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  "You did well," Matt said, smiling at me. Then he got serious. "We need to stake out this crater. Don't make it obvious. We need to let the second batch of nanobots out near some stone.

  Hurry. The Grounders will show up if they haven't already. Oh, crap." Matt frowned. "There's one."

  I followed his gaze.

  It turned out that they were already here.

  He stood above us, peering down from the very edge of the drop. Everyone else had backed off. Even from way down here, in this crater of dirt and stone, I recognized the blue-gray uniform of a Task Force worker and the high collar that hid the blob attached to his neck.

  In fact, I recognized the worker.

  Henry Ogilvy, our museum guide. His plain buzz cut stood out in a way that made my stomach turn. He had come to look at the mysterious cylinder that landed in the middle of the park. His expression remained neutral, which made him terrifying.

  Rage pumped through me. Henry had taken Winnie and the others to Mars. He had trapped them with his boring tour and his lifeless gaze. I thought of the thing attached to his neck, the thing that had destroyed whoever he was before, and I wondered if he had a family who now missed the person they had loved.

  Henry shook his head.

  We were pests. I could read that.

  I raised my weapon--my heat gun--and pointed it right at Henry. He didn't move. Instead, he fixed me with that lifeless stare.

  Grounders must not feel fear. I wanted that to change.

  Another person stuck their head over the edge, and another. Two women joined Henry, and both wore the same uniforms that hid the monsters on their necks. They had responded, then, just as Matt had predicted. We had three Grounders.

  I pressed the button that Matt had shown me.

  "Tess!" he shouted.

  It was too late.

  A buzz sounded inside the gun, and I tensed, wondering if I'd done something wrong or if the weapon was about to explode. A force pushed me back and the air warped in front of me, forming a rippling beam that shot in Henry's direction.

  It struck the Grounders, and Henry flinched. Smoke rose from the space between his neck and his collar, leaking out in tendrils before spilling out in a billowing cloud. Henry grabbed at the back of his collar. His face contorted in agony. He slumped out of sight, and the two women followed suit.

  They made no sound.

  Once the three of them fell, a thin cloud of smoke rose from where they once stood.

  Screams rose. Feet trampled. People had witnessed death here. We had declared war. An Enforcer announced over his arm microphone that all civilians had to leave the area. His words echoed off the walls of the crater as the air stilled in front of my weapon.

  I lowered it to my side. Matt watched me with wide eyes.

  I had killed three Grounders with a heat gun.

  "Everyone, evacuate the park!" the Enforcer shouted. He had no idea that we weren't after them.

  I was going to throw up. I felt no victory. I turned away and faced the cylinder, not sure how to feel. The Grounders deserved this, and I had to do this to protect the Earth from them, but this made me feel like...made me feel like--

  "Crap," I said.

  I hadn't expected the Grounders to make faces like that. I had expected them to make some alien noises and then slump over. Maybe I'd expected them to bleed green or something, anything, to make them look less human. I hadn't thought they were capable of feeling pain or making their hosts look like they were feeling pain.

  "We should have waited," Matt said. "They were only looking.

  Now the Enforcers will call the Great Council. They won't know better. We still have to get the rest of the nanobots going, and they're going to need a couple more hours to build our other machines."

  I turned to him. Shock ruled right now. "What did I just do?"

  "I know. The looks on their faces are horrible," Matt said as I followed him around the cylinder. The Enforcers continued to shout at everyone to leave. "I should have warned you about that. I forgot. Try not to think about it. The point is, they're coming, and we can't leave yet."

  I shook my head, trying to cast Henry's face out of my mind while the Grounder on his neck burned, sending pain signals to his brain. Why was this bothering me? I wanted to get revenge on the Grounders and do whatever I could to take our world back. We had to fight these emotionless monsters who didn't care about sweeping us aside.

  I swallowed and focused on Matt's words. Now wasn't the time to reflect on the horrors of war. I had to get out of sight before Mom and Dad peered down this crater to see who had roasted three Grounders. They might be Earthers just as much as I was, but I had the feeling they wouldn't be happy to see me here, on the front lines of this conflict and about to march to the Great Council themselves.

  What would they think about having a daughter who killed former people with a heat gun?

  We ran around to the other side of the cylinder. The screams died down. People were leaving. Matt grabbed my arm. "There's a hatch this way that we should have used in the first place. I only left through the top to see what was going on."

  He spoke in a tone like I had screwed up. We were off to a good start.

  I had killed.

  I felt like--

  It turned out that the cylinder was half-buried in the crater, like a crooked monolith from space. Matt circled, searching and not letting go of my arm. I felt like someone who needed babysitting, and it was almost as bad of a feeling as being a pest. Matt had only wanted to stake out the area. I had acted too fast.

  The hatch was half-buried in the rocky soil, and Matt and I had a hard time getting it to open. Thankfully, it opened inwards. At last, we crawled through and back into the lower seating area. The cylinder was half-buried. We must have impacted with incredible force. It was no wonder that Fiona had told us to buckle up. I wondered what she and her team had done to reinforce this cylinder and absorb some of the shocks. This landing should have killed us.

  We climbed the ladder. Matt opened another locker, hurrying this time, and he wasn't speaking to me.

  "You should have told us that it wasn't time to shoot yet," I said.

  He said nothing at first. The silence was worse than anything else. But then he pulled out two more boxes and set them on the floor. They were creatively labeled SECOND and THIRD. "I said that it was time to stake things out," he said. "The Grounders know we're a real threat now."

  We were racing the clock.

  "Sorry," I said, angry at myself more than anything. "I see Grounders in my home, close to my parents, and I happen to see the same one who led my friends into a trap. What would you do in that situation?"

  "Shoot him," Matt said, watching the box labeled SECOND open on the floor. More nanobots spilled out, and he rushed down to open the hatch again. The swarm split into two, one of them going for the remaining ingots, and the other rushing down the sides of the ladder to the outside.

  "Exactly," I said, wanting to throw up again. I had taken revenge for Winnie, but I hadn't imagined it would feel this bad. "Now I'm a murderer and a failure, and you're yelling at me."

  "I'm yelling because I'm stressed," Matt said. "We're supposed to be a crew of five. I'm going to kill Marv if I ever see him again."

  I was glad that there were millions of miles of space between Marv and us. I wondered if he had died, and how Fiona felt about it.

  "My point is, we have to survive this. The Grounders know that we came to attack and they'll figure out that we must have come with better weapons this time. If we're not ready to kill them, we'll die."

  He had a point. Slowly starving on Mars wasn't the way to go. The Grounders didn't care about our well-being. They just wanted Earth for themselves. Not only did they have no emotions, but they also had no sense of justice.

  I watched the swam of tiny bots take apart two of the iron ingots. A stream of them headed outside, little pieces in tow, to join the bots milling around in the crater. "What are they doing?" I aske
d.

  "The second batch is building the mining bots that will help make the walker," Matt said. "Once we have that, we'll be off the ground. Grounders don't like heights. We'll have an advantage."

  "Because they're used to the ground?" I asked.

  "Exactly. Grounders hate getting too far from their native environment."

  I liked the thought of getting above the Grounders, so we could see what was going on outside the crater. I knew that three bodies waited. Outside, a faint siren wailed. The Great Council had activated the warning system, something that hadn't happened since a tornado alert last year. People would be getting warnings on their contact displays to avoid Woking Park. The sound of a chopper followed. Enforcers were coming to monitor the situation. They'd never fit through the hole above us.

  I wondered what the Grounders had planned. I sat down on the floor of the manufacturing room. What were Mom and Dad doing right now?

  Mom and Dad were close, maybe even within meters, with no idea that I was down here. The dead Grounders wouldn't give them my description, at least.

  "I know," Matt said. "Well, you could try climbing up the crater wall, but you're not going to kill too many Grounders, even with that gun. I wish Fiona would talk to us."

  She'd been silent. Maybe the Grounders could detect radio transmissions. We knew what we had to do: build our machines, get out of this pit, and attack Grounders before they killed us.

  But a big part of me wanted to crawl out of this pit and join Mom and Dad. They had to be up there. They'd be furious at me for returning. Disappointed. But it was easier than climbing into a walker and leading an invasion.

  Or was it?

  If I climbed up to Mom and Dad, the Grounders would kill me.

  Mom and Dad might even have to watch. I needed to spare them that, even if they had lied to me. Matt had survived last time because he had given over his weapon to Mom in the form of that tracking capsule.

  "Matt," I asked. "Are these guns also trackers?"

  "Yes," Matt said. "The others colonists who land will be able to tell where we are. If we stay alive that long."

  We had a chance of dying soon. I didn't know everything about how this stuff worked--Fiona did--but I hoped she had studied Grounders very well.

  "What do we do if Enforcers come down here?" I asked.

  Matt sat on his bunk, on top of all the straps, while a new buzzing noise started outside. "Let's hope that doesn't happen."

  "What do we do in that case?" I asked. "Enforcers are still human. We can't hurt them."

  "There's another weapon," Matt said. He did not sound happy about it. Outside, a helicopter continued to fly overhead. I must be right that the opening in the dome wasn't large enough for it to fit. "We need high ground if we deploy it."

  "Is it a gas?" I asked.

  "It's not nice. It doesn't just make you fall asleep. We only need to deploy it if it's an emergency."

  I shuddered. I had the sense that this gas Matt was mentioning didn't, or couldn't, only target Grounders. "We can't deploy it here," I said.

  "I hope that we don't have to use it out in the park," Matt said. "We need this place alive if we're going to spread life back across this planet. We need all the parks alive."

  Matt and I moved on to eating another meal out of cans, which was easier now that we had returned to full gravity. My stomach turned into a huge knot and got worse the more I ate. I hadn't asked to come on this mission. Well, I had, but I hadn't. I knew that war was dangerous. Mom and Dad had a point about that.

  I hoped they assumed that I was still on Mars.

  After eating, we spent time listening to the sounds outside from our bunks. Matt warned me not to head outside anymore. "It's best if the Grounders don't know there are only two of us," Matt said. "We want them to think that we have more weapons on hand than we do."

  I thought of Henry's agonized face as I zapped him with that heat gun. The light outside got longer and more tired. The artificial sun had moved well past the hole in the dome and evening was coming. It might be a bit safer to poke my head out of the hatch once the light got dark. Of course, the Enforcers could make Mom reset the sun and keep the light going, but I had the sense that the Great Council and the Grounders were going to take over this situation.

  A new growl joined the noise outside. I jumped. "What's that?" I asked, hating that I sounded like a baby.

  "That's probably the mining bot," Matt said. "We'll have our walker in soon. The nanobots will reproduce so that things go faster."

  I was anxious to get out of this pit. I wondered if any news choppers were hovering overhead. The Great Council might even be addressing the world about the mystery cylinder that had sailed here from Mars. I imagined them speaking in their monotone as the footage played. "I have to look."

  I expected Matt to yell at me, but he didn't. He scraped at the inside of his can of beans and nodded. "Keep your face in the shadows."

  Gun in hand, I crawled for the hatch. Yes. It was early evening, because the light on the walls of the crater was orange and full of shadows. I peeked out, marveling at a new robot that crawled along the side of our prison, drilling into exposed rock whenever it could. It reminded me of a giant metal spider. This one was the size of a large dog, with a body more like a beetle than an arachnid. Still, it reassured me. Spiders were the most natural pesticide in the world. They were good for keeping the bad bugs away. Fiona had done well, choosing the design. These things would help us fight the Grounders.

  The real pests.

  The swarm of nanobots had grown. A dark cloud seethed and moved on the ground. I fought down fear. The specks bolted across three lumps on the floor of the crater, and a line of them had formed between the mining bot and the new project. They looked like ants more than ever.

  The whole thing just appeared so...alien.

  And other than this and the distant chopper, there was only silence. The park had cleared out.

  "How's it going?" Matt asked.

  "Good," I said. "I think."

  Then I saw it.

  A dark figure slid down the side of the crater, followed by another and another.

  I tensed.

  Grounders.

  The Great Council must have told the Enforcers to stay out of this because they knew that they were dealing with the start of an invasion.

  The men and women sliding down the side of the crater, kicking up dust, all wore gray Task Force uniforms, and a gaunt woman in the front wore the black robe of the Great Council. They slid down the crater, unafraid of the drop. I gripped my gun tighter, ready to do what I had to do to stop my parents from having to see the worst. I could deal with Grounders. I knew that already.

  But it was what they were wheeling down towards the cylinder that bothered me. A huge steel barrel on wheels plunged forward, glowing with a red light inside.

  I froze.

  A pulse cannon. They hadn't been used in over eighty years.

  The weapon accelerated downward, dragging about a dozen Grounders with it. They fanned out as if they knew that I couldn't hit all of them at once. The cannon reached the bottom of the crater and rolled forward as if it couldn't wait to rip our atoms apart. It was official. War had begun.

  And there was no way I could hit all these Grounders with a narrow heat beam before one of them operated that cannon.

  I ducked inside. "Um, Matt?"

  He jumped off the cot and climbed the ladder to meet me, grimacing. "They brought weapons, didn't they?"

  I nodded. "We're going to die."

  Chapter Fifteen

  Now was my first time seeing a pulse cannon. I'd heard about these guns being used back in the Unifying Wars when the Great Council made the world one country, but they hadn't been brought out in the last eight decades. Pulse cannons were supposed to be able to blast apart all atoms within thirty meters. The Grounders had dug this one out of a government bunker for certain. They might not have emotions, but they could calculate. Fiona hadn't prepared enou
gh for this. My gun couldn't take all the Grounders down before one used that thing.

  "What did you see?" Matt asked.

  I hated that I wasn't as honest as he could be. "What's the sturdiest part of this cylinder?"

  His mouth opened in horror. He got my drift. "Um...that would be the workroom." Matt stood aside, being a gentleman and letting me climb up the ladder first. Even in the face of death, he kept that trait.

  I scrambled up the rungs, waiting for the blast. I had seen footage of pulse cannons ripping apart tanks. Our cylinder wouldn't stand up to that. Matt and I would get blasted to pieces. I hoped that it would be fast, for Mom and Dad's sake. We had only postponed our death by a couple of days when we hopped into the cylinder back on Mars. Matt sat between two of the storage lockers, opening one with his left hand. I sat down next to him. We had put as much material between us and the pulse cannon as possible. I wondered what it would feel like, getting our particles ripped apart. There might be a very brief flash of pain.

  Matt slipped his hand into mine and squeezed.

  "Kiss me," he said.

  "What?"

  His eyes were pleading. We had come this far together. Those two words told me everything that I needed to know: that we weren't going to make it.

  So I kissed the green boy.

  He kept his hand tight on mine as our lips met. Matt dropped something down the ladder with his other hand, which made a small explosion. Matt's lips parted mine, and I closed my eyes. In the face of death, I wasn't too weirded out by kissing a green boy. In fact, I had never kissed anyone before.

  And Matt was great at it.

  We separated and faced each other. Matt's brown eyes were big. Scared. A hissing noise sounded from below. The locker on the other side of Matt hung open. It contained dozens of black spheres, all made of some rubbery material.

  The cannon would fire any second. We'd break apart into dust, settling with the nanobots and the dirt. Mom and Dad would never find out what happened to me unless they ran into Fiona. They might kill her or better yet, the radical Mars Identity people who had forced us into this in the first place.

  But it never came.