Extraction

by Stephanie Diaz

  Behind them and a few more passenger ships, I glimpse the massive transport craft that I climbed into in Restricted Division, that carries the KIMO missile inside its escape pod. The ship spews steam onto the hangar. I have no idea if Charlie already set the timer, but wouldn’t he have left if he had? I don’t think he’d stick around to watch the countdown to zero.

  Please, please let the timer not be set yet.

  “Commander!” Sam calls.

  Charlie turns to stone when he sees me.

  “The initial system—” a scientist is saying.

  “Please excuse me one moment,” Charlie says, holding a hand up. He’s calm again. Collected. But the vein in his neck stands out.

  I wonder what he wants with me and Fred, why he cared enough to save us instead of letting the KIMO missile destroy us.

  “Sandy, please explain this,” he says. “You said she and Colonel Fred were safely on the other transport vehicle on their way to the Core.”

  “She was, Father,” Sandy says quickly.

  “So why is she here?”

  “I hid in their transport,” I say, snapping the words. “It was almost too easy. You should do a better job training your personnel.”

  Charlie’s eyes narrow.

  This is dangerous. This is so, so dangerous; he could kill me right this second if he wanted. Logan too.

  He eyes him now, assessing Logan’s figure. Realizing this is someone important to me. Noticing, I’m sure, how he puts more weight on his right leg than his left.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Charlie says. “Lieutenant Sam, please escort the prisoners to my ship.” He turns away.

  I let out my breath. At least he’s not going to shoot us yet.

  “Actually,” he says, haltingly, “I’ve changed my mind. Shoot the boy.”

  There’s a moment where I don’t quite understand, where I think he must be kidding. Then Joe lifts his gun and presses the barrel to Logan’s head.

  “NO!” I twist away from Sam—wrenching—kicking—

  You can’t—you can’t—

  There’s a whizzing sound, and a ping.

  Another official helps Sam hold me back.

  “No…”

  Did I lose him? I can’t. Don’t you dare go.

  Joe drops his gun and stumbles. Blood oozes from his back.

  Behind Charlie, Beechy’s holding a smoking pulse rifle. He shot Joe.

  Charlie realizes this at the same moment I do.

  There’s the sound of another shot, then of pounding feet as the rebels come running. Sam yells something, and his men whip out their guns.

  The air fills with laser beams. I drop to my knees and duck my head. A red laser blasts a lamp in the floor beside me. The bulb shatters, and glass flies everywhere. I scream, blocking my head with an arm. Shards scrape my skin. They set it stinging.

  It takes me a second to realize Sam has let go of me.

  I crawl beneath the lights and smoke until I reach a pod. I move to the other side and press against the metal, hoping it’ll shield me. Piercing noises from the guns reverberate in my ears. The flight deck rumbles beneath my feet.

  “Logan!” I cry. Smoke from the lasers clouds my vision. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if they shot him.

  And I don’t know where Charlie is, either.

  A body thumps as it falls two feet away. A copper slides out of the official’s grip, and I snatch it up. As I stand, I peer around the pod corner and aim at the first man in armor I see. The bullet grazes his side, and he almost trips.

  His head turns.

  Sam snarls and aims his next shot at my head.

  I jump aside, and the laser beam hits the pod instead. He fires a second time. I try to shoot back. The copper slips from my sweaty hands and clatters too far away.

  Someone—Cady, I think—starts shooting at Sam too, distracting him. I turn to run. I make it past one more pod before I almost crash into Logan.

  I blurt out a word that sounds like his name. He grabs my shoulders and drags me behind a ship. He’s breathing hard, and there’s blood on his shirt.

  “I think Charlie sent someone to start the timer,” he says.

  “I don’t know if I can disable it.” My panic spills out with my words. “He’s gonna kill us, Logan. He’s gonna kill us if we don’t stop him.”

  “I won’t let him.”

  “He’s stronger than us.”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  An explosion behind us rocks the hangar, and I cry out, stumbling with Logan. But it wasn’t the KIMO bomb. Someone threw a grenade.

  The bomb. I have to disable it.

  “I can’t leave you, Logan.”

  “I’ll be right here. I promise.”

  “Okay, but if you die—”

  He kisses me, roughly.

  For a second I’m lost, not here anymore, not breathing.

  The force from a nearby laser blast blows us apart. My back slams into the ground.

  It takes me a second to recover. I gasp for air.

  “Run!” Logan chokes, trying to get up.

  To my left, Sam is coming for me again. His gun is aimed and he’s pushing past other officials to get to me.

  I ignore the ache roaring through my body and scramble to my feet, racing away from Sam. I’m not that far from KIMO. The steam is getting stronger, so it should be just ahead. But the ground is rumbling again—a steady tremor, not from a grenade. It scares me because that probably means Charlie or one of his men already did something. They may have started the bomb’s initiation sequence.

  A sharp pain from a laser pierces my elbow. I cry out and stumble. My knees hit the metal deck.

  I’m trying to stand when Sam’s nails dig into my ankles and he wrenches my leg. I kick against him. With a snarl, he forces me onto my back. The cold muzzle of his gun touches the skin between my eyes.

  His knee presses into my stomach, pinning me and making it hard to breathe. “Aren’t you going to scream?” he asks. His voice is scratchy from all the yelling. The smile he gives me is cold.

  “Just shoot me if you’re going to.”

  I don’t want to die, not here, not this way, but I won’t scream. I won’t cry.

  But the weight lifts, and air returns to my lungs. Someone heaves Sam off me.

  “Go!” It’s Sandy. “Beechy needs your help. I’ll hold him off!”

  I’m gasping and hurting and shaking, but I make myself turn over. Somehow I manage to push off the ground.

  A laser beam ricochets off a fighter jet, and I throw an arm over my eyes. It misses me by a foot.

  The engine steam is thick now. I can barely see at all. I ram into something hard—a pod, maybe.

  “Beechy!” I yell. Sandy said he needs my help, but I can’t even find him.

  Figures stumble into view through the steam. One of them looks like Charlie. “Get to the transports!” he yells. “Get everyone out of the no-fly zone. Abandon the rebels.”

  “Charlie!” I scream his name.

  He doesn’t see me at first, but his face contorts with anger. He looks wildly around.

  “You set the timer, didn’t you?” I yell.

  He spots me. His nostrils flare. “Of course we did,” he says, striding toward me. He withdraws a gun from his pocket, and before I can blink, he slams the barrel into my jaw.

  Fire—burning—breaking—

  I topple over, clutching my jaw.

  Charlie staggers away.

  The bomb has been activated. Who knows how long the timer is set for? If I can’t disable it, we’ll be stuck here on this deck when it goes off, when the explosion rockets everything but the Core into space. When the world ends.

  I don’t see the laser beam that brings Charlie down, but I hear a thud. When my vision clears and I squint through the steam, he is deck-bound. Not dead, not even close, but it looks like the laser went through his left leg. He’s screaming. He can’t get up.

  I turn to see who shot him, an
d there’s a hand helping me up. Beechy’s hand. There’s a gash in his shoulder. Blood soaks his leather suit.

  “Beechy, he—he set it. It’s gonna go off.”

  “Think you can disable it?”

  “I can try.” Charlie’s going to kill me either way. I have to try.

  “Good.”

  “Stop them!” Charlie yells at one of the officials who came back for him.

  Beechy takes my hand, and we run across the rest of the hangar and through the steam to the hovercraft. Lasers shoot at us from behind. I duck to avoid them.

  The cargo lift is already open. We scramble up the ramp. A laser barely misses my head. Beechy aims a shot over his shoulder. I can’t tell if he shoots the man down.

  At the top of the ramp, Beechy finds an indoor panel on the wall and slams a button. There’s a hiss, and the ramp lifts and seals behind us, hiding the fog and the officials from view.

  “Can’t they still get in?” I ask.

  “It should take them some time. Hopefully, the rebels will stop them before they figure it out.”

  The ship still rumbles beneath us.

  “Where’s the bomb?” I ask.

  “We can access the control panel from inside. I think it’s this way.” Beechy grabs my hand and pulls me down the narrow corridor.

  There are compartments overhead and on either side of us, and passenger seats here and there attached to the walls. We pass another corridor leading to doors and a bunk room at the end.

  We come to a ladder. Beechy goes up first. I follow him, scrambling up the rungs.

  We get to our feet in another, shorter passageway. At the end is a door with a window, and a second door beyond it, leading to what looks like an escape pod. The one with the missile inside it.

  Beechy presses a button near us on the wall, and the doors zip open one at a time.

  There’s someone inside the pod, sitting in the cockpit chair with his head bent over. He jumps to his feet and spins to face us, lifting his copper level with his face.

  “Drop your weapons,” Oliver says.

  38

  Oliver’s eyes are muddled behind his glasses, not the way they should be.

  I’m going to be sick. I want to run and find Charlie and vomit bile and mucus on his shiny black boots. He told his other men to get to their ships, but he left Oliver. He was going to leave him here to die.

  “Drop it,” Oliver says, pointing his copper at Beechy’s forehead, “or I’ll shoot.” The words sound like someone planted them in his head; like he’s a machine reciting letters.

  Beechy’s nostrils flare, but he lets his gun clatter onto the metal. There are two of us, and we can handle Oliver. But I have to try reasoning with him first.

  “Oliver, please put the gun down.”

  He doesn’t say anything. But he turns the copper on me, and I flinch.

  “Drop your weapon,” he says. He’s staring at me, but it’s like he’s staring right through me.

  My voice shakes when I tell him, “Charlie left you here, Oliver. You know the bomb’s gonna go off, right? He left you to die.”

  A flicker of worry touches his eyes. Then it’s gone. “Drop your weapons” is all he says.

  “Clementine, there isn’t time,” Beechy says.

  “I know,” I say. We have to overpower him, but I’m not ready yet. Oliver is still here, underneath the injection and all the lies. I can still reach him.

  “Oliver, please.” I want to wrap my arms around him, but I’m afraid he’ll try to kill me. “We’re not trying to mess things up, I swear. We’re trying to save everyone.”

  Oliver flips a switch on the copper, taking it off stun. “I’m giving you ten seconds to get out of here. Ten, nine, eight—”

  Beechy slams his fist into Oliver’s hand, knocking the gun away and setting it off at the same time. An orange beam strikes somewhere behind me. I duck and gasp.

  Oliver snarls and struggles against Beechy, trying to push us out of the escape pod.

  “Help me,” Beechy says.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Oliver.

  I ram into him. He loses his balance. We grab his arms and pull him until all three of us are out of the smaller transport, back in the narrow passage of the hovercraft.

  “I’ll secure him,” Beechy says, grabbing both of his arms. I press flat against the wall to let him pull Oliver past me. “Get in there and check out the control panel. I’ll be right back.”

  “Please don’t hurt him,” I say. Oliver’s been hurt too many times because of me.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  I swallow hard and move into the escape pod. I hit a button that shuts the doors behind me, putting one more barrier between me and Charlie. Just in case.

  I scan the transport. There’s a complicated panel of buttons and a screen before the pilot chair in front of me, and a window on the wall. It’s steamed over, but the word K-I-M-O on the top of the panel tells me I’m in the right place. The bomb must be connected to this transport, maybe above me or below me, or jutting out from one of the sides.

  I slip into the pilot seat and wipe two fingers across the control screen, hoping it’s a touch screen. Words pop up:

  PROJECT KIMO

  1:38:17

  ENTER DEACTIVATION CODE

  The 17 drops to 16, and then to 15 and to 14, and all the air goes out of my lungs. It’s showing me how much time is left until the bomb goes off. One hour thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds.

  My hands tremble as I touch ENTER DEACTIVATION CODE. A blank bar pops up with a blinking cursor and a keypad with letters and numbers and math symbols below it.

  This is it. Either Fred gave me the code that’ll turn the bomb off, or I won’t be able to stop it.

  I tuck the curls behind my ear, trying to ignore how fast my heart is beating. I have to focus.

  Fred said to use Yate’s Equation. But did he mean type in the problem, or the solution?

  I try the solution. I memorized it, but I go through the steps in my head to double-check the answer. When I’m sure it’s correct, I type it in:

  674837.475

  A fierce tremor runs through the ship, shaking the transport. I clutch the arm of my chair with one hand. I touch ENTER on the keypad with the other.

  A red bar replaces the blank one:

  ACCESS DENIED

  No, no, no. It didn’t work. This has to work.

  The red bar goes away, and I press ENTER DEACTIVATION CODE again. This time I type out Yate’s full equation, all sixty characters of it.

  ACCESS DENIED

  The doors slide open behind me. “Is it working?” Beechy asks.

  I shake my head. I try the solution again, my fingers flying across the screen. There’s blood on them from the cut on my aching jaw and the one on my shoulder, but I don’t care.

  ACCESS DENIED

  I don’t know what to do.

  “Charlie must’ve switched the code,” I say. “It’s gonna go off. We can’t stop it.”

  I’m fighting back tears again. Grady’s going to get blown to bits, and so is that girl, Nellie—I don’t like her but she doesn’t deserve to die—and so are all the kids in the camps, and the adults up there too; all the people Charlie doesn’t think he needs anymore. And the trees and the grass and the shacks and the animals. It’s all going to be gone.

  And so am I. Charlie isn’t going to welcome me back to the Core; he’s going to shoot me if I go back there. I’m going to splinter, shatter, explode into dust. So will Logan and Beechy and Oliver and everyone I care about in the entire world.

  We are going to run out of time.

  “There’s still one more option,” Beechy says. His voice shakes, and I can’t look at his face. “We could fly the hovercraft away. We could get the bomb as far away as possible, so it wouldn’t cause as much damage. Hopefully, we’d have enough time to deploy the bomb and fly out of its range before it detonated. But regardless, it would screw up Charlie’s plan.�
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  I stare at the timer on the screen. The number is down to 1:32:57.

  I run my fingers through my curls. I exhale; I inhale; I exhale.

  Beechy’s plan would work. We could save everyone. And buy our friends more time to stop Charlie.

  But I don’t know if we’d have time to deflect the bomb and save ourselves too.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I’m going to die either way. This is the best way to go, isn’t it? Saving the world.

  But oh, how I wish we had more time.

  I open my eyes and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “Okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mhm.”

  Beechy places a hand on my shoulder. “You know we can’t tell the others, right?” he says, and I can tell he’s trying hard to keep his voice steady. “They’d try to stop us or come with us. We can’t do that to them.”

  I nod, tight-lipped. The thought of leaving Logan without saying goodbye and never seeing him again, not even for a moment, makes my chest and my heart hurt so bad I might explode and shatter into a billion shards of glass.

  But this is the only way to save him.

  *

  Back in the corridor near the cargo lift, Oliver’s thrashing in one of the passenger seats. Beechy tied him down with wires he must’ve found in some compartment, but they don’t look like they’ll hold him much longer.

  “Can you try to secure him better?” Beechy asks, ducking his head to hurry down the passage to the main cockpit. “I’m gonna get us out of here.”

  I nod, glancing at the sealed door to the cargo lift. I don’t like that we’re taking Oliver with us, but we can’t open that door without risking getting shot by someone still outside, or letting Logan and Sandy find out what we’re doing. I have to be okay with it.

  But I hate it. I hate it.

  Oliver’s spewing words in his seat, though I don’t really hear what he’s saying. His voice grates in my brain. There’s no way I can listen to it.

  I move to the wall of compartments beside him, not looking at him. It’s full of cubbies with wires and tools and kits inside. I open another compartment and find folded blankets. Grabbing one, I rip off a strip I hope will be thick enough.

  When I turn to him, Oliver’s eyes shoot daggers at me. “I knew they were right about you,” he mutters. “Completely Unstable.”