The Always War (10 page)

The plane jerked and lurched and rolled. Tessa closed her eyes and bent her head down.

“No, no—
look
at something!” Dek yelled at her. “Watch the movement! It’ll fend off the airsickness!”

Tessa wanted to say,
Leave me alone! Let me die in peace!
But just in the short time she’d spent with Dek, she could tell: Dek wouldn’t stop bugging her. Dek wasn’t the type to ever leave someone in peace.

Tessa opened her eyes and stared at the computer screen. Surprisingly, this did make her stomach feel more settled. But were they supposed to be dropping toward the ground so rapidly?

Gasping and still gagging, Gideon struggled up behind her.

“Trees … nothing but trees … not supposed to be trees here,” he murmured, lunging toward the computer screen again.

Tessa tried to focus on the shapes and colors on the screen, rather than the sensation that the ground was rushing toward them too quickly. The ground did seem to be full of hillocks and mounds of green—she guessed those might be trees.

Gideon dropped the airsickness bag from his face long enough to punch in commands to open a new window down in the corner of the computer screen. Then he called up something recorded—maybe more of the spy satellite video Tessa had seen before. This time Tessa noticed both the geographical coordinates and a date stamped at the bottom of the screen: yesterday’s date. Tessa blinked and focused on the scenes: rows and rows of houses and streets and apartment buildings. They looked like they might once have been quite nice, with neatly mowed yards and flowers growing along the sidewalks. But now the yards and flower beds were pitted with craters; facades were ripped from the buildings. In one house lacy curtains fluttered out a window, a portrait of some cozy normalcy Tessa had always longed for. But those curtains, that window, the wall that held it—that was the only part of the house that hadn’t been turned into rubble.

Gideon moaned.

“There was a bombing raid here
yesterday morning,
” he murmured. “Why aren’t
our
cameras showing this? This is all right below us. Why can’t we see it from the air?”

He minimized the scenes of destruction, so the trees rushing toward them filled the whole screen.

“Did the enemy just this morning unveil some incredibly advanced masking technology?” he asked. “I’ve got to tell—”

He reached toward the controls again, but Dek slapped his hands away.

“You are not sending any message out to our military, from this plane, right now,” she ordered, in a tone that would have been perfect for a general if it hadn’t carried just the slightest hint of little-girl squeakiness. “Are you trying to make our chances of being killed go
over
one hundred percent?”

Gideon paused to retch into his airsickness bag.

“It’s just—,” he said, when he could speak again.

“Unless the enemy shot down all our spy satellites, our military’s seeing the same thing we are,” Dek snapped. “Let’s focus on doing things that keep us alive, shall we?”

Gideon probably would have kept protesting, but they hit a pocket of air just then that made the whole plane buck wildly. He had one hand on the airsickness bag and one hand stretched out toward the controls—he wasn’t holding on to anything solid. He tumbled over backward.

Tessa grabbed for his arm.

She caught his sleeve; he curled his fingers around her wrist.

“Are you trying to pull her arm out of its socket?” Dek shrieked at him. “Do you hurt or kill
everything
you touch?”

Gideon let go.

“No!” Tessa screamed.

But when she looked back, Gideon had only shifted to clutching the back of her seat.

Tessa wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the landing got even rougher after that. Maybe the wind currents were more dangerous closer to the Earth’s surface; maybe even the
autopilot had lost power, and gravity was taking over. The plane shimmied and shook, rolled and throbbed, slammed down toward the ground. This seemed to go on for hours. Tessa’s teeth pounded together; her spine jolted against the seat; the belt bit into her hips. And then, even when Tessa was certain they had to be on the ground, they
bounced.

When they finally stopped moving, Tessa didn’t dare to breathe for a full minute.

“Is … everyone … okay?” she asked in a small voice that sounded tinny and panicked even to her own ears. She had a sudden fear of looking around: What if Dek or Gideon was dead? She kept her eyes focused forward, staring straight at the computer screen, which had gone completely dark.

Suddenly a hand slapped against the screen.

“On! Come! Back! On!”

It was Dek. She’d sprung out of her seat and was alternately hitting the computer screen and slamming her hands against the controls.

“Who designs a computer system to shut down just when you need it most?” she hollered. “Where’s the backup power?”

“It … serves the … military’s purposes, not to have a drone plane loaded with all our coding … fall into enemy hands,” Gideon said in a creaky voice from behind Tessa. He was alive! “So … blame your bosses … for not … retrofitting … enough.”

Tessa spun around, to see if Gideon looked as pained as he sounded. But the jerky movement was too much for her after the wild landing. Her stomach lurched; her head throbbed; her vision receded and then surged again.

By the time Tessa could see straight once more, Dek had already launched herself from the pilot’s seat and was running toward Gideon. He was huddled in a broken-looking way against the padded column.

Okay,
Tessa thought.
Dek will take care of him. She’s not as heartless as she tries to sound. She’s all bark, no bite.

Dek bent down beside Gideon. But instead of checking for broken bones or dabbing at the cut over his cheek, she immediately began tugging at his shirt.

“We’ve got to get that uniform off you and hide it!” she cried, her voice brimming with fear. “Tessa, help! If the enemy shows up and sees him wearing that, they’ll kill us all!”

Gideon twisted around and shoved her away. She hit the wall hard.

Maybe Gideon wasn’t hurt as badly as he looked.

“This uniform may be the only thing that saves us,” he insisted. “If I can say, ‘I surrender’ before they shoot me, they have to treat me like a prisoner of war. There are
rules
for that. Policies they have to follow.”

Dek snorted.

“Only way that uniform is going to protect you is if it’s bulletproof,” she muttered. She rubbed the back of her neck, where she’d hit the wall. “And what’s going to protect Tessa and me?”

“I will,” Gideon said.

Tessa expected the other two to ask what she thought, to give her a chance to weigh in with her own opinion. Would she have to cast the tie-breaking vote?

But Gideon was already lunging to his feet, already
slamming his hand against the release for the door. The door slid open, and instantly he had his hands raised in the air.

“I surrender!” he screamed out into the open air. Tessa could tell he was trying to make his voice as loud as possible, to reach the ears of snipers who might be hundreds of feet away. “I surrender! I surrender! I …”

Gideon stopped talking.

It’s amazing what you can notice in a split second. In the instant after Gideon’s voice died out, Tessa stared at him so hard that she could see the individual beads of sweat caught in his eyebrows. She could see the crust of a scab already forming over the cut on his cheekbone. She could see the way his hands trembled as he held them in the air. She could see the slight smear of what might be vomit on the formerly pure-white cuff of his uniform sleeve.

But she didn’t see any recoil in his body from bullets hitting it; she didn’t see any bloom of suddenly gushing blood on the section of the uniform covering his heart.

She kept looking. She seemed incapable of doing anything else.

Not Dek.

“What?” Dek demanded, her voice hoarse with fury or fear. Tessa couldn’t be sure which one it was. “You can’t just stop like that. You’ve committed to this course of action—you keep surrendering until they’re carrying you away in handcuffs and leg irons!”

Gideon turned his head very, very slowly.

“I don’t think there’s anyone out there,” he said in a near whisper. “There’s nobody to surrender
to
.”

Dek stared at him in disbelief for a moment; then she scrambled toward the door herself and peeked around the edge of it.

Tessa realized that she’d slumped down in the copilot’s seat in a way that protected most of her body from the doorway. Only the top of her head and her eyes were exposed.

What do you know,
Tessa thought.
Guess I have survival instincts I never knew about.

But the longer Gideon stood in the open doorway, not being shot, the more foolish Tessa felt for cowering in terror. She even thought Dek looked kind of foolish, clutching the curve of the wall and only barely looking past the strip of rubber that lined the door. Tessa felt like she’d done way too much cowering since she’d stepped onto this plane the night before. She’d done way too much cowering her entire life.

On trembling legs she stood up and went to stand beside Gideon. Standing freely, on her own, she gazed out into enemy territory.

At first glance it looked like Gideon was right: There was no one in sight. There was, actually, very little in sight. Very little except for a vast field of grass, stretching out in all directions.

Or—was this still what you would call grass? In Tessa’s experience grass was tufts of muddied green blades that tried to spring up in bare patches of dirt, when people didn’t trample it too badly. She’d seen pictures in books of expansive lawns trimmed to almost scientific perfection in the luxurious, prodigal era before the war began. But that had always seemed too fantastical to believe, like gazing at drawings of unicorns or fairies or trolls.

This field did not look like a lawn. For one thing the grass was too tall. Half thinking,
Maybe it’s not too smart to just keep standing here, a clear target,
Tessa stepped down into the grass. Much of it reached all the way up to her waist; a few hardy stalks were level with her shoulders. A breeze shuddered across the field, and Tessa almost forgot herself watching the glory of it all, seeing the acres and acres of grass bowing together. It was like music, like a dance. The grass seemed more fully alive than any of the people Tessa had ever known.

“I … surrender?” Gideon called again behind her, his voice gone soft and uncertain.

“Would you two idiots stop and think for a second?” Dek hissed from her position still crouched at the edge of the door. “Just because they haven’t killed us yet, that doesn’t mean nobody’s going to.”

“So what would you have us do?” Gideon asked mockingly. “Let me guess—you’ve got some brilliant plan.”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Dek whispered. “Hasn’t it occurred to you yet? For some reason, no one seems to know we’re here. Maybe it’s
our
military that put some brilliant masking technology on this plane. Maybe it was my bosses.
They’d love it if their planes didn’t show up on any radar except their own. And, you know, it’s not like they’d tell me about anything like that.”

Tessa was surprised to hear a bit of pain throbbing in Dek’s voice.

So she resents not being fully trusted,
Tessa decided, then pushed the thought to the back of her mind because none of that really mattered right now.

“I don’t hear a plan in all that,” Gideon complained. “You open your mouth and I just hear, ‘Maybe this,’ ‘Maybe that.’ No military ever conquered anybody with maybes.”

Tessa thought this must be something his instructors had said a lot at the military academy. He sounded like he was quoting.

“That was background information,” Dek said. “Here’s the plan: As long as nobody knows we’re here, why don’t we keep it that way? We sneak away from the plane, find some jet fuel to steal—and some sort of container to steal it in—we come back here, fuel up, and then we’re on our merry way. No one gets hurt; we get out of here undetected; everything’s good.”

Gideon frowned. Tessa could tell he was trying to find something to object to.

“What if someone catches us?” he asked.

“
Then
you surrender,” Dek countered. “We can always go back to the original plan if we have to.”

Gideon’s frown deepened.

“I don’t think you can still surrender and be protected under prisoner-of-war laws if you’re caught in the middle of a crime,” he said. “Like, say, stealing.”

Dek threw up her hands.

“Fine! I’ll be the one to steal the fuel!” she said. “I’ll carry the canister myself. You can stay all pure and innocent and white-uniformed as long as you want!”

Gideon kept glaring at her, but he slid down into the grass beside Tessa. A moment later Dek stepped down alongside them.

Once again, the other two had made a decision without even consulting Tessa.

“Crouch down as you walk,” Dek suggested. “No point in being total sitting ducks.”

“Shouldn’t we try to hide the plane?” Tessa asked.

“Where?” Dek asked.

“How?” Gideon asked. “Even if we could push it somewhere, we’d just leave a trail of crushed grass that would lead right to it.”

“Oh,” Tessa said, feeling more stupid than ever. She noticed that the blades of grass broke off just as she tiptoed through them. “But we’re leaving a trail too!”

“Can’t be helped,” Dek said with a shrug.

Tessa saw that both of the other two believed they were going to get caught. Maybe they thought it would be better to get caught away from the plane than on it? Or … maybe they just thought it was better to try
something
rather than just wait to be killed?

All three of them plodded forward. Tessa wondered if they’d picked a direction on purpose or if it was just a random choice. She wasn’t going to embarrass herself further by asking.

Then something jabbed into the side of her shoe.

“Ow!” she cried, reaching down. She came up with a
handful of gravel. “Why would there be rocks in a field of grass?” she asked. She reached down again, and felt around. “There are rocks
everywhere
!” she said. “Rocks, and little bits of broken-up concrete—”