Titan Base (12 page)

“I bet the adults use these tunnels to move through Santa Blanca when they don’t want to be noticed,” he said. “Or when they have to move something alien. Or maybe even the Ch’zar themselves come through these tunnels.”

The kids stopped eating and glanced down the tunnel,
looking and straining to hear something besides their own thumping heartbeats.

“What do they look like?” Bobby whispered. “I mean, the aliens who’re supposed to be in charge of everything?”

Ethan turned to Madison to see if she knew. She shrugged.

“We’ve never seen one,” Madison told them. “They send out robots and I.C.E.s—those giant insect battle suits you’ve seen—and use mind-controlled people, but we’ve never had a confirmed report of them coming down from their spaceships in orbit.”

Ethan shuddered, remembering how they’d
almost
seen a Ch’zar. There was probably one on the command zeppelin that directed the attack force searching for the Seed Bank last month. They’d blasted that zeppelin out of the air, and then every enemy I.C.E. had dived into the flaming wreckage and died in a futile attempt to save some
thing
inside.

Later, Ch’zar ships came and removed the smoldering wreckage … so the Resisters never found out for sure.

“You’ve never seen them?” Bobby asked, pressing his hands to his temples. “How do you know they even exist?”

Ethan sighed. Bobby still struggled with the truth. He didn’t blame him.

Ethan was about to tell him how Coach Norman had told him about the Ch’zar and showed him holograms of their mother ship in orbit, but Emma spoke first.

“Look.” Emma pulled Bobby to his feet and showed him the veinlike structures on the wall. “Does that look like anything a human could make?”

“No …,” Bobby admitted, squirming, half fascinated, half repulsed.

Emma reached out with her hand and hovered over the veins. “Try this,” she whispered. “You can actually
feel
them.”

“No way,” Bobby breathed.

Emma locked eyes with Ethan.

He had a sinking feeling he knew what she meant. He didn’t want to try it … but he didn’t want to look like a big chicken either. So he held out his hand, too, almost touching the organic structures on the wall.

He felt a faster pulse inside the things.

His own pulse accelerated to match the elevated beat. Then he felt more—a dozen other beats, hundreds, thousands, all thumping away; it was a concert, beautiful music that filled his mind and flesh.

Something far away directed the blood music.

The Ch’zar Collective, just a hairsbreadth from his fingertips.

All he had to do was reach out … and connect.

He jerked his hand back, horrified.

Emma kept her hand where it was, then moved it a smidgen nearer to the wall. “They’re looking for us,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I can hear them whispering our names.”

“You can
what
?” Madison said, her eyes widening.

Emma ignored Madison, and her eyes opened and locked with Ethan’s. “They didn’t see us—I mean the Resisters—in the basement. They know some of us are here, though. They detected our I.C.E.s inbound and are looking for them … on the outskirts of town. They don’t have a clue they’re smack in the middle of Santa Blanca in trash trucks.”

Ethan grabbed his sister’s wrist and pulled her hand away from the wall.

“Don’t do that,” he told her.

Madison made a click with her tongue, getting Ethan’s attention. Her pixie features bunched with extreme concern.

Ethan could guess what Madison was thinking. He was thinking the same thing.

Emma was a year older than they were. Thirteen … and maybe changing—puberty and the huge shift in brain chemistry that went with it—and that’d make her vulnerable to Ch’zar mental domination. Here in the middle of
enemy territory, there was nothing they could do about it either.

Emma looked at Madison and him and laughed.

It startled Ethan and he dropped her wrist.

“There’s no way I’m getting absorbed, you two,” Emma said. “I’m just smarter than you, Ethan, so I can hear a little bit more. It’s not like I
want
to dive in deeper.”

Madison’s brow knit in confusion at this.

But Ethan got it. He’d experienced the same thing before in his wasp I.C.E. suit—that melded-mind feeling, sinking in, like he was becoming part of that insect brain … but also repulsed by the “otherness” of it all.

Madison gazed at them both, licked her lips, and then slowly said, “Maybe we just better get moving.”

Ethan stared at his sister, unsure if she was okay or not.

“Don’t be stupid,” Emma told him. She slugged him in his shoulder with her usual knuckle-grinding strength.

“Ow! Okay,” Ethan said. He grabbed his backpack. “Come on, guys,” he said, and motioned to the rest of the Grizzlies.

“I can’t …,” Bobby said.

“You’ve got to believe us by now,” Emma said.

“I do,” Bobby replied, and let out a tremendous sigh. “I know you’re right.” He swallowed, choking back a sob, then cleared his throat. “That’s why I’ve got to go
back
.”

Ethan didn’t understand. Was he going back to his parents? Giving up? That didn’t sound like the Bobby he knew.

“I have to try and save the others,” Bobby explained. “They’re going to be taken on those buses for ‘sick’ kids. We’ll never see them again.”

“Yeah …,” Madison whispered. “You probably won’t.”

“We’ve got to stop that,” Bobby said to his teammates.

Sara and Leo nodded back to him.

“Come on, Ethan,” he said. “We can do this if we stick together.”

Bobby was talking as if this were a team huddle in some soccer game.

Ethan tried to see how they could pull it off. Sabotage the buses first, stage some diversion, get the kids out, maybe into these tunnels … but then what?

Did it matter what came next? He could figure that part out as they went. The important thing was saving the rest of the kids in Santa Blanca.

What if the Ch’zar took them to Sterling? What if they took them straight to Ward Zero? Or just drugged them until they grew up, and “installed” them in enemy I.C.E.s?

There was no way he was letting
that
happen.

“Lieutenant …,” Madison said, and gently set her
hand on his arm. There was an uncharacteristic look of sympathy in her eyes, along with the expectation that he was going to give orders—the
right
orders.

The responsibility that Colonel Winter had given him tightened like a noose around his neck.

He had to finish his mission. He had to get back to the Seed Bank and deliver the information they’d gathered on New Taos. Even if Colonel Winter and Dr. Irving couldn’t use the city as a new base, he had new data—that crystal from the library. It might be the key to unlocking a new technology they could use.

He had to focus on the bigger picture, the Resistance effort, saving all humans everywhere from the Ch’zar.

He had to let Bobby go.

And if he couldn’t get the medicine that Angel needed, he’d have to let her go, too.

It felt like the entire world rested on his shoulders, crushing him. He was only twelve. A few months ago all he cared about was getting good grades and soccer.

Ethan straightened.

The one thing he couldn’t afford right then was to feel sorry for himself.

Everyone was counting on him.

“We can’t go with you, Bobby,” he said. “We have to complete our own mission first.”

Bobby’s mouth dropped open. He was too stunned to even protest. From his perspective, it had to look like Ethan was abandoning him.

Ethan couldn’t even risk telling him what they had to do, because Bobby’s mind might become compromised by the Ch’zar, and then the enemy would know everything he did.

“Get the team, Bobby,” Ethan said. “Get them and meet me at my house, my old house. That old maple tree in the backyard. I’ll be there or leave instructions on how you can find me.”

Bobby shook his head, still unable to believe that Ethan wasn’t going to help.

Emma stepped in. “Bobby, we have important things to do—things that will save more lives. But we can’t tell you the details.…” She let her words hang in the air.

“Oh …,” Bobby finally said, and a light appeared in his eyes. “Yeah, I get it. Mind control. The aliens would find out, if …” He held out his hand for Ethan to shake.

Relief flooded through Ethan. He was glad his old friend understood and wasn’t blaming him. That would’ve been too much to take on top of everything else.

He clasped Bobby’s hand and they shook on it.

“I’ll rescue them, Ethan. You get your stuff done. Then we’ll leave this place together.”

Ethan nodded.

Madison handed Bobby her flashlight. “Good luck,” she told him.

Bobby gave her a smile. Madison didn’t smile back.

Ethan watched Bobby and the other Grizzlies team members go back down the tunnel. He wondered if he’d ever see them again.

It felt like Bobby was taking the last bit of the old, happy, soccer-playing Ethan Blackwood with him.

   
13
   
WHAT LIES IN THE DARK?

ETHAN AND MADISON TENSED, THEN SHOVED
.

The cast-iron sewer cover grated on asphalt and rasped to one side.

They were crammed in a vertical concrete tube, each with one arm looped through a ladder rung and the other arm on the cover. For Ethan, this was superembarrassing because their shoulders and hips pressed against one another.

He could feel Madison’s pulse hammering in her body as they finished sliding the lid off. She was warm. Her muscles were iron cords, but somehow she was soft, too. That had to be a girl thing.

“Are you two going to hang there all night?” Emma whispered. “Are you stuck?”

“We’re not stuck,” Madison said a little too quickly. She pulled herself up and poked her head over the edge of the sewer hole. “All clear,” she whispered back to Ethan.

He clambered after her, and Emma followed.

They stood in the middle of Main Street. Barker’s Drugstore was half a block down at the corner. Overhead, those enormous lights held aloft by cranes spilled hard illumination onto the streets and made the three kids’ shadows long and spindly.

They ducked into a side street where the light didn’t penetrate.

They stripped off their normal-clothes disguises, shoving them into their packs. Their flight suits adapted to their surroundings, turning mottled gray with flecks of red brick for camouflage.

The streets of Santa Blanca looked the same as they always had: smooth asphalt, recently cleaned and washed down by the evening street sweeper; concrete sidewalks; litter cans; and cherry trees in planters every ten paces. All perfect.

Ethan had the strangest feeling, though, that he didn’t
know this place. He’d spent his entire life here … but Santa Blanca felt empty and dangerous.

“Cut down Elm Street?” Emma asked.

“I was thinking that alley off of Pine,” he told her. “That’ll dump us out at Tidy Laundry.”

“We’ll steal a laundry truck,” Madison said, “grab some uniforms, and will be halfway out of that Santa Blanca hospital before anyone even notices.”

Ethan thought through this improvised plan, listing hundreds of things that could go wrong. Before he got very far, though, he spotted motion on Main Street. A patrol of the Neighborhood Watch adults had rounded the corner. They were swinging their flashlights back and forth into the shadows.

The three Resisters darted down the alleyway.

All it’d take was
one
adult to spot them, and then
all
the adults would know where they were.

They jogged, paused at the end of the alley, checked and double-checked that no one was coming, and sprinted across the road into a narrow side street.

When they were safely back in the dark, Madison said, “There’s one thing that’s been bugging me … about you two.”

“Just one thing?” Emma asked, taunting.

“Seriously!” Madison whispered.

It sounded like this was important, so Ethan slowed his pace. “Don’t mind my sister,” Ethan told Madison. “She’s just kidding. Go ahead, what do you want to know?”