by Shannon Hale
“What if you stay on the ground?” asked Luther. “What if you watch where the pink ghosts go and don’t only shoot havoc at it but direct missiles and balefire, Maisie, we could try a nuke, right? There’s no reason—”
“The missiles won’t work. I don’t know why, but I have to listen to whatever subconscious data the thinker token is uploading to my brain.”
“I wish …” He took a deep breath. “I wish none of this had happened.”
When the others went to bed, I stayed in the lab. Wilder wasn’t there, but I knew he would come. Since the lockdown, there was nowhere else for him to go except his lonely little room, and he hated being alone. Only child. Missing mom/absent father. He came to astronaut boot camp with an entourage of friends, even though he had nefarious plans. He tried (succeeded?) to get together with me, and who knew how many other girls. The boy needed company. And I wanted a full confession. The question and presence of Wilder was distracting me from my mission.
I was fiddling with the mini-trooper suit when I sensed him at the open door. I spoke before he could try to slink off again.
“Why does Howell trust you?”
“Because I didn’t kill Mi-sun.”
“You told me you did.”
“I was lying.”
“Brutus said—” I stopped. I hadn’t thought of it since getting the thinker token and suddenly felt like a fool. Brutus had said Wilder killed Mi-sun. He could have meant GT Wilder. His testimony was questionable. I threw it out.
“Did you know we were going to kill Ruth?” I asked.
His tone was cautious. “So, are we talking now—”
“Did you know we were going to kill Ruthless?” I asked again, turning.
“Yeah, I knew. I knew other things too—that no one would stop her but us. And she’d do a lot of damage first. Killing her quickly was one option; the other was to let her rage and raze until we were forced to kill her anyway.”
“You didn’t have to kill her. If you’d—”
“No. She wasn’t going to fight for the team anymore, and we needed the token back. Without all five, we’d fail, and my nanites were constantly screaming that our mission would be colossally important.”
“It was all an act,” I said. “You made me care about you so you could use me.” I wished my voiced hadn’t quavered. That weakness goaded me, and I shouted. “You perverted worm, you nonhuman, you’re a hundred times worse than your father!”
He trembled. “I didn’t make you do anything! Besides, that wasn’t my plan. The you part.”
“You lied and manipulated me into going after Jacques—”
“The other part! The part where I fell in love with you.”
I felt as if I’d been slapped.
“Shut up.”
“Make me,” he said, then laughed at his own absurd joke. Because, of course, I could make him.
Enough confession. I pronounced judgment in a calm, even voice that made me proud. “You are a murderer and a liar, and you’re so far gone, you don’t even care.”
He matched my gaze as if it were a contest. “So, what are you going to do with me?”
I couldn’t stand to have him around anymore. Every time I looked at him, my heart hurt all over again. Besides, the way he’d sat there like a vulture while I was paralyzed scared me. Handing him off to the police was ridiculous. Everything we were, everything we’d done with these tokens, it seemed apart from the rest of the world.
“I’m the general now, and you’re not welcome here or anywhere near people I love. Leave HAL tonight and don’t come back.”
I turned and got to work on my suit. He stayed for fifteen seconds more. I counted his retreating footsteps till he was gone. Then I sat down, elbows on knees, my face in my hands. I was glad my body had waited for his absence to start shaking.
Instead of relief I felt a loss. I wanted to curl up in a dark room next to Laelaps and sink into numbing sleep. But Wilder had dumped new data on me, and I couldn’t relax till I’d examined it and organized it on neat little shelves in my brain.
Ruth. I hadn’t been the thinker when I’d known her, and I had to admit, his analysis of her seemed right.
Mi-sun. The evidence indicated he’d killed her, but I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.
But Wilder couldn’t lie his way out of trying to kill me. He most definitely aimed blue shot at my person and tried to—
I dropped my hands from my face. He’d aimed. And missed.
I hadn’t understood before, but aiming was so easy with the shooter token. My eyes were the weapon’s sights—I looked and there my ammo flew. I could shoot someone in the eye, no problem, especially from only a few meters away.
Okay, but he did destroy Fido.
Then again, he could have shot those havoc knives at my torso or head. Instead he hit the only place that wouldn’t make me bleed. I’d assumed he’d made mistakes that night, but what if everything he did was on purpose? Maybe he took an overdose of potassium or something intending to stop his heart—a self-execution. Why would he want to die in front of me?
So his tokens would leave his body. So I would be there to take them.
But neither of us could have known what I was beginning to guess—when his heart stopped and the tokens began to shut down, I leaned over him and the electricity of my three tokens must have drawn his nanites back to their base. I’d pulled them away before he was fully dead, and so I’d been able to revive him.
He’d shot my Fido arm, even knowing that without it, I wouldn’t be able to call for help. Help for him. He walked into that building believing he would die. If I didn’t question that he was the bad guy, then I’d let him.
The thought was so sharp, so sad, I fell back into a chair.
He wasn’t the thinker anymore. I shouldn’t have been able to sense him, but I thought I could. He was above me. The upper floors were closed. What was he doing?
I remembered him in the cafeteria, turning to me, arms open, inviting me to kill him. I’d wondered then if he didn’t want to live.
Wilder was on the roof.
Chapter 49
I ran. Too hurried for stairs, I scaled the outside of the building, leaping onto the roof. Wilder was standing near an edge. With the building in lockdown, now that he was out, there was no exit but down.
I walked closer, and he startled when he heard the gravel slide beneath my feet. I’d never seen Wilder startle before. He used to know when I was near. He used to know everything.
“Tell me again.” I stopped a few meters away. “I’m going to try to listen better.”
He blinked surprise. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.” He began to pace a short track in the roof’s gravel top. “Okay. Everything? Um … my dad found out about the tokens and Howell’s plans. He made sure I would be one of the recipients. We had only a vague understanding of what the tokens were and what they would do, but Dad knew they would be valuable. I knew it’d be a risk, but when I heard that the tokens might make me stronger or smarter, Dad didn’t have to work to convince me.
“Dad intended to use me as his little spy and help lure the rest of the token holders into his employ. ‘We’ll be more powerful than anyone can imagine,’ he’d say. ‘We’ll do whatever we want, own whatever we want. We’ll be a team.’ A few years earlier, I might have really believed that once I had a token my daddy would wuv me,” he said in a baby voice. “I knew better than to be completely sucked in by his promises, but still, he would notice me, and at the time, that was enough.”
He glanced up as if expecting I would walk away. I stayed. He looked back at the ground.
“I chose you at boot camp because of your arm.”
“What do you mean you chose me?”
“I’d agreed with Dad I would stay single at boot camp because Howell might choose anybody, and I didn’t want to complicate matters with a potential teammate. The plan was to secure everyone’s loyalty for Dad, and if any
one didn’t side with us … Dad might have to … you know … get rough. I did hook up with a couple of girls at boot camp, but I knew they wouldn’t be chosen because they weren’t too bright. I got bored with them. You didn’t qualify as not too bright, but I was sure Howell wouldn’t pick you because of your arm.” He looked at me, grimacing. “How am I doing on the hate meter? Rising up to ten?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to pass judgment yet.
He couldn’t seem to hold my gaze, looking down again. “When your name was on the list, I was … wow, I don’t know that I’ve ever been so angry. At Howell, at you, at myself. It wasn’t until then that I realized I actually liked you, and how much I thought that weakened me.”
I nodded, and he seemed encouraged to go on.
“Dad didn’t want you loyal to me—he wanted you loyal to him alone. I was a terrible thinker. I could feel that urgency to unite the team and train us for what was coming. But I wanted to use that brain power to show my dad I was worth the gamble. I wanted the world, and I wanted him to see me get it. And it all backfired in Ruth. I should have seen what was wrong with her before she blew.”
“So you decided she had to die.”
He nodded, still looking down. “I convinced myself I was a hero who could stop a killer. It wasn’t until we were on the boat that I knew she’d die. I felt sure that only the thinker should salvage her token—but you took it first.”
“Sorry …”
“Yeah, you’re kind of grabby.” He tried to smile. “So … you left, and when you did, my ability to keep the team together broke. Jacques and Mi-sun went home—or so I thought. I didn’t trust Howell, so I left too, and it was then I realized GT had killed my mom. I wanted to punish him. I didn’t want him dead—I wanted him alive and eaten away by remorse.
“But the pull of the fireteam interfered with revenge. I felt like half of a person without you … you guys. And I was convinced something really bad would happen if I didn’t re-form the team. So I made a plan, and it started with you. After Dad visited your house, I gassed you out to make you feel in danger.”
“It was you.”
He laughed ruefully. “I know, this just gets better and better. Are you sure you—”
There was an angry hum followed by a loud crack. I ran to the edge of the roof. The north wall was splitting, chunks of concrete falling loose.
“Speak of the devil,” Wilder said, crouching beside me.
“He’s determined to get these tokens, isn’t he?” I said.
“He’ll never stop.”
I called Dragon.
“I’m on the roof,” I said.
“Yeah, electric fence down and something is attacking the north wall,” he said. “You stay put and stay low, Brown. They’re here for you. Don’t give them a target.”
“My dad—”
“Those suckers are not getting through our wall. We have a few surprises.” He disconnected.
The turrets were showing their bristling firepower, weapons lighting up the night. I saw a swarm of aerial droids take off from HAL, zipping down the line of a searchlight. The wall continued to crack.
“Laser gun?” I asked. After sporting alien technology for half a year, a laser gun trying to break a wall seemed practically mundane.
“Quiet, less likely to draw outside notice,” said Wilder. “GT tried to paralyze you and take you away. That failed, so he won’t try it again. He doesn’t know that the tokens won’t stay put in gravity. So this time he’s here—”
“To kill me.” I nodded. “So go on. I can multitask.”
He smiled. “Okay.” We were whispering now, both of us crouched and keeping an eye on the commotion. “So my plan was to get you isolated from everything and make you believe I was your one lifeline. But while you were in Florida—”
“You knew where I was?”
He shrugged. “Sure. I … uh …”
“You put a tracker in my necklace,” I said.
“And risk your discovering it? Give me some credit. No, I monitored Luther’s computer activity, hacked that Japanese site, and, after you posted, followed your IP trail. But I didn’t lead GT’s guys there. I didn’t know he had your dad—”
“I know,” I said. “Go on.”
Wilder took a breath. “So, GT had recruited Mi-sun and Jacques straight out of HAL. They were especially susceptible to my dad’s manipulations. The nature of the tokens made them want a team, a leader—but after Ruth, they didn’t want me anymore. Dad had them take out some of his old enemies, partly just to get them in so deep they’d feel like they couldn’t leave. Jacques went shopping for a ‘hitman wardrobe.’ Mi-sun … got weird. I pretended to join up with Dad so I could figure how to get Jacques and Mi-sun out. After a while Mi-sun agreed to leave with me.
“I think she hadn’t really processed what she’d been doing for Dad until she had a choice to stop. We were at Dad’s, and she was heading to her room to pack when she started to scream. I heard her in the hallway, but before I could get to her, she pulled a ring off her finger and shot it at her own chest. Maybe she was aiming at the token, but she hit her heart.”
I shivered.
“Dad picked her up and felt for a pulse. Brutus and some other guys saw it happen, but they didn’t know about the blue shot. It must’ve looked like Dad was choking her—and maybe he did, to make sure she was dead.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Then he’s hollering at me to come take her token. It was coming out of her chest. Whatever we were made for, we would need every token. But I hesitated.
“Jacques was there too, and he leaped for her. I kicked him back and took it myself. Better me than him, that’s what I thought. Until the pain hit.” He took a breath. “It only lasts a few seconds, but it feels like forever, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. In the distance we heard shouts, zaps, a helicopter. Still crouching, I bounced on my heels. I wanted to be helping, not hiding.
“How did Jacques feel about that?” I asked to distract myself.
“He armored up and declared his intention to take both my tokens. I actually thought about killing him and claiming his instead. But the memory of pain was so fresh, I couldn’t go through it again. I don’t know how you did it, Maisie.”
“I wanted to die,” I whispered, looking out. No movement beyond the wall. The landscape was steeped in darkness. “Taking Jacques’s token, choosing to go through it a third time? Like shoving a knife into my own chest.”
“It had become clear that Jacques was as lost to the team as Ruth had been. But I couldn’t kill him. I mean, I could have.” He smiled.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re so tough.”
“But Dad rightly became suspicious of me. He gave the order to kill me, but I escaped, went into hiding. It’s funny that doesn’t bother me anymore. Maybe it was inevitable, father wanting to kill the usurper son.”
“It’s so Greco-Roman.”
“Am I Jupiter still?”
“You’ve always had a god complex.”
Something exploded in the courtyard. Smoke billowed outward. Dragon and the security guys in gas masks ran into the haze. The breeze shifted, and I made out figures fighting Howell’s guys. I was in a perfect sniper position. No matter Dragon’s orders, I had to attack.
Forming flat havoc pellets, I began to precision-fire on invaders as I saw them, like punching them from a distance. Quickly I depleted the electrons stored in the shooter token battery. Mi-sun could store more electrons than I could, my shooter token tangled with four others. Yet another weakness.
I kept firing, pulling electrons from the gas molecules in the air around me. I could feel my hair rise, the hairs on my arms standing, the air molecules pulling on anything to replace the electrons I’d stolen.
“We’re maintaining the perimeter,” said Dragon on the headset. “Stay back, Brown.”
“Careful,” said Wilder. “They’re trying to draw you out.”
I moved to steal electrons from a new patch of air. I aimed at a
guy just as he turned to aim at me. He must have fired first. I heard that familiar whistling noise. Needles.
Chapter 50
I pushed Wilder down, hitting the roof beside him. There was another explosion. This one bright—a light bomb maybe, something to blind us.
We huddled flat to the roof, Wilder’s arm over me. I opened and shut my eyes, but everything was orangey-white, my eyes dazzled. I felt for Wilder’s head and traced my hand over his skull and chest, giving him a havoc helmet and breastplate.
He whispered, “Does this mean that you don’t want me dead?”
I almost laughed.
“I’m sorry, Maisie,” he said.
“You didn’t mean to be a complete douche bag to everyone you knew,” I said flatly. “You were trying to accomplish something impossible, and you had to play tough in order to win.”
“It sounds absurd when you say it out loud.”
“It didn’t feel grand at the time either,” I said quietly. “You should go back in.”
I heard him knock on his helmet. “Naw, I’m good.”
“You’re as stubborn as your dad.”
“It just feels good to explain. I don’t mean to excuse myself. Maybe there’s no good reason for all I did. When I had the thinker token, it seemed so clear. And now … nothing’s clear. Almost nothing. Is your sight coming back?”
“Yeah.” I could make out shapes in the dark. The humming and cracking started again. If the HAL forces had destroyed one laser cannon, another had taken its place.
“So it’s …” Wilder rubbed his face harshly. “It’s been torture this past year trying not to care about you. Because I am—was—the leader, and I couldn’t let what I felt get in the way of what I would do. I meant what I said—falling for you wasn’t the plan.” He didn’t seem the least bit shy declaring this. “I felt like trash every time I lied to you. You were willing to leave your parents because you were worried about Mi-sun. If you’d known she was already dead, would you still have come? I believed I would fail without you. But I was just scared you would hate me if you knew. That she was dead. That I had her token. That I’d lost a second team member.
