching a “demon” lambda; the catastrophe at the Space Needle; the avalanche.
She exchanged a smile with Jack, and set it down.
“Jack and Aubrey work well together—the two of them helped break the terror network—and now we have an added bonus: Tabitha Tyler. Tabitha is a telepath. So Jack can watch Aubrey, and Tabitha can pass intel and orders back to her. The perfect team.”
The Green Berets nodded, and Aubrey tried not to look disappointed. She didn’t want Tabitha in her head. The moments when Aubrey was alone and whispering to Jack—so far away that only he could hear—were some of their most intimate times together. Now Tabitha would be in the middle of that. Granted, Aubrey would be safer and more effective, but it was hard for her to let go of what had been.
“Next we have Richard Jefferson,” Gillett said. “He’s going to be central to everything we’re doing.”
Rich’s dark skin flushed, and he looked straight ahead—not at the captain or at the Green Berets.
“Richard can—well, how would you explain it? You can talk to machines?”
“Kind of,” Rich said.
“It’s just
Rich
,” Krezi said.
“Rich,” Gillett repeated, his face still mostly expressionless.
“It’s not that I can talk to machines,” Rich said, scratching under his helmet. “It’s that I can understand how they work. Just by touching them. I mean, give me any computer, and I can run it—I know the passwords, how to navigate the system, everything.”
Gillett nodded. “Or give you a car and you can drive it, or a clock full of gears and you can fix it, am I right?”
“Right.”
Gillett looked at the group, and then rapped on the table with the knuckles of his right hand. “Rich is going to solve our problem for us. We’re going to find the Russian device—this electronic-interference device—and Rich is going to explain how it works.”
There was a pause, and then Nick Sharps pointed at Josi. “What about the sick one?”
“Josi Sola,” Gillett said, nodding to her. “Imagine a photographic memory that isn’t just photographic but audio and sensory recording as well. She can’t forget a thing. I think she’s still trying to process the sensory input of the chopper ride, aren’t you?”
Josi nodded.
“Look at me,” he said, and she stared at him with weak eyes. “Tell me the names of all the Green Berets, their hair color, and something else about them.”
“Nick Sharps,” Josi began, and seemed to be fighting the urge to throw up. “Red hair with a little brown at the temples. He has an ink stain on his left index finger—I think he’s left-handed.”
“Good,” Gillett said.
“Chase-Dunn. Brown hair. Crooked nose like it was broken, I think. VanderHorst. Brown hair—kind of a muddy brown—and a mole under his right eye. Ehlers. Shaved head, but the stubble is light, probably blond. Tattoo of a sword on his wrist.”
“That’s Excalibur,” Ehlers said proudly.
“Lytle. Black hair. Scar along his chin. And Uhrey. Black hair and he’s cracked his knuckles eight times since we’ve been in this room.”
No one spoke for a moment, and then Lytle leaned forward. “So what is that for? I mean, no offense, darlin’, but do we need a Sherlock Holmes on our team?”
Gillett finally sat down at the end of the table. “She memorizes what Rich tells her. Let me lay out the plan for tomorrow. First of all, the goal: we want to get Rich in contact with one of the Russian vehicles. We figure that there’s something about their vehicles that keeps them immune to the effects of whatever device is interfering with our electronics. So Rich touches a truck or a jeep or a tank and figures out how it works and what makes it so special. You can do that, Rich?”