Top of the Feud Chain

by Lisi Harrison

  Just then, something green and faintly fuzzy stirred behind the boulder nearest them.

  “Hey.” AJ appeared, her scratchy voice more grating than Parmesan. She hopped over a boulder to join the group, casually adjusting her green tam as if she’d bumped into them in the Alpha Pavilion.

  Allie blinked. Had their chili been tainted? Was she hallucinating?

  Ohmuhgod. An agonized groan escaped Allie’s mouth before she clamped it shut with her hand. The group all stared at AJ with shocked expressions on their faces. Which meant that sadly, AJ wasn’t just a vision of Allie’s nightmares. She was the real thing.

  Allie would have preferred a murderous wolf over this. Was there not anywhere on Earth that she could go to get away from the stinky songstress?

  “What are you doing here?” Skye shrieked.

  AJ aimed her seaweed-green eyes straight at Allie as a thin smile spread over her pointy face. She swallowed the remains of a BrazilleBlast bar she must have filched from the PAP. “You guys never include me in anything, so I decided to include myself,” she said at last.

  Allie looked at her friends, wrinkling her nose as a whiff of AJ’s patchouli essential oil found its way into her airspace. “Am I having a nightmare, and you’re all in it?”

  Mel narrowed his pale green eyes. “You snuck onto the plane, you mean,” he said coldly.

  AJ stood blinking at the group, smiling calmly in spite of the angry silence hanging in the air. “Okay, yeah. I hid in one of the rear compartments. It wasn’t so hard, if you haven’t noticed, I’m tiny.” AJ stretched her spindly arms out as though trying to prove it. “I heard you guys talking about the plan last night. I muted my aPod when I had my headphones on. I don’t embrace the competitive spirit, but I felt like I should be a part of this experience.” The words hung pointlessly in the air like a pair of old sneakers draped over a telephone wire.

  “That is extremely weird,” Darwin murmured, shaking his head.

  “No big deal,” AJ said brightly, her attitude maddeningly serene. “Why don’t we all go back to the fire and chill out? Anyone up for a sing-a-long?” Before they could answer, she led the way.

  At the fire, AJ threw a few sticks onto the blaze and plopped down to warm her hands, seemingly oblivious to the glares being shot at her from six still-incredulous sets of eyes.

  Allie couldn’t believe AJ had snuck onto the plane, but at least she wasn’t a rabid animal or a deranged criminal hiding from the law. That we know of. The silent joke made Allie giggle.

  Sighing as her sandaled feet began to thaw, Allie resolved not to let AJ being here get the best of her. There were way bigger threats to her safety now that they were stranded in the desert. What could the teeny greenie do to her out here? Allie leaned her head against Mel’s shoulder and inhaled the scent of his Aveda sandalwood pomade. This whole thing was kind of romantic, if you looked at it the right way. Staring into the campfire, her beau beside her, Allie took on the character of a heroine in an old Western movie. If only Mel could ride her off into the sunset, or at least get the plane working.

  She turned to look at her boyfriend and couldn’t keep a tiny laugh from escaping her lips. His silver leggings and gauzy babydoll top didn’t exactly fit the cowboy bill, but he was still a mega-hottie.

  Allie began to brood over what tomorrow might bring. If Charlie couldn’t fix the GPS and they couldn’t alert anyone to their whereabouts, it was fully possible they’d all die out here. Allie began to imagine all the news stories that would run if the worst happened. The girls weren’t celebrities, of course, but the Brazille boys had been on magazine covers for as long as Allie had known how to read. Their dramatic death would be covered everywhere—from TMZ to CNN. Her grieving parents would probably be on Oprah. The national tragedy would be almost on par with Princess Diana’s death, or Marilyn Monroe’s.

  Allie shivered at the thought. Perversely, she began to picture her ex-boyfriend Fletcher and ex-bestie Trina cutting out her picture from all the papers, maybe even making a little shrine to Allie, whom they had betrayed by hooking up with each other on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. They would blame themselves for her death, for hooking up and forcing a betrayed Allie to join Alpha Academy to forget about them. Hopefully, word would get out that Allie died the girlfriend of Mel Brazille, who topped Fletcher in every way possible.

  She turned to Mel again, but his back was to her this time as he nodded vigorously, engrossed in conversation with… huh?

  AJ sat on the other side of Mel, and he pushed his white-blond hair off his forehead and nodded in agreement with something the jolly green midget had just said. “I know what you mean about playing music. Modeling is the same way. Once I finally got over stage fright and was fully confident in myself, that’s when my modeling really took off.”

  “Exactly,” AJ drawled, meeting his eyes with her faux-earnest gaze. “The audience trusts you when you trust yourself.”

  Allie’s navy blue eyes shot skyward while her face burned with jealousy. How dare AJ try to bond with Mel by recycling stale self-help clichés! She was lucky to get a BrazilleBlast bar and a warm spot by the fire—no way was she going to monopolize Allie’s boyfriend.

  “I feel exactly the same way about acting,” Allie piped up, attempting to join the conversation.

  “No offense,” AJ sneered, a stray lock of her dyed-black hair escaping her crusty green tam, “but didn’t you just start acting, like, three weeks ago? It takes years to get comfortable onstage. You wouldn’t really understand—”

  “Of course she would,” Mel laughed. “Have you seen this girl act? She’s a scene stealer.”

  Take that!

  “Yeah, Allie’s always been quite good at impersonating others.” AJ tossed her stringy, awapuhi-cleansed locks and turned toward Charlie and Darwin.

  Allie grinned as she nuzzled her cheek against the crook of Mel’s beefy shoulder, not even caring that it was clothed in a poly-blend boatneck shirt. Mel wasn’t just perfect, he was loyal. Which was even more important to Allie, especially after what she’d been through with Fletcher and Trina.

  So Mel didn’t wrangle a horse out of thin air and whisk her off into the sunset—he had just proven there were other ways to rescue a damsel in distress.

  8

  THE MOJAVE DESERT

  BASE CAMP

  NOVEMBER 3RD

  7:10 A.M.

  Charlie blinked awake in time to catch the most striking pink-and-orange sunrise she’d ever seen. And considering she’d seen the sunrise from every continent, that was saying a lot. Peeling back the thin silver blanket that covered her, Skye, and a still-asleep Darwin, she sat up and stared at the vibrant Kool-Aid-colored sky, a relaxed smile on her chapped lips.

  Even after spending the night on the hard ground, waking up with the sun felt natural and peaceful, like she’d been transported back to a prehistoric time, to a simpler world where people didn’t worry about text messages or toilet paper. Her smile deepened when she thought about how much fun it was to sit around the campfire with her friends last night. Even though she was totally freaked out and half freezing to death, she had never just hung out with friends like this before. No pressure, no agendas, just real. Maybe she wanted this more than she wanted to be an Alpha. She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, picking a few twigs from what she hoped wasn’t a hopeless rat’s nest acquired after her night spent sandwiched between Darwin and Skye on the desert floor.

  Careful not to wake the others, Charlie crawled out from her space in the middle of the sleeping castaways. There were only a few blankets on the plane, so everyone had wound up pressed together like a litter of piglets burrowing for warmth. Charlie’s sleep-puffed eyes found the fire pit, where the blaze had burned down to a few weak embers. AJ slept closest to it, slightly removed from the group and curled in a tight ball. She wore her green tam pulled down over her eyes like a sleep mask, and in the night it had become even filthier than usual, dotted with dried
leaves and ash from the fire. Gross.

  Darwin was stirring. He smacked his full lips like he was dreaming of pancakes, then turned over and caught a few more Zs. The rest of the downed crew slept on peacefully. The boys were still in their girly outfits, and Charlie swallowed a giggle when she noticed Taz’s (shaved) legs sticking out from the bottom of his blanket. A pair of silver platform heels lay tossed at his feet. The scene looked more like the aftermath of a bachelor party than a plane crash.

  Charlie tiptoed to survey the landscape in the soft morning light. Other than the tall saguaro cacti dotting the beige earth like cowboys waving both hands in the air, the only other signs of life came from clouds moving fast across the brightening sky.

  She sniffed the air, which smelled of sage and dust and the dying embers of the campfire. This was the first moment of real peace Charlie could remember. Now that Alpha Island’s pressure-cooker atmosphere had boiled over into a winner-take-all war, Charlie’s stress levels had been boiling over, too.

  For a split second, she fantasized about what it would be like to live out here forever. If only they could find a water source, Charlie wouldn’t mind waking up with the sun each day. As long as Darwin and her friends could stay, too. With him sleeping by her side under the stars, Charlie was pretty sure they wouldn’t miss civilization at all.

  But just when Charlie had begun to feel like this real-life Georgia O’Keeffe painting was exactly where she was supposed to be, her sense of inner peace was shattered by the shrill cries of three birds circling about a hundred feet away from the campsite. Their black, feathered bodies hung high in the air, but their prehistoric call was unmistakable—buzzards.

  Ohmuhgud. Didn’t buzzards only circle like this when death was imminent? Charlie’s tranquility evaporated, instantly morphing back into her familiar anxiety. Unless she figured out how to get a signal to radio for help, they’d be bird turds by this time tomorrow. Her stomach lurched with worry as she bent down and started gathering sticks and twigs, her hands clawing at the dusty brown floor of the desert. They needed to keep the fire lit in case a plane came. Once she had gathered a few handfuls of kindling, she would head back to tackle the broken GPS.

  Narrowing her hazelnut eyes to scan the ground for cactus husks and dried seedpods, Charlie’s thoughts drifted to the person who had become her primary stress-inducer this year: Shira. What would the obnoxious Aussie do if Charlie died out here, in the American version of the outback?

  Shira was famous for clawing her way to the top and staying there because she always looked out for number one. One of her mottos was “no regrets,” but regret was exactly what she would feel if Charlie and the others died. Regret, and maybe even guilt. Because in a way, this was all Shira’s fault. If she hadn’t turned her prestigious academy into a shark tank where every day might be an Alpha’s last, the girls would never have been driven to attempt insane competitions like this PAP race.

  And Shira had extra reason to feel guilty about Charlie. She’d made Charlie’s mom, Bee, her loyal assistant for thirteen years, quit her job in exchange for Charlie’s enrollment in the Academy. Not to mention forcing Charlie to dump Darwin, which had made her first few months here the most emotionally taxing of her life. Now, all because of Shira’s vague announcement that one Alpha would prove herself a leader and become an AFL (Alpha for life), Charlie had risked everything. Charlie let out a choked sigh of frustration. Just thinking about Shira elevated her heart rate.

  If Charlie died, Shira would surely set up a foundation in her name. Young girls could compete—Shira loved competition, after all—for the Charlie Deery scholarship. And Shira would have to live with the guilt of her death for the rest of her long, cryogenically prolonged life. There was a tiny bit of malicious pleasure Charlie could take in that fact.

  But what about Bee? She’d given up her career with Shira so Charlie could have the best education on Earth. Was this how Charlie was going to repay her? By dying pointlessly in the desert? Charlie froze as she answered her own question, her hands clutching a bouquet of twigs so hard that several snapped in half. No freaking way.

  She had worked too hard at the Academy and given up too much for all of it to end out here. Charlie squeezed her eyes shut so hard that purple spots swam across her closed lids. Then she opened them wide. The only thing she’d regret was giving up.

  She hurried back to the campfire and threw the kindling into the embers before quietly making her way back over to the PAP, where she took the plane’s stairs two at a time and hopped into the cockpit. Charlie was one of the best inventor-tracked Alphas in school, wasn’t she? Hadn’t she created a whole fleet of mechanical butterflies and a teleportational travel system that had the potential to change the world? Hadn’t she patented a chemical compound for mood-glow nail polish that changed colors based on the wearer’s emotional state, and hadn’t mood-glow nail polish already netted Brazille Industries millions of dollars in sales? Charlie wasn’t one to dwell on her accomplishments, but today she needed to remind herself of just how much she was capable of achieving.

  Compared with all that, a broken GPS module should be cake. She smiled, turning the silver capsule-shaped GPS over in her hands. She just needed to treat it like her relationships—sometimes things needed to come apart before they could work again.

  Charlie spotted one of Allie’s bobby pins on the floor of the plane’s backseat and used it to fashion a makeshift screwdriver. She unscrewed the flat silver panel on the back of the shiny GPS module. The inside of the device consisted of a motherboard, several multicolored wires, and a larger white wire that led to a flat, cylindrical battery unit. Maybe if she opened up the big white wire and rebraided the copper inside, she could jump-start the battery and the extra juice would force the machine to find a signal. Seemed like as good a plan as any.

  Working slowly, Charlie hummed a Katy Perry song that Taz had played last night as she stripped the wire. The campsite was beginning to buzz with yawns and conversation-—the rest of the crew had woken up, which meant that soon, Charlie would have to tell them they still didn’t have a way out of here. She shook her head slightly, tuning out the sound of Taz and Skye flirting, the sound of Allie complaining about having to pee on a cactus, and the sound of AJ moaning about how loud they all were.

  Come on, Charlie whispered to the GPS as she plugged the rejiggered wire back into the battery pack. Give me a little juice to go with breakfast, why don’t you?

  With shaking hands, Charlie flipped the switch on the side of the GPS unit to ON. For a moment, the pill-shaped device buzzed from the power boost and Charlie thought she’d done it. But then the motherboard flew out of its slot, leaving the wires exposed and crackling with blue sparks, and it was everything Charlie could do not to cry.

  She sealed her eyes shut and bit her lower lip to keep the tears back. Crying won’t get you home. When she opened them again and sat back in the white leather pilot’s seat, she stared down at the mess she’d created: a million little pieces of GPS littering the ground.

  “Hey.” Charlie looked up to see Darwin’s head just a few feet from hers, peering at her through the open window of the cockpit. Allie was with him, her brow furrowed with concern. How long had he and Allie had been watching her stare into space?

  Charlie wanting to smile reassuringly at Darwin, but barely managed a limp grin. “Hi.”

  Darwin smiled for both of them.

  “Still no luck, huh?” Allie piped up cheerfully. A sympathetic frown alighted on her rosebud mouth for a moment.

  “I think I made it worse,” Charlie whispered, swallowing another round of frustrated tears. “I don’t know when we’re getting out of here, guys. I thought maybe if I jump-started the battery…” she trailed off, not wanting to bother explaining her latest scheme since it had failed anyway.

  “So, um, I had an idea. It came to me just as I was waking up,” Allie said, her ski-slope nose wrinkling as she flashed Charlie an I’ve-got-this kind of look.

 
Charlie shrugged and stared at her hands folded on her lap. Allie was sweet to try and think of something, but the girl didn’t know a mascara wand from a data stick. There was no way someone with zero engineering knowledge could fix this.

  “Charlie, hear her out,” Darwin said softly, sensing her hesitation.

  Charlie forced a nod and turned her bloodshot eyes toward Allie. If Darwin was insisting, maybe Allie had an idea worth listening to. “Let’s hear it,” she said weakly.

  “Okay, so I know you guys didn’t watch a lot of TV when you were traveling the world, but on LOST, there’s a plane crash, and the survivors have to hike to the highest peak on the island to get a radio signal.”

  “Uh huh,” Charlie said, waiting for the idea.

  Allie widened her navy blue eyes and tilted her head as if Charlie were being dense. “So… maybe if we find the tallest plateau in the desert, there’s a chance our GPS or our aPods will pick something up.”

  Charlie considered the possibility. Static was all the GPS was able to produce down here, but maybe Allie had something. Maybe they were in some kind of dead zone, and a signal would find its way to their many electronic devices if they left it. Nothing else had worked.

  “I think it’s worth a try,” Darwin said. “What do you say, Charlie?”

  Fitting the pieces of the broken GPS back together like a high-stakes Rubik’s cube, Charlie shot a quick glance at the whitening sky. The buzzards were circling lower now.

  “I say it’s more than worth it. Let’s get going.”

  9

  THE MOJAVE DESERT