The moment she says it, I try. How can I not? And I regret it. Whatever pain meds I’m on, they’re working, but they have limits.
An IV is attached to my arm, which is bare except for the bandage wrapped around the bullet wound that Mack inflicted.
“Hutch sewed you back up,” Sig says. “Arm, stomach and back. Covered the wounds in some kind of antibiotic glue. They shouldn’t open again.”
“Saved by Hutch and Vegas,” I say, “the heart and the hunk.”
Sig’s eyes widen. She opens her mouth to say something, but I think the drugs are making me a little slap happy.
“Seriously, why can’t there be one guy who’s both a prime specimen and kind hearted? That’s my Ken, Sig. I know, I know, you think he should be smart, too, but honestly, I don’t really care. At this point, we just need to repopulate the planet, right?”
Sig is an ice sculpture.
“I mean, obviously, we have to fight. We weren’t given gargantuan Shugerbombs? Shuguben? Shugoten. That’s the one. We weren’t given them just to admire, right? I mean, my name is on one of them. And my mother...my actual mother…she brought me here, but did she know? Did she know three weeks ago? About them?”
“Effie,” Sig says, but I’m on a roll. I’m feeling good and a little something more and talking to Sig, just talking to her, this little person with a big brain who I trust more than anyone.
“Well, they knew, right? They told hunky Vegas. The Diablos knew. Mack knew. They all knew. Because of Mars. But they didn’t know when. D-Day was sooner than they thought. That’s what Quinlan said before he kicked the bucket. Twenty years. They thought they had another twenty years to turn us into soldiers. Shuger...Shugoten operators. Support Striker pilots.” I make finger guns and shoot them at imaginary targets. “Peow, peow, peow.”
“I think we gave her too many painkillers,” Sig says.
I nearly respond with a joke, but it catches in my throat. For a moment, I’m confused, but then I remember my ribs. Laughing would hurt. But that’s not why I stopped talking.
My mind claws up through the fog, and it finds purchase on two words.
‘We,’ and, ‘her.’
Sig wasn’t speaking to me.
There is someone else in the room.
Sig confirms my dreaded conclusion with a nod.
“Glad you’re okay,” Hutch says, clearing his throat. “And for the record, Vegas is definitely a hunk. That other guy is really kind of a jerk, though.”
I whip my head toward the other side of the bed. Hutch is sitting back in a chair, looking casual, wearing a smug smile the way old men wear their pants too high—like it’s their God-given right to give themselves wedgies and expose their wrinkly ankles to the world. The worst part is, he knows I can’t do anything about it.
“You could have said something,” I grumble. “That was a private conversation.”
He holds up his hands, and I notice he’s changed into a black flight suit with a pattern of orange stripes and dots that reminds me of the Shugoten bearing my name. But it’s more than a simple flight suit, its closer to very thin, form-fitting armor. And the orange bits aren’t just fabric, they’re glowing, all of it coming together at his chest to form a luminous Support symbol. “I won’t tell a soul. Doctor-patient privilege.”
“I take back every nice thing I said about you,” I say.
He makes an exaggerated quizzical face. “Does that include everything you said in your sleep?”
Sig snorts out a laugh, and I hate to say it at this moment—I hate everything at this moment—but the sound of her laugh makes me smile. “The moment I’m out of this bed, you’re both getting punched.”
“You’d never punch Sig,” Hutch says.
I glare at him, but I’m unable to hide my smile. Stupid painkillers. “Then I’ll punch you twice.”
“Is she flirting with me?” Hutch asks Sig, on the verge of bursting into laughter, which he does the moment Sig lets out the loudest barky laugh I’ve ever heard.
“Good God, strike me down,” I say, but I find myself chuckling, working hard to contain my building laughter. “This is so not fair. How about we talk about Gwen?”
“What about Gwen?” Hutch says. I can’t tell if I misread the two of them, or if he’s really good at hiding his emotions.
“Or Daniel?” I turn to Sig, and her smile is fading quickly. Oops. “Sorry.”
“Daniel’s a good guy,” Hutch says, not losing an ounce of his good cheer, “but I think Duff is the man for you.”
Sig fights her returning smile.
“So,” I say to Hutch, happy to move past my faux pas, “You’re just one of the girls, eh?”
He shrugs, unfazed by the crack. “I do have three sisters.” As soon as he says it, his lightheartedness falls dead on the floor. He’s quiet for a moment. “I hope I still do.”
“I’m sure they’re okay,” I say, but he’s equally unfazed by my platitude.
“I’m worried about my parents,” Sig says. She’s an only child. Not a lot of extended family in the States. But she’s close to her parents.
I realize that the horror I felt at seeing the outside world torn apart and burning, as horrible as it was, was far worse for them. I’m not sure where Hutch is from, but Sig and I both lived east of San Diego.
“We are going to fight them, right?” Sig asks.
I try to push myself up, but Hutch puts his hand on my shoulder. “You need to rest. You lost a lot of blood. I had to give you a transfusion.”
I’m about to ask from whom, but then I see the bandage in the crook of his arm. He gave me his own blood. Is that part of why they picked him for my Support? In case I was bleeding out and needed a fresh batch to keep me going? Are Supports seen as expendable? Are Points really that important? Questions for another, more lucid day. “And now I need to punch you three times.”
He sighs, but he helps support my back until I’m sitting up straight. I’m expecting it to hurt a lot, but the thing around my ribs holds everything in place.
“We’re going to fight them,” I tell Sig in my most serious, ‘I’m not screwing around’ voice. “We’re going to fight them, and we’re going to—”
An alarm sounds, like I’m on a game show and have just given the wrong answer. But then it repeats, over and over. A red light is flashing in the hallway.
“What’s that?” I ask, but they’re as clueless as I am. We all know it’s an alarm, and probably not good, but what is it for?
“We’ll be back,” Hutch says, rushing for the door, Sig running to catch up.
“Hey!” I shout at them, flexing ribs, gasping from the pain. “Help me up.”
Hutch shakes his head. “Effie, seriously, you can’t—”
I yank the IV from my arm and ignore the trickle of blood that might be mine, or Hutch’s. “The three of us are a unit now.”
They both stare at me.
I point at Sig. “Base.”
My finger slides over to Hutch. “Support.”
I hitch a thumb at my chest. “Point.”
“We don’t have to do everything you tell us,” Hutch says, speaking loudly over the alarm. “Especially if it’s going to hurt you.”
“Before I...died...Vegas told me I was in charge. Not him. Not either of you. Unless either of you think you can be a Point, I’m responsible for everyone in this place. Everyone who survived the past few days or longer on this island. I can’t lead from a bed. Franklin D. Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down by Guillain–Barré syndrome. But did he say ‘boo-hoo for me, let the Japanese have Hawaii’? ‘Let Hitler have Europe’? No. He said, ‘we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us
God.’”
They just stare at me, dumbfounded, like they’ve never heard those words before. And maybe they haven’t. So I elaborate for them. I point to the wheelchair folded up in the corner of the room. “Get the damn chair.”
Hutch heads for the chair, but he doesn’t look thrilled about it. As soon as he steps away from the door, Gwen slides into view, clutching the frame, stopping herself mid-run. She’s out of breath. Afraid. And dressed in a white, armored flight suit with glowing red stripes that come together at a metal Unity badge on her chest. It looks like the badge I found in my go-pack, but orange on the sides, and black at the tip and base. A Support badge.
She looks me in the eyes and delivers the one message I hoped she wouldn’t. “They’re here.”
The two words are vague, but the message is clear enough.
They’re here.
Them.
The enemy.
35
I don’t know how wheelchair-bound people do it. Having your top speed limited by a motor or the person pushing you is frustrating. While even the fully mobile have a top speed, you can always improve it, or push against it, expand the limits a bit. But in a chair, being pushed, options are limited to sit back and enjoy the ride, or make the life of the person pushing you a living nightmare.
I choose the latter.
“I’m not someone’s aging grandmama,” I grouch at Hutch.
“You have broken ribs,” he says. “Two bullet holes.”
“One bullet hole. One bullet scratch.”
“You died,” he complains.
Is this what having a real mother would have been like?
“From loss of blood,” I say, “which you gave back to me—thanks for that—and you’ve plugged all the leaks. This glue stuff will hold, right?”
During the alarm-whooping seconds of his non-response, Gwen and Sig round a corner far ahead of us. I slap both armrests. “Move it, Hutch, or I swear, I’m going to jump out of this thing and run.”
“Hold on,” he says.
My hair slides back in the breeze of our acceleration. As we approach the turn, I grasp the armrests. It takes a supreme, pride-fueled effort to not shout as we take the corner, the wheelchair tipping onto one wheel, nearly careening into the wall. When the chair thumps back to the ground, pain bursts through me, and I’m glad Hutch can’t see my face.
The alarm goes quiet just before we reach Operation’s entrance. Its shrieking call is replaced by the sound of shouting voices. Sounds like everyone beat me here, and no one knows what’s going on.
Hutch slows us down as we enter the large control room. The first thing I notice is the people. Everyone is here. Vegas is wearing a white flight suit that matches Gwen’s. Berg and Ghost are wearing armored flight suits, too. They’re maroon and covered in a pattern of glowing yellow stripes that converge on their various Unity symbols. Where did they find them?
Then I see Quinlan’s body is missing. They somehow got him, and the ExoFrame, out of here. The blood and debris has been removed, too, though I can still see a smear on the long hangar window, where someone hastily wiped it down. I must have been unconscious for a while. A few hours at least.
The third thing I notice is the wall of screens. Many of the smaller displays still show satellite views of the world in ruin. But the large screen shows a tropical ocean and something large moving just beneath the surface.
“Where is that?” I ask, but no one hears me. They’re too busy shouting at each other about what to do.
“Hey!” I shout, and the pain caused by the lone word nearly makes me gasp. But I put on a strong face when everyone turns toward me. From the far side of the room, sitting at a terminal, Gizmo whispers, “Effie, thank God.”
Thank God? For me? That’s a first. I’m not sure how I came to be that person, whose presence can only be explained by divine intervention, thus requiring thanks to a supreme being—to Gizmo or anyone else. It’s not something I ever wanted, or thought possible. And as views of the ravaged world glow around the room, the whole ‘Why would God allow bad things to happen?’ argument flits through my mind. It’s the same question I’ve wrestled with all my life in regard to my parents. Why would loving parents subject their daughter to a life like mine?
As I push myself up out of the chair, my subconscious provides an answer: To make you strong enough. For what? To survive a life of abuse? Of solitude and confusion? Or to survive the horrors of an island my mother planned to abandon me on for a second time?
The back of a massive body rises through the water, creating a wake. I look from the screen to the hangar window below it, and to the Shugoten standing sentinel on the other side.
Strong enough for this.
I point at the large screen. “Where is that?”
“Three miles out and closing,” Daniel says. “It triggered some kind of proximity sensors. The security system picked it up. Sounded the alarm. Has been tracking it automatically since.”
“When will it get here?” I ask, and I think someone like Vegas might have said, “ETA?”
Daniel looks back at me. He’s terrified. “Ten minutes.”
I can tell he has more to say. “What?”
“It’s approaching from the West. We already know these things hatch from the pods, and that they fell from the sky. I think this might be the one we saw crash that night. The one that caused the Tsunami. Since they seem interested in eating...people, there is no good reason for a pod to land in the middle of the Pacific. It being in this part of the world was probably unintentional. But it coming here, to this island, is not. Effie, it knows we’re here. I don’t know how it knows, but it does. And it’s coming for us. To eat us.”
Daniel’s declaration sets the room abuzz once more.
“Quiet!” I shout, ignoring the pain a little easier this time.
With all eyes on me once more, I point at the hangar and ask Daniel, “You know how these work?”
“In theory,” he says. “If they didn’t change too much.”
To Vegas. “And you can operate them?” To Berg. “Both of you?”
“If they work like an ExoFrame, we can manage.” Vegas looks ready to charge out there and try. After seeing the state of the world, he seems ready for a fight.
“There’s more to them than an ExoFrame, but the controls are similar enough,” Daniel says. “Again, in theory.”
I turn to Gwen, not wanting to ask anything of her, but I understand how this is supposed to work—even if I don’t yet know the physical mechanics of it. “What about you? Can you fly one of those?”
Daniel pipes up again. “The Support Strikers should be identical to—”
“I asked her,” I say.
“Yeah,” Gwen says. “I aced the flight sims.”
“This won’t be a simulation,” I tell her.
“I always assumed it wouldn’t be someday,” she says, and smiles. “And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s our job to worry about you, not the other way around.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” I say, turning to Ghost. “How about you?”
“I haven’t flown one of those,” he says, “but I passed the flight sim exam when I was fourteen. I’m more at home in the air than I am down here.”
That settles it. “Vegas, Berg, see if you can get those things working. Ghost, Gwen. You’re their Supports. Get in the air and back them up. Duff, Daniel, you’re their Bases. Figure all of this out. Do what you can to guide them.”
And just like that, everyone snaps into action. Vegas opens the hangar door at the side of the room, revealing a staircase leading down to the floor of the wide-open space. Berg and Ghost follow him out. Gwen isn’t far behind, but I stop her. “Gwen.”
She waits for me, as I hobble up to her. “I half expected you to jump in one of those robots yourself. You’re showing strength and wisdom. I think—”
To our mutual surprise, I cut her short with a hug.
“Be careful.”
&
nbsp; She leans back, looking me in the eyes. “I will...but I’ll also do what I have to.”
I nod. “I know. Just come back alive.”
She smiles, but makes no promises before leaving.
Daniel, Gizmo, Duff, Doli and Sig are all seated at consoles, working hard. I watch Doli for a moment and Hutch, the only other person left standing, notices.
“Killing Quinlan brought her back a bit,” he says. “She hasn’t said much, but she never really did. She’s more at home in the digital world.”
I watch Doli’s curved screen, seeing only streams of text and numbers. “What’s she doing?”
“Trying to make contact,” he says.
“With who?”
“With anyone.”
“Duff.” Daniel leans back in his chair, looking past Gizmo to the older, chubby ex-Diablo. He holds up the strange white helmet connected to his system. It looks like some kind of sea creature—a jelly fish with holes and small sensors on the inside. “Have you ever used psy-controls?”
Duff nods. “Yeah, but we’re not controlling anything from in here.”
Daniel pulls the strange helmet over his head. “There are corresponding psy-controls in the Shugoten and Strikers. When all three are activated, we’ll be able to communicate in real time, just by thinking. We’ll also feel what they feel, so be ready for that. Just remember, we’re inside a bunker under a mountain. We’re safe. Our lack of fear can be a buffer for theirs.”
“Unity,” Duff says. “I know how it works.”
And now I do, too. At least a little more than I did before. I had pictured the functions of Base, Support and Point as wholly external. Base supplied information. Support provided physical relief and emotional strength. Point led the way and did the dirty work. At best, it was all about trusting your team. But the three-person unit—mind, soul and body—merged through psy-controls, really could act as one. Separate, but unified.
And while that is kind of cool, I still don’t really see the strategic advantage to simply having an army of Points in giant butt-kicking robots. When dealing with something the size of a daikaiju, brute force seems like a more appropriate response than the touchy-feely, ‘let’s share our feelings’ Unity method.
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