by Brian Yansky
“I wouldn’t have told them.”
“Right. You forget I know how strong they are. People here think you’re strong, but they don’t know the aliens the way we do. The aliens are stronger. They would have forced you. Anyway, the point is you put your friend over the whole group. That’s not a leader. A leader makes the difficult choices. If that means one has to be sacrificed to save the rest, then that’s the way it has to be. You haven’t learned to be a leader. And you may have caused one innocent boy’s death.”
She wields Zack’s injury like a weapon, and maybe that’s her right, but it makes me angry. “I never said I wanted to be a leader.”
“No?” she says, raising an infuriating eyebrow. “Then tell me why you won’t make people see that there is no such thing as the Warrior Spirit.”
“I’ve told people,” I say, but I don’t sound very convincing, even to myself.
“You like it. You like them thinking you’re destined to lead them and save them. You like that they think you’re a strong fighter.”
“I am a strong fighter,” I say. I can’t help it. She’s so sure about everything, so self-righteous.
But there’s something that bothers her more than the Warrior Spirit, more, even, than my crazy rescue mission to Austin. I can feel it in her, but she still surprises me when she says, “When I said we could lead together, you looked at me like I was crazy.”
I frown. “No, I didn’t. Or if I did, it’s just because the idea surprised me. I hadn’t really thought of myself as wanting to lead New America. I told you that.”
“Right,” she says. And then the thing that she’s been holding in spills out: “You think that just because I don’t have that much telepathic power, I can’t lead. You’re wrong, you know. I’m not like Catlin or you, but I know how to lead people and you don’t. You or Catlin.”
“And what about Dylan?” I say. “Does he know how to lead, too?”
For a second she looks a little guilty. Just a second. Just a little. Then she glares at me.
“I just know we can’t trust you.”
“You really believe that?”
She doesn’t say anything. And in that silence is everything. I knew it before, I guess, but I didn’t admit it. I do now.
“You’re going to help Dylan?” I ask, because I need to hear her say it.
“He understands about leading.”
“What about SAF?”
“I’ve been rethinking that, too. I was letting my feelings for you cloud my judgment. Stay and fight sounds like you. It’s what you do well — fight. But what about everyone else? You saw us today during the training session. We can’t fight them. Not fight and win. If we can’t win, we have to change tactics.”
“You don’t know we can’t win,” I say, though I’ve thought the same thing many times.
“We both know,” she says, standing.
“So you’re going to help Dylan?”
“He’s not as bad as you make him out to be. Anyway, he can lead these people. He wants to. You don’t. You should be what you are, Jesse. Just stop pretending.”
“Right,” I say. I stop myself from saying “That goes two ways,” and later I’m glad I didn’t say it. It will seem like I did one little thing right.
“I’ve got to get going,” she says.
“Okay.”
“See you around, then,” she says.
“See me around?”
“What do you want me to say?” she says sharply.
I don’t have an answer.
She makes a little sound of contempt and strides off without looking back. I sit there in the middle of the forest and think how twisted everything has become. It was simple just a little while ago. I liked a girl. She liked me. Of course, there was the whole alien invasion, but I was, at least, sure about Lauren.
I feel tired. I feel so tired I can’t imagine walking to my tent or even into the woods. I lean forward and rest my head in my arms on the table and drift off almost immediately.
We do see each other around. In fact, we see each other at dinner that night, but we don’t sit together. She sits with Zelda. I sit with Catlin and Michael. She does come over to ask Michael to come to the meeting of New Bloods tonight.
“I hope you’re still coming,” she says to me.
I don’t answer.
“What does she mean, ‘still’?” Catlin says when Lauren walks off.
“We aren’t together anymore,” I say.
“Because of what we did?”
“Because of a lot of things.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dude,” Michael says, “I gotta say she didn’t really seem exactly right for you. I wouldn’t have said it before, but it’s true.” With typical Michael subtlety he adds, “Not your dream girl.”
Catlin does her best to pretend that he hasn’t spoken, and I do the same.
One of the healers who works in the hospital comes up and tells Catlin that Zack is awake. Catlin’s face lights up. She says she’ll let me know how he is as soon as she can, but if he’s awake that’s huge.
Catlin starts toward the hospital.
“Are you coming?” Catlin asks the healer.
The girl shakes her head. “Go on ahead. I’m going to grab a cup of coffee.”
“Okay. I’ll see you there,” Catlin says.
But the girl doesn’t head toward the coffee. Instead she lingers at our table. I look over at Michael, wondering if he’s been talking the girl up.
“Want to sit with us?” I say.
She shakes her head.
“I heard you and Lauren broke up,” the girl says.
“News travels fast in a telepathic rebel camp,” Michael says.
The girl’s looking at me. “Is it true?” she asks.
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She frowns. “Do you even know how amazing Catlin is? We have a healer at the hospital. A good one. And her daughter, too, who was training to be one before the invasion. Catlin can do things our healer could never consider doing. She’s totally brilliant. No one else could have brought Zack back.”
“I know she’s good,” I say, a little confused about why she’s telling me this.
“Not just good. My mother is good. I’m good. Catlin is amazing. You’d better not hurt her.”
The girl walks away and leaves me sputtering. “What was that all about?”
Michael shakes his head. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”
I put down my fork. I’m not hungry anymore. “Not really.”
“I was just being nice,” he says. “You’ve never known what you’re doing.”
“Thanks.”
“Welcome. Looks like everyone but you can see the obvious.”
“Can we just talk about something else?” I say.
He says we can as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with little green aliens.
We argue about which superhero would win the decathlon if there was a Superhero Olympics. It feels like one of our old arguments. He says Superman, which I call an obvious and uninspired choice.
“Of course it’s obvious, because anyone with half a brain would go with Superman.”
“I guess you’re proof of that.”
“Who do you think then, Chosen One?”
“Thor, god of thunder.”
“He’s not a superhero.”
“Son of Odin.”
“Not a superhero. A god, I think. A full one.”
“Some people would call him a superhero.”
“Shut up.”
Michael and I go up to the hospital tent to see Zack. Zelda is already there. Zack is sitting up on his cot.
“I was just telling Zelda how totally awesome you and Catlin were,” Zack says. “You saved me. Then she saved me.”
Catlin smiles at him.
“He didn’t save you,” Zelda says to Zack. “He put you there in the first place.”
Zack shakes his head. “I wanted to go
. I begged him. And when that alien struck me, Jesse did something. He turned his strike somehow. If it had hit me full-on, I’d be dead.”
Zelda doesn’t seem impressed.
“Catlin says I can leave tomorrow,” Zack says. “I’m going to start training with you again as soon as I can. I’ll be ready for the next fight.”
“Good,” I say. “That’s good.”
I say we’d better get going and let him rest. Catlin says she has one more patient to see. She’ll see us back at the camp. I don’t even notice Zelda is following us out until we’re outside the tent.
“I’m not going to thank you for preventing his death when you’re the reason he was there in the first place.”
“I don’t expect —”
She holds up her hand.
“Just listen to me. He worships you. He thinks you’re some kind of hero. Just don’t you ever put him in a place where he can be killed again. Don’t you ever do that.”
I want to say okay. I want to tell her that from now on, Zack will be safe. That she’ll never have to sit by his cot again and worry that he might die. But in spite of what Lauren thinks, I do know that there will be hard choices ahead.
“You know I can’t promise you that,” I say as gently as I can.
Her face gets even more angry. She walks back into the tent.
Michael and I start down the path toward our campsite. Sam and Dylan come walking up it. Better than Lauren and Dylan, I guess, but still not great.
Sam says, “You guys headed to the town meeting?”
“I guess,” I say.
Dylan’s eyes lock onto mine. “I need a word with the Chosen One first,” Dylan says. “You go on ahead.”
“Come on, Jesse’s friend,” Sam says.
“My first town meeting ever,” Michael says as they walk off. “Maybe you could guide me through it.”
“What do you want?” I say to Dylan.
“I want you to go away.”
“I want you to do a few things I doubt you’ll ever do, too.”
He pauses, as though he’s deciding whether it’s worth trying to explain himself to me. Lucky me. He seems to decide it is. “Even when I was a kid, I knew I’d do something great. I saw how my people were so careful because they were afraid. I had big plans for my clan and house. We wouldn’t have just wasted our talents like my dad’s generation and those before it, and we wouldn’t have hidden them, either. We would have used them. We would have made people understand we weren’t the freaks, the misfits; we were what humans could become. We were the future.”
“The future how?”
“I would have joined the houses. Together we would have been too strong for the untalented. We would have improved mankind, taken it to a new level.”
“Like the master race?”
He doesn’t answer. “We’re still the future, and I’m still the leader. I’m the one chosen to unite us. I’ve known it since I was a child.”
“You’d be like a king,” I say.
“You can help,” he says. “I would be grateful when I’m the head of the houses.”
“Who doesn’t want a king to be grateful to them?” I say.
“Think about it,” he says. “Think about your friends. These are dangerous times. I will be the head of the houses. It’s going to happen. You can be my friend or my enemy. The choice is yours.”
“What was that all about?” Michael asks when I come into the meeting-hall tent.
“He wants to be my blood brother,” I say, “or he wants my blood. I’m not sure which, but I’d bet on the second.”
Sam says, “He’s dangerous. I’d be very careful.”
“Did you know he had this big plan,” I say, “for uniting the houses and becoming king? He thinks it’s his destiny or something.”
“I’m impressed,” she says. “I didn’t know he had that much imagination.”
“Oh, he’s been imagining all kinds of things,” I say.
“It’s not much of a kingdom anymore,” she says.
“It’s a disappointment, but he’ll take what he can get.”
“On another topic, I have an idea for a second suicide mission,” Sam says, clearly done talking about Dylan. “Your friend here has already volunteered.”
“I did?” Michael says.
“You’re probably still having memory problems,” she says. “You were all for it.”
“That doesn’t sound like me,” he says.
“We all surprise ourselves sometimes.”
“What is it?” I ask.
She wants to attack Denver, where the aliens have a base. This time we’ll do it right, she says. We’ll take two trucks with soldiers, some of them pilots. We’ll do more damage, get more ships.
“But first we need more explosives,” she says. “Lucky for you, it just so happens I know where to get them — the safe house for the Wind Clan just outside the square in Santa Fe. We’ll take the two ships, but just four or five people total. A quick in-and-out without anyone seeing us. We’ll go tomorrow night, and then the next night we’ll blow up the base in Denver.”
I see Catlin making her way over to us. I see Lauren whisper something to Zelda from across the way, but I keep my shield up so that I don’t have to hear whatever it is she says.
Sam lets Catlin know she’s volunteered for a suicide mission. “Congratulations, you’ve been accepted.”
“Lucky me,” Catlin says.
The town meeting is shorter than the one last night. Everyone seems weary at first — camp life and the strain of being hunted, I think. I do hear a lot of buzzing about Michael, which becomes almost deafening when Doc calls him up to the stage to be introduced and welcomed into New America. Then there’s news about our successful attack in Austin and some cheering over that. It’s a small victory, but every victory makes us feel a little stronger. There’s a moment of silence for all we’ve lost.
When the meeting is over, Michael, Catlin, Sam, and I walk back toward our campsite, but Sam turns off before long. Her tent is in the neighborhood closest to the food.
“It’s where the best people live,” she says, “but your hill is nice, too, if you don’t mind walking.”
As she walks away, Michael stares after her. “I’m in love.”
“I thought you were in lust — I mean in love — with Zelda,” I say.
“Who’s Zelda?” Michael jokes, still staring at the spot where Sam was.
When we reach our campsite, I notice that Lauren’s tent is gone, which isn’t exactly a surprise but still bothers me. Catlin looks at the empty space and then says she’s going to turn in. She’s exhausted. We say good night. It feels a little awkward between Catlin and me now, which bothers me, too.
“You think she likes me?” Michael says.
I’m thinking about Lauren and Catlin.
“Who?”
“Who do you think? The Amazon woman.”
“Sam? Not particularly, but maybe you’ll grow on her.”
“I think she sort of likes me,” he says, unzipping his tent.
I wish I had his confidence sometimes. I’m really tired. I don’t realize how tired until I get inside my tent. I don’t even take off my clothes or unzip my bag. I just lie on top of it fully dressed, and in a second I’m asleep.
At breakfast the next morning, I see that Lauren has joined Dylan and his sidekicks at the Dylan-and-his-sidekicks table. They seem very cozy, sitting there beside each other, talking — making plans, I suppose. Lauren is always making plans.
“Why is Lauren sitting over there with that creep Dylan?” Zack asks. He was released from the hospital tent first thing this morning, and we haven’t had the chance yet to catch him up on what he’s missed.
Zelda, who is sitting next to him but looking none too happy about it, tells him to be quiet and eat his breakfast. He’s taken two helpings of everything, which seems like a good sign to me.
“What’s that saying about a woman scorned?” Michael says.
<
br /> “I didn’t scorn her,” I say. “If any scorning was done, she did it.”
Zack gets it and doesn’t seem all that upset. “She wasn’t right for you anyway,” he says with his mouth full.
Zelda scolds, “Stay out of it, Zack.”
“It’s true,” he says defensively.
“It doesn’t matter,” Zelda says. “You don’t necessarily say something just because it’s true.” Then she looks at me. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I say, and then I look at Zack. “It’s all right, Zack. I’d rather hear the truth.”
“Sure you would,” Michael says.
Catlin gets up. “I’ve got to get to the hospital.”
I hear Lauren laugh. Lauren’s laugh is one of those musical ones. She could give a concert with that laugh. Right now she’s giving a concert for Dylan.
“I’ve never heard Dylan be funny,” I say to Michael. “Does he look like someone who could be funny?”
“Not intentionally,” Michael says.
One thing about Michael: he’s a good judge of character. Another thing: he’s loyal.
That afternoon I train the faithful again. There are even more rebels at this session. Over a hundred, I’d guess. Zack’s been telling everyone how I defeated (this is so the wrong word, but that’s the word he uses) the great alien hunter and how I saved him. He claims he felt something in me that was like a sudden explosion of power.
“Like the spirit,” he says.
Once again, I try to link the physical moves (roundhouse kick, tiger mouth, knife-hand strike, palm-heel strike, elbow strike, punches) with the moves of the mind. People do make the connections, but they make them imperfectly. I try not to be too disheartened. In tae kwon do it was the same. You have to do thousands and thousands of side kicks before you start doing them well. We do get a good workout, at least. This is my kind of sweating, good physical exercise, not sitting around nearly naked in a sweat lodge with a fat old dreamwalker.
After the punches and kicks, we work on hapkido moves. I’ve partnered everyone up so they can practice different techniques. We’re working on a simple way to twist a wrist so the opponent is disabled.
One of the pairs is a guy named Lucas and a girl named Marie. I’ve seen Lucas hanging around with Dylan’s group, though I’m not sure if he’s really a part of it. I keep an eye on him because he’s aggressive. I’m watching him when he twists Marie’s wrist too much during the exercise. Marie stifles her cry of pain, but I can hear it in my mind.
