ROAD TO FREEDOM
NOVEMBER 3
9:17 A.M.
Over the past hour, Skye’s lower half had gone from supple to cement. She brought up the rear, lagging behind her fellow hikers as they trudged in a winding, dusty line toward the top of the first plateaued mountain they’d spotted. The climb grew steeper by the minute, and Skye paused to take a sip from her A-shaped canteen. Swallowing and flattening her parched lips into a determined line, she used all her dancer’s willpower to force her legs to keep walking. If feet had mouths, hers would be swearing. And Skye’s spirits sagged even lower than her arches.
Not that the rest of the group looked much better. At the front of the death march, Charlie and Darwin led the way. They stared straight ahead as they walked, steely and determined, too tired for conversation. Next came Allie and Mel: chattier, slower, and way more annoying. Mel’s arm was permanently draped around Allie’s slim shoulders, and in the mirage-inducing sunlight they looked like a two-headed metallic beast lurching through across the broiling surface of Mars. Even AJ seemed to be faring better than Skye. She shuffled along to the side of the group humming, looking up now and again to shoot menacing glances at Allie. But at least she was moving at a steady pace.
“That’s it,” Skye finally yelled, stopping to pick up a jagged rock from along the desert path, and aiming it directly at her flight suit.
“Skye, no!” Allie cried. “It’s not too late, we can still get out of here!”
Skye shook her head with a laugh. “I’m not trying to hurt myself, Al.” She rubbed the rock against the metallic fabric’s edge, making a big gash in the material. Then she began to rip. “I’m… just… so… HOT.” With a grunt, Skye yanked the remaining cloth from her jacket. In the one-shoulder top that remained, she now looked more like a gilded Amazonian than a PAP pilot. “What?” she said in response to the group’s curious expressions. “I grew up in leotards and shrugs my entire life. We had to get creative if we wanted to look fabulous. Who’s next?”
Moments later, each one of the girls strode along the desert floor looking more like Lara Croft than Jackie O. But Skye could have been butt-naked and still would have felt like she was walking through a wood-fire pizza oven. She staggered over a few large rocks, cursing her clear gladiator sandals for their lack of traction. If anyone was going to drop first, it was definitely going to be her. She looked longingly at a shriveled desert shrub clinging to the side of a rock, thinking about how ah-mazing it would be to rest her head in the six-inch patch of shade beneath it and never get up.
Her parents would eventually find her sun-bleached skeleton, and they would fly her remains back for a huge memorial service in Westchester. All her old friends from OCD would come, dressed in designer black suits their mothers let them buy to honor the tragedy. Her own mother, Natasha Flailenkoff, beautiful former prima ballerina and owner of Body Alive Dance Studio, would mourn her only daughter in a beautiful, dramatic, Russian style. She’d probably gild a pair of Skye’s toe shoes and hang them in the studio for all the little tutu’d girls to aspire to…
Well, screw that! Skye rubbed her temples and shook her aching head to erase the morbid fantasy from her mind. Her toe shoes would hang in Lincoln Center someday, not in Body Alive Dance Studio off the Saw Mill Parkway.
She executed a quick en pointe to remind herself that she was still a living, breathing ballet dancer, arching the blistered soles of her feet and throwing her chest forward as her arms swept upward in two perfect semi-circles. She still had a lot of work to do on this Earth, and a stupid plane crash wasn’t going to erase her twelve years of dance training. Jutting her sunburned chin out in front of her, Skye straightened her posture and picked up the pace.
The one member of the group she kept losing sight of was Taz. For the past hour, he’d been darting in and out of the of the scrubby desert bushes with newfound objects (A quartz crystal! A sandstone that looks exactly like Stewie from Family Guy!) and observations (My B.O. is way less funky than Mel’s! I think I can see Burning Man from here!). Now he came crashing into sight from behind a sage plant, still wearing his pleated skirt and white Alphas blouse. He stuck out his tongue and pointed to a saliva-coated purple leaf. Skye didn’t know whether to laugh or gag.
“Want one?” Taz grinned. “Sage leaves help prevent dehydration. Learned about it a couple years ago on safari.”
“Sure.” Skye plucked a grayish leaf from Taz’s outstretched hand and popped it in her mouth, her heart suddenly racing. Whenever she was around Taz, she felt as if she’d drunk about eighteen cups of green tea without the peeing part. Every molecule of her body felt alive and energized, and it wasn’t the sage leaf. It was Taz’s infectious energy.
Even now, he bounded up the trail like he was born to hike in 100-degree heat. She pushed herself to match his pace, trying not to pant like a sled dog. She’d do whatever it took to keep up with Taz. He must feel the same way, right? Skye tried to figure out what was going through his mind as they passed AJ along the path.
Her eyes focused on Taz’s pleated silver skirt ahead of her, Skye thought back to last night, when she found the food. He told her she was awesome. But then he’d high-fived her. Did boys only high-five their friends? He’d given her the sage leaf just now, but apparently he’d gathered up a lot of them, because now he was handing them out to Mel and Allie.
Skye blinked, realizing she had lost sight of Taz again as the path bent around a boulder. The sun was blindingly bright already, and for a second all she saw was heat ripples in front of her. She stopped in front of the boulder, unsure which way to go.
“Up here,” came Taz’s voice. Skye looked up and saw the shadow of her cross-dressed crush standing on top of the rock, blocking out the sun behind him. He opened his strong arms out wide à la DiCaprio in Titanic, stuck his chest out and shouted “I’m freeeee!”
Skye’s heart sunk again. So free you don’t need me.
“Sorry,” he called down, blushing a little. “I’m just so happy to be off that island, out of my mom’s sight!”
Taz was obviously too happy flying solo to care whether she was his girlfriend or not. He jumped off the boulder and kept walking up the mountain, leaving Skye to shake her head and follow.
But the longer she walked, the more Skye realized she didn’t care. If she was going to die out here, she didn’t want to do it with any regrets. She wanted her last few days of life to mean something. She wanted them to be crazy and energetic and… Taz-esque.
She ran to catch up with him, forcing her legs and arms to propel her through the sauna-hot air.
“I have a game we can play,” she announced, trying to make her voice sound as confident as possible.
“Nice!” Taz said. “I think I’ve run out of ideas.”
“What happened to being free?” Skye said playfully.
“I am free,” he shot back with a smirk. “I’m also bored.”
Taz wiped a long bead of sweat from his cheek. His light blue eyes were playful, completely devoid of the hate-daggers she’d felt directed at her so many times over the past weeks.
Skye’s chest thumped. It felt like her heart was punching her ribs, like her body was ordering her to make the next move. She glanced ahead to where the others were still trekking in the distance. If they didn’t pick up the pace, they might lose them. But she didn’t care. She had to find out how Taz felt.
“Okay, the game is Would You Rather: Alpha Edition,” she said. “Ready?”
“Hit me,” Taz replied.
“Would you rather shave your legs for the rest of your life, or never cut your hair again?” Skye asked.
“Hair,” Taz said without hesitating. “This leg thing is brutal. Plus, I’d look pretty cool with long locks.” He smiled, tossing a fake mane. “Like Tarzan.” He banged his fists on his chest and let out a jungle call.
“Okay,” Skye smiled and rolled her eyes, then thought hard. “Would you rather live with your mother until you are married, or neve
r get to make fun of your brothers again?”
Taz thought a little harder about this one. “I guess I’d live with my mother,” he said finally. “I mean, she’s not always so bad. And have you met my brothers? They were born asking for it.”
Taz was good at this game. But Skye still had one more question she needed to ask…
Here goes nothing.
She took a deep breath, pasting on her most professional stage smile. “Would you rather date any other girl on Alpha Island…” Skye bit her lip. “… or me?” Her words hung in the dry air like a white flag of surrender. She’d barely spoken the last part out loud, but she knew he’d heard her. She held her breath, waiting to see if Taz would take the bait or signal that the war wasn’t over.
Taz slowed his pace to a stop and stared down at a prickly cactus as though it held the answers he needed. Skye looked at the desert floor, too, nervously turning her toes from first to second position and back again. Then she glanced back at Taz. It was weird to see him so thoughtful. Or was his expression angry? Skye began to panic. What if he was about to tell her—again!—that there was no way he wanted anything to do with her? How could she force her legs to keep walking after that kind of rejection? Where could she go to hide? They were in the middle of the desert. Talk about awkward.
Just when Skye’s brain was about to implode with anxiety, Taz looked at her. That’s when she realized his eyes were full of hurt. “That depends,” he said softly. “Would you also be dating my brother?”
Skye could almost hear her heart shattering, like a rose dipped in dry ice in eighth-grade chemistry class.
“Actually, I wanted to explain that whole thing,” Skye rushed to fill the chilly silence between them with words, starting carefully as she tried to explain why she’d given Syd a chance in the first place. But pretty soon, her halting recollection of how Syd had charmed her with poetry became a rushed explanation of everything that had happened and before she knew it, Skye was finally explaining to Taz why she had no choice but to keep dating Syd in spite of knowing the better choice was him.
“I realized my mistake a long time ago,” Skye said, staring at Taz’s scraped kneecaps below the hem of his metallic pleated skirt instead of his light blue eyes. “Syd was never right for me. It was you all along.”
“Then you should have ended things with him instead of leading him on,” Taz said with an edge in his voice.
“I was just about to end things,” Skye couldn’t help her voice from sounding irritated. “But then your mom got involved.”
Taz blinked hard in surprise. “Huh?”
Skye risked another peek at her crush’s face. His mouth was twisted in anger, but his thick eyebrows were raised in curiosity. “My mom played a part in this?” Then, quieter, he mumbled something else. “Why does that not surprise me?”
Skye shrug-sighed. “Shira told me that if I broke Syd’s heart, she would break my enrollment. It was either stay with Syd or leave Alpha Island.”
There, now he knows the whole truth. She sucked on the sage leaf still in her mouth, ran a hand nervously along the bumps in her blond bun and waited. All she could do now was hope he’d understand.
But maybe he wouldn’t get it, Skye’s inner pessimist argued. Taz didn’t know what it was like to have to fight for stuff. Growing up as Shira’s son meant he’d never had to. Then again, her inner optimist pointed out, he definitely noticed (and hated) the way Shira controlled everyone around her. That much was clear from the way he’d acted after the plane crash. Her teal eyes searched his to try to figure out how he was processing her bombshell.
“So that’s why you acted so weird to Syd,” Taz mused. He smacked his forehead, and a lock of his shiny black hair fell adorably over his left eye. “You were trying to get him to dump you.”
“Exactly!” Skye burst out, happy that Taz made the mental leap so she wouldn’t have to spell everything out in excruciating—and embarrassing—detail. She didn’t feel like reliving her faux-farts, greasy hair, or onion breath. Not when she was trying to get Taz to consider her dateable again. “My only hope was to be as gross and weird as I could, so Syd would move on and get obsessed with… I mean get interested in… some other girl,” Skye giggle-shrugged.
“News flash. You weren’t that good at it.” Taz’s eyes sparkled mischievously. He plucked a little white flower off a lethal-looking cactus and twirled it in Skye’s direction.
“At what?” Skye put her hands on her narrow hips. Was Taz really going to dredge up the past and make her relive how painful it was to be trapped in a lie with Syd, and then start immediately making fun of her for it? She was all for gentle teasing, especially after what she’d put him through, but telling her she sucked was just… mean. Skye instinctively rolled her shoulders back to ease the tension in her body as she wondered if Taz was more trouble than he was worth. Better to keep on being single and fighting to become top Alpha than to put up with this.
“You aren’t very good at making people stop liking you.” Taz stared at her pointedly, a flicker of a smile slowly turning into a goofy grin on his handsome face.
Wait, what?
And then it hit Skye, the realization as sharp and acute as an elbow jab to the ribs. He still liked her!
She threw her head back and laughed, not her normal nervous Taz-manian giggle but a real, happy peal of laughter, because it was finally obvious that Taz was into her again. The brutally bright sunlight momentarily blinded her and when she finished laughing and directed her gaze back at him, all she could see was the dark outline of his face.
Specifically, his lips. Just a couple of inches away from her own. Now she really didn’t care if they ever caught up with the others again.
Ohmuhgud. Skye shut off her head and let her heart be her choreographer.
Suddenly, even on this dry, dusty patch of desert, she felt weightless, like she was submerged underwater. Her face tilted sideways as her body leaned in. Every particle of her wanted to collide with the dark-haired, blue-eyed boy in front of her, and now she knew he felt the same way.
And then Taz kissed her, his lips the one soft thing in the prickly, hard Mojave desert. His arms pulled her flight-suited shoulders close, and she didn’t even have time to wonder how gross and sweaty she felt. She held on to him, too, her body suddenly light enough to float away like a balloon. Skye wasn’t thinking about getting rescued anymore. Sure, an airdropped crate of toiletries, fresh clothes, and clean linens would be nice, but that was no longer necessary. The kiss was saving her.
10
THE MOJAVE DESERT
TOP OF THE PLATEAU
NOVEMBER 3RD
10:06 A.M.
Charlie was good at pretending. She could pretend to respect the way Shira ran her Academy. She could shrug her shoulders and play dumb when asked how the island’s surveillance system got broken. She could even pretend that Darwin looked cute during his blessedly short-lived emo phase when he dyed his naturally highlighted hair blue-black.
But at some point, even the best pretenders dropped their masks. Charlie’s mask hung by a thread thinner than dental floss, and any minute now that thread was going to break.
For hours, she’d been pretending to be strong and upbeat as she led seven exhausted, dehydrated, and ridiculously dressed Alphas and Brazilles up the side of a searing-hot mountain devoid of shade. Soon it would be noon. The sun’s heat would only grow hotter, she had a huge painful blister under her gladiator sandals, and she was down to less than half a canteen of water.
In other words, if the GPS didn’t work, they were screwed. And all the pretending in the world wasn’t going to help Charlie hide it from her friends. Aside from AJ, who stumbled along the rocky terrain humming to herself, they were a smart, perceptive group. They’d know something was up.
Charlie knew Darwin could see it, too. Charlie’s exhaustion hung on her like a heavy coat, dragging her down with each thudding, blister-rubbing step. Darwin kept walking doggedly at her side, his own
foot bleeding where the strap of a too-small pair of platform sandals dug into his skin.
“We’re here!” Mel shouted up ahead. Somehow, he had found the energy to push ahead of Charlie and Darwin to climb over the last boulders that led to the mountaintop, where a wide, circular plateau awaited them. Mel dropped to his legging-covered knees and actually kissed the dusty ground as Allie clambered up the boulders and looked on with a weirded-out expression on her dust-streaked face.
As Charlie and Darwin struggled up the rocks to join them, Charlie could hear Taz still playing the “What would you do for a bite of food” game with AJ and Skye. She had one unopened BrazilleBlast bar left, but Charlie had kept it hidden, wedged into her pack along with the GPS. They’d need it soon enough.
Taz’s game was getting a little out of hand. He must be really hungry, Charlie thought as she scrambled up a boulder and turned to watch the stragglers approach. “But would you eat a scorpion, uncooked?” he asked, breathing hard as he helped push an exhausted Skye ahead of him.
“Yeah, I would,” Skye said, her eyes visibly rolling under her gold aviators.
“Would you bludgeon it to death, or throw it on a fire and burn it alive?” Taz asked.
“Stop!” AJ squealed, bringing up the rear. “As a member of PETA, I insist you find another game.”
“As a member of humanity I insist you find a sense of humor,” Allie shot back.
When she finally reached the plateau, Charlie’s legs collapsed beneath her. She sank to the ground like a wind sock minus the wind.
Now comes the moment of truth. Charlie shrugged her metallic mini-backpack off her sweaty shoulders and unzipped it. She pulled out their aPods and the GPS module, laying everything in front of her on the ground so everyone could see what she was working with. Or not working with, as the case may be.
“Go higher, Charles,” Allie said. Charlie turned and saw Allie’s freshly Purelled thumb gesturing to a giant, flat-topped rock. “That’s the highest point around.”
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