Drafted Page 14

  Instead, I heard my first Grounder screams.

  Someone who might be the leader woman shrieked in pain and coughed. More gags followed. Matt didn't smile. We stared at each other as the sounds of pain continued. Our cylinder remained upright and intact.

  After five minutes of coughing and gagging, silence fell. I got the idea that Matt and I weren't about to die after all. I didn't understand what had happened, but I wasn't going to complain.

  “What did you do?” I asked, my voice hoarse from the tension.

  “I dropped a smoke bomb,” Matt said, one notch above a whisper. His hand trembled in mine. “I was hoping we wouldn't have to do that. If we were lucky, only Grounders came into the pit.”

  “A smoke bomb?”

  “We can't go down there yet. Fiona says they take about an hour to clear. Anyone who breathes the black smoke suffocates. It coats the inside of your lungs, and it can't tell if you're human or a Grounder.”

  I let go of Matt's hand, casting aside thoughts of kissing the green boy. I peered down the hatch and into the lower chamber that contained our cots and our seats.

  I held back a gasp.

  A black vapor filled the space, blocking our sight of the exit hatch and the most of the cots. It was the strangest thing I had seen so far. The vapor swirled, forming a new floor on the bottom of the cylinder, and it looked almost like the surface of a black pond. If I fell in, I would never come out again.

  “Don't fall!” Matt shouted.

  “I wasn't planning on it,” I said. I couldn't take my gaze off the gas--the black smoke--swirling below us. If I fell, I would die. It would coat my lungs. I'd drown in the open air. I thought of the coughing and gagging of the Grounders and hoped that no one else had come down with them. For a moment, I hated Fiona for creating this stuff, but it had just saved our lives and allowed us to continue with this mission. The teaching computers always told us that war was brutal no matter what weapons got used. Now I saw it firsthand.

  The black smoke didn't start to thin for minutes. The Grounders couldn't have escaped back up the crater wall in time to avoid it. There would be more bodies once it was safe for Matt and me to climb down.

  "Why did you ask me to kiss you?" I asked Matt. I had to get my mind off of the conflict. More of this would come.

  "I wasn't sure the gas would spread fast enough to save us," Matt said. He managed an awkward smile. "Besides, it was a good idea at the time."

  "At the time," I said. "You're vague again."

  "But truthful," Matt said.

  He might be honest, but he was also mysterious. The kiss hadn't meant anything, anyway. But I had the sense that there was more to Matt that I had discovered, more secrets that he was hiding other than his involvement in this war. That aspect of him was drawing me in. We even liked some of the same things. I could still feel the pressure of his lips on mine.

  Matt and I waited for what seemed like another hour as the black vapor thinned, leaving a coat of what appeared to be soot all over our cots and the seats below. The ladder looked as if someone had blasted ash all over it. I shuddered, knowing that we'd have to go through that to exit the capsule.

  Matt seemed to read my mind. "Once the stuff settles, Fiona says that it's safe to touch," he said. "It's only dangerous if it's in the air. I think we're okay to climb down. So that you know, gas masks won't help us against this stuff."

  "What is it made out of?" I asked. I had to know.

  "I'm not sure," Matt said. "Fiona didn't want anyone to know."

  I shuddered, thinking of this stuff invading my lungs and clogging my airways. It would be such a horrible way to die. Outside, the buzzing and cracking sounds continued. The other bots were still busy building our machines.

  “I'll go down first,” Matt said. “Watch.”

  I let him do the honors. Matt scrambled down the ladder, touching the stuff that had suffocated the Grounders. I followed. The grains felt strange on my hands, but they didn't stick. This stuff had performed its duty.

  And Matt had more rubber spheres ready.

  The cloud had settled all over the bottom of the cylinder, far below, and on the seats that Matt and I had occupied during the trip. Nothing poked through the blackness. Matt peeked outside of the hatch and back to me. “There's one good thing about this black smoke stuff,” he said. “You can't see the bodies too well once it settles.”

  The light outside was much dimmer now. The authorities hadn't told Mom and Dad to turn the sun back on. If they had, Mom and Dad had broken the machinery. I imagined Dad pulling out some wires.

  Matt stepped outside. I followed.

  The first thing I noticed was the black residue all over the bottom of our crater.

  The second thing that registered was the fact that it covered several lumps now lying on the ground. A dozen humanlike shapes lay scattered in the artificial moonlight, completely covered in black soot like the victims in the city of Pompeii. Vomit rose in the back of my throat. I knew these were Grounders, but some of them lay curled up as if in agony. I could no longer tell if they were men or women, or if the blobs themselves still lived. I spotted no movement other than the rivers of nanobots and the metal spider that still mined at the walls of the crater. Drilling sounds pierced the silence. The sight was dismal like the end of the world.

  We must have killed fifteen Grounders at this point. Maybe more. A representative of the Great Council lay here. I didn't know her name, but that didn't matter. The rest of them would come.

  “That should keep more of them from coming down,” Matt said, averting his gaze from the soot-covered lumps.

  I followed it.

  Our walker was almost complete.

  My jaw dropped when I realized how high the monstrosity stood. The walker had three legs, all metal with thousands of segmented joints, and it rose maybe fifteen meters in the air. A massive swarm of nanobots made the top of the device appear as if it were moving. From this angle, I could tell that the top of the walker was roundish, like a metallic turtle shell, and big enough to fit a few people.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  Matt looked at me in confusion. “We're giving the Grounders their expectations.”

  I didn't get what he meant, but I wasn't going to dwell on that. “It looks like the tripod back in the Mars Exhibit!”

  “Where do you think Fiona and I got the idea?” Matt asked. “I used to study those old stories about Mars. My dad collects them. Besides, this should work. Grounders aren't going to climb towards us or fly, for that matter."

  I faced the sky. A cylinder-shaped hole peered out on murky blackness. I could smell the disgusting smog. “We just landed from another planet, and now we're going to pilot an actual tripod.”

  “We call them walkers.”

  “It has three legs.”

  “It was cheaper to take one of the legs off. Fiona had to cut corners wherever she could.”

  I supposed that made sense. I wanted to laugh for a moment. “How do we get into it?”

  “A ladder will drop once it's finished. It looks like that will be in minutes.”

  I dared to step out further into the night. A helicopter flew over the park again, a searchlight swinging back and forth. I ducked underneath the barrel of the pulse cannon in case they were filming this. I was sure that the Enforcers were. The giant barrel gave off heat. The Grounders had been charging this when the smoke reached them. We had killed them in time--barely.

  I shuddered from being so close to it. One good thing had happened. The Grounders wouldn't easily get this thing out of the crater again, not without bringing in equipment. Pulse cannons weren't light from what I'd heard.

  The chopper passed. I realized Matt had also hidden under the giant gun, on the other side. I stood all the way again. He did the same.

  “It's quiet,” Matt said.

  “The park is always quiet at night,” I said. It was hard to believe that I was home again. Right now, with these bodies and these horrible
weapons, it felt like Rockville. I blinked and saw the bodies of livestock behind my eyelids again. I had suppressed the image pretty well until the draft had woken it all up again. It was another reason to hate them.

  It reminded me why I needed to fight.

  I was an Earther, after all, and we were here to save the planet. The thought gave me the strength to remain by Matt's side and watch as the swarm finished our walker.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It didn't take long.

  That was good because I feared another pulse cannon rolling down into our pit. Fear didn't drive Grounders. Logic did. But logic now also dictated that they would get destroyed if they dared to visit our little stronghold, so no more of them came.

  Matt didn't have to tell me that the bots had finished our walker. The entire swarm of them fell to the ground at once, raining down like tiny pieces of ash from an erupting volcano. I watched as the bots fell around us in a grainy, black snow and joined the remains of the killer dust on the ground. They accumulated on the corpses that I could no longer see, adding to the darkness on the bottom of the crater. It was an eerie sight.

  But once the air cleared, our walker stood ready, silent and sinister, in the artificial moonlight. The metal glinted like a sharp knife, and I blinked, trying to see if any ladder was coming down. The helicopter had vanished to turn around and make another sweep over us. The park stayed silent.

  The Enforcers may have evacuated the whole area of civilians. They cared about public safety. I was glad. I just hoped that the Enforcers didn't drag out any old weapons as well. The helicopters were supposed to have stun beams, to shut down the muscles of fleeing criminals, but nothing else. They belonged in the past.

  At least, I thought big weapons had been a thing of the past until this pulse cannon showed up.

  "Now what?" I asked, eyeing the walker. It looked like a silver brain on three legs, only smooth. It also gave me the creeps.

  "We get out of here. What else?" Matt asked. He managed a grin. "In that."

  Anything could be waiting for us above the crater. I did not doubt that the Grounders knew about this thing we had built.

  A buzzing sound followed from above, and Matt grabbed my arm. We stepped back as a round opening formed on the bottom of the metal brain, and a shiny ladder extended down, unfolding to land in the black soot. I couldn't tell what was in the top of the walker. I almost didn't want to climb in.

  But Matt motioned for me go first, so I did.

  I felt like we were back in the Mars Exhibit. “What's going to happen now?” I asked. My stomach tightened into a knot. “Do we march out of the crater and start shooting at Grounders with heat rays?”

  “Actually, yes,” Matt said. He climbed up after me. “I feel a lot better about using that because we won't hurt the Enforcers.”

  "You're joking." The more I got into this, the more my head exploded.

  "Hey. Stories have inspired lots of things," Matt said. "That guy gave us some good ideas."

  I hoped that the Grounders didn't give the Enforcers any pulse cannons. Something told me that they wouldn't. Now that their secret might be out, there was the possibility that the Enforcers had figured out the truth about the Great Council. Besides, all Enforcers knew was how to arrest and detain people—not kill. A pulse cannon would be as new to them as it was to us.

  The ground got smaller and smaller until at last, the blobs that were bodies seemed to melt away into the rest of the black expanse. I kept the rungs of the ladder in a death grip. We had blasted in a huge crater. I could see a bit of the rim now, and the grass and trees that lined it. No one stood on the edge. The gas attack or maybe the pulse cannon had scared everyone off. I felt as if I were hanging over an alien landscape.

  But I climbed into the inside of the walker.

  Like everything else on this mission, it was pretty spartan. The walker had three orange plastic chairs, assembled from whatever the bots had mined out of the crater. A thick glass window peered out on the edge of the hole and the tops of the trees that peeked over it. Only four switches and several buttons adorned the control panel. There were no fancy screens, no monitors to tell us the status of anything. The whole setup looked more like one of those ancient arcade games than a high-tech, Grounder stomper.

  Matt climbed up behind me. A scraping sound followed as the ladder retracted itself and vanished into a small compartment right below us. Matt closed the hatch. Fiona had only added the bare minimum to this thing, just enough for it to serve its purpose. There was no fluff on Mars. Comfort wasn't even a thing here.

  “This got built for three people,” Matt said. “One to pilot, one to shoot, and one to drop the gas bombs. We're going to do all of those jobs."

  “Which button is which?”

  “This lever moves us. The orange button and the second lever operates the heat gun. That's the one that only kills Grounders.”

  “Then let's only use that,” I said.

  Matt sighed. “We might have to use the other weapon at times. If the Grounders get out another pulse cannon, and our heat gun is in the middle of charging, we won't have a choice.”

  “Thanks,” I said. If I killed humans, I wouldn't live with myself. Earthers had to respect all Earth life. We did not kill unless it was to eat.

  But I had already done that.

  Grounders didn't count as Earth life, but I couldn't shake a disgusting feeling. My identity felt ready to shatter all over again.

  “Do you want to pilot or shoot?” Matt asked.

  I thought of Rockville again, and I chased the horrible feeling away. “I'll shoot.” Matt could have whatever button released the black stuff. Besides, I didn't trust myself to make this thing get us out of the crater. The Grounders had barely managed to get the cannon down the slope.

  Matt flipped a switch. The control panel lit up in an eerie orange. A single black button stood out from the others. Matt caught me studying it.

  “That's the button we don't want to use,” he said.

  I nodded. “I'm not touching it.” I wanted to save the planet, but I didn't want to sacrifice people to do it. It wouldn't be fair to kill some to save others.

  Why was I running that through my head?

  I sat down in one of the plastic chairs. Matt did the same. We left the middle one empty between us, the one meant for the black button. I asked Matt how the gun worked, and he explained that another lever aimed and the orange button to my right fired. I could sustain the heat beam for up to fifteen seconds before I needed to let the gun recharge for five minutes.

  “You have to be careful,” Matt said.

  A spotlight drifted over us. The helicopter.

  I was in Rockville all over again. I wondered if the Grounders planned on blowing up Woking Park or something to get rid of us. I didn't put it past them. They wanted Earth life gone, after all.

  Matt cranked the lever forward, and a greenish spotlight burst to life on the front of the walker, casting an eerie glow on the crater ahead. The mining bot still worked, with another nanobot swarm milling around underneath it. I wondered what else they had to build. I thought of the fact that Matt had mentioned farming bots, meant to spread seeds and plants back through the world to crowd out the red weed.

  We took one step and then another. It was not a smooth ride. I bounced up and down in my seat and nearly threw up when I realized that we might be stepping on Grounder bodies--bodies that used to be human. Bodies that had suffocated and died a horrible death.

  “Ignore that,” Matt said, staring straight ahead and gripping the lever so hard that I thought his bony hand might break. The same thought was bothering him. The entire war thing was becoming more real by the minute. If we survived, we both might end up with that stress disorder that used to happen to soldiers. Reality had already shifted. I now inhabited a dark world that I had never imagined. My life before now had been a cozy lie, and this was the reality.

  “I'm trying,” I said, eyeing the rim of the crater. We had,
in fact, landed in the forest. I wondered if we had landed near the fire pit where Dad found me, only to lead me into the Grounders' arms. Perhaps we had even destroyed it.

  We took one step onto the side of the crater, and then another. We tilted back, and I grabbed onto my seat with one hand, keeping my other one above the lever that would aim the gun. How would I even know how to do this? I had no sight of the weapon.

  I felt dumb enough. I had never piloted anything before or even driven. The Great Council had forbidden people to drive for decades.

  Our walker took another step and crested the top of the crater. Its long legs had climbed out in only two steps. I bounced back into my seat and kept my hand on the lever. The greenish spotlight cast an eerie glow over the trees. A few bats fluttered away from us, and I jumped, expecting another pulse cannon to appear out of the trees.

  But there was nothing. No Grounders ran among the trees that I used to know so well. In fact, the park appeared empty.

  "This isn't right," I said.

  Matt eyed the swinging searchlight, which appeared to work on its own. "I know," he said. "I expected tons of Grounders by now. We couldn't have scared them off. I don't think they fear death."

  "No living things want to die," I pointed out. It was wishful thinking.

  "Grounders aren't like us," Matt said. "They don't think the way we do."

  The moon shifted into our view. Tonight, it was almost full. Well, it was the artificial moon on the dome, since the real one didn't become visible often anymore. From up here, it looked like the projection that it was, but it cast enough light for me to see that the park appeared empty. The bright spotlight blasted through the trees, casting strange shadows on the ground.

  "This isn't right," Matt said, echoing my thoughts. "It's too quiet. I expected to be shooting by now."

  We turned, scanning the rest of the forest. Nothing. I imagined how our vehicle must look, towering over the trees, to anyone who could view it. The greenhouses came into view, shining with a sickly green light. We had landed about a kilometer away from them. The crater looked like an opening into a void, with faint light reflecting off the cylinder. Beyond everything, the entrance to the park was dark. Sasha had turned off the entryway lights and probably fled.