Drafted Page 15

  Woking Park appeared empty.

  "Matt, does this thing have scanners?"

  "I'm sure it does. That would be stupid if we were blind," Matt said, searching the few buttons on the control panel. "It wouldn't have been hard for Fiona to install something like that."

  "How are we supposed to get out of the dome?" I asked.

  "That," Matt said, "is a big issue. I'm sure Fiona thought of something. We must have ways to blow things up."

  So Matt didn't know everything about these machines. Fiona hadn't expected to send us on the first wave of this mission. She wouldn't have given Matt every single detail about how the walkers worked, even though he was curious.

  We turned again and took a few more steps. The hill that contained my house rose.

  My home was dark. It looked empty. The green light swept across the front of my house, illuminating every detail even from this distance.

  My front door lay open.

  I took a breath, my heart sinking. Mom never left the door open. She had a strict door-closed policy.

  "Matt," I said.

  "Oh," he said. "I see."

  "We have to go over there," I said.

  He faced me as if I had just mentioned that we give ourselves up to the Grounders. "We can't," he said. "We don't know who's watching. The Grounders might not have emotions, but they're not going to sit down and let us defeat them. They've been working too hard on making Earth their own. They won't want to give it to us after all this time waiting."

  "Something is wrong," I said. The whole park was empty. It was possible that Mom and Dad had left the house in a hurry and forgotten the door, but the thought didn't jive. The house wasn't damaged. We had landed in a mostly unused part of the park. We had done nothing other than put the crater on the ground. "We're walking over there and checking it out. The Grounders might have figured out that Mom and Dad were helping us. What if they got deported?"

  "They could have," Matt said. "At least if that happened, they're not dead. It doesn't look like your house got hit with a pulse cannon or anything."

  "Or they might be getting questioned about this," I said. "Do Grounders torture people?" I spiraled into a panic.

  "I don't know if they can extract peoples' memories," Matt said. "Anything could have happened."

  "What's your opinion?" I asked. I wanted to shake Matt and demand the truth, even though I knew he would give it to me.

  "Well, Grounders might be able to see peoples' memories if they dig their tentacles into their brains." He stared straight ahead as our searchlight swept over my house again.

  I felt like I died inside. "We're going over there. Do not argue."

  Matt and I had caused all of this. I had opened my mouth in front of those radicals, and now my family was paying the price.

  My partner opened his mouth to say something but closed it. It looked like I had Mom's fierceness. I would not abandon my family the way I had left Winnie. I was already a lousy Earther.

  Matt cranked the lever, and our walker barreled forward. Even with its giant steps, it didn't move fast enough. I would not think of Mom and Dad as new Grounders, with no choice but to betray us.

  Again.

  I knew I was letting fear take me for a ride, but Matt had a point. I wondered how the Grounders had figured out that Mom and Dad were involved in this. Would they get a trial?

  Would they even be Mom and Dad anymore?

  We climbed the hill to the house, which felt like nothing compared to the wall of the crater. The walker stopped, and Matt pressed down on the lever. A clicking noise followed, and the hatch with the ladder hissed. It was our cue to climb down.

  I got out of my chair. "I'll be back."

  "You shouldn't go down alone," Matt said.

  "Someone needs to stay up here where the weapons are," I said. "The Grounders could come back any second with reinforcements."

  "You have a point," Matt said. "Be quick."

  The hatch opened on its own, revealing the grass far below, and I watched as the ladder slid out of its compartment below my feet and extended into something usable. Once it contacted the ground and stopped moving, I scrambled down. The height didn't bother me. Not now. All that mattered was Mom and Dad.

  I reached the ground in seconds, panting. The front door still lay open, and the searchlight of the walker continued to swing, looking like some sinister alien beam. I pushed the thought aside and ran into the house, breaking a million rules about using my brain in that situation. I had always wondered why people did dumb things in emergencies and how they could let reason get away from them, but now I understood.

  To my left, outside the transparent dome, a green shooting star fell. It was so bright that I had to squint. My thoughts turned to the second cylinder that Fiona had sent, or maybe this one was the third or fourth. It was landing somewhere close to us as Matt had predicted. Reinforcements had come. They would take some time to back us up, but they were here.

  "Mom!" I shouted once inside. "Dad!"

  The entryway was empty. The last time I stood here, three weeks ago, Mom was telling me to remember who I was. Dad was staring at the floor. Now the Grounders might have come for them.

  All lights were off except for a soft blue glow coming from Mom's office. I drew my heat gun and crept down the hall. The creaking of the boards didn't comfort me now. The world had changed. Now they could betray me, just as my parents had.

  "Mom?" I asked, hating that I wounded scared and weak. I imagined every shadow to contain a Grounder.

  I peeked into the open door of her office. It was another place that remained closed at all times. For security reasons, Mom said. Now I knew why she had such strict rules. Earthers had to stay ready for Grounders. They hadn't helped now.

  Mom's chair stood there, empty and spun around as if she had faced someone and gotten out of it quickly. Her monitors on the walls all still worked, displaying different sections of the park. The greenhouses stood dismal and empty. The bridge over the creek had no one leaning off and looking at the turtles that sunned themselves on the rocks. The entryway was empty of staff and people lining up to take their veggies home. The chicken coops stood there, surrounded by feathers as the birds inside slept for the night. The park wasn't open, but even the security guards had vanished.

  Woking Park was dead, with no one here but two invaders and a bunch of bodies.

  I wanted to throw up. Instead, I spun Mom's chair around, hoping beyond hope that she was standing somewhere in her office. Nope. She and Dad had left. They never went out at night. Dad was too paranoid about people getting into the park.

  "They're not here."

  Matt stood in the doorway of the office. I jumped at his voice.

  "I can see that," I said.

  "I checked every room of this house," Matt said. "Your parents might have evacuated at the Enforcers' orders. They could be in the city with everyone else. I'm telling the truth about that, too."

  I thought of a Grounder sinking its tentacles into a new host's neck. I wanted to beat on the wall and scream, but I remembered my Earther pride and held back. I had screwed up enough. I wouldn't continue. Then a thought hit me. "We need to play the security footage," I said. "Mom stores it all on her tablet. I've seen it a couple of times."

  "That's a good idea," Matt said. "By the way, another cylinder has just landed a few kilometers from here. I don't know what number it was, but reinforcements are coming. Some might already be here."

  "I saw it." I couldn't believe we had already been here for twenty-four hours. I went to work opening Mom's drawers. Her contacts still lay inside one, now shattered. She believed me after all.

  I pulled open drawer after drawer until I found Mom's security tablet, the one I was not supposed to mess with, ever. For the first time, I wondered if she had any information about Grounders on it. I swiped to turn the tablet on, not shocked at all to find that it was password protected. "Um, Matt?"

  "Bummer," he said. "Your mom mentioned th
at she had some intelligence on Grounder activities on that thing when the two of us were talking."

  More news. "Did Mom tell you the password?" I asked. "You spoke to her about this stuff." It felt strange, asking Matt about my mother's business. I should know this, not him. It added another level of betrayal onto what had already happened.

  "She might have written it down somewhere," Matt said. "Let's keep looking."

  I yanked open more drawers, unlocking them with the keys Mom had left until I found a notebook with several sequences of numbers scribbled down on it with ink. Mom had buried it under a bunch of family photos. "This looks promising."

  "That's a lot of passwords," Matt said. "I'm sure that in an emergency, she'd want you to be able to open her tablet."

  It made sense, even though I was still sixteen. Of course, Mom didn't expect me to be here right now. She thought I was still on Mars, twiddling my thumbs. "You should get back out and keep watch," I said. "I'll try some of these passwords and see if one works." I knew that Mom's tablet could lock me out, like any other tablet, if I failed too many times. It would need a fingerprint after that.

  Matt left, leaving me alone in Mom's empty office. I decided to do the most logical thing and try the last password she had written on the pad, the one that was probably the most recent. I typed in the numbers and random symbols and to my amazement, the tablet unlocked. I wondered if Mom had left this for me after all, just in case, because she was usually excellent about the whole security thing.

  Or if she hadn't had time to grab her keys.

  I recognized the background on her tablet. A forest, with a bubbling spring in the foreground. It looked like a fantasy landscape, mainly because we had few places like this on Earth anymore. Mom had lots of icons on her tablet, some of them folders about geology, others about the Solar System, some about the environment (of course), and others about microbes. It took me a minute to find an icon in the upper corner shaped like a camera. I tapped on that one to open another folder, this one filled with security camera thumbnails.

  This tablet had downloaded all the security footage from the past week. My heart raced. I would see what had happened.

  I wished Matt were here to see it with me. Even though he'd tell the brutal truth about anything I saw, I wanted to have someone to share this with, good or bad. But he had to stay in the walker. Right now, we had to think like Grounders. Emotions didn't have a place here.

  I played the first security tape for today, from the camera that looked out on the forest. I had to increase the speed until I reached the part where Matt and I landed. In one frame, there was nothing, and in the next, a greenish explosion ravaged the trees and dirt rained down. I jumped at the footage of our landing. I hadn't imagined it this violent. When the dust faded, the crater came into view, huge with the glowing-hot cylinder in the center. I slowed the speed of the video long enough to see people gathering around it at first, eyeing the sight. Some uniformed Enforcers arrived with their electric batons, ordering people back from the rim. I couldn't tell which one of the specks on the screen were Mom and Dad.

  Then, after the first half hour of footage, the first Grounders showed up. The Task Force emerged from an actual van--an outlawed van--and spoke with the Enforcers for a bit.

  I changed the camera before it could play the part where Henry and the other Grounders made their first attempt to approach the cylinder.

  I switched to footage of Mom's office. It was empty at first, but at about four in the afternoon, hours and hours after Matt and I had landed, Mom ran into the room, panting. She reached under her desk, opened a locked drawer with a key, and drew out one of Dad's old pistols. She stood there, pointing at the office entrance that I couldn't see.

  I swallowed.

  My parents kept bullets after all. I had always thought that Dad collected his old guns as a hobby, nothing more.

  Mom waited by her desk, eyeing the door. I could hear her faint breathing over the tablet. It was clear that the Grounders had figured out her involvement in this attack.

  And then she tightened her grasp, face hardening.

  "You cannot detain me unless I get drafted," Mom said with authority.

  I bit my lip so hard that it bled. The taste of blood filled my mouth, but I ignored the pain.

  "The Great Council wishes to question you about this landing," a Grounder man said off-screen. He spoke with zero fear. "You and your husband are to come with us, effective immediately."

  She continued to aim at the presence that I couldn't see. "We are not going with you."

  "Earthers," the Grounder man said. "You are pests. The two of you will help us with this situation. We have just lost over a dozen members of the Task Force."

  I knew that voice. Even without emotion, it had stayed with me for the past eight years.

  It was the hooded man. The Great Council member who oversaw the destruction of Rockville. He had come for my family a second time.

  Mom's features contorted with hatred.

  She fired the gun.

  The noise made me reach up to cover my ears. I hadn't realized that guns were so loud. I dropped the tablet to my lap and moved my legs to keep it from landing on the floor. Mom fired a second time, backing away and out of the camera view. Footfalls thudded. I could no longer see the action.

  "I shouldn't have to go!" Mom shouted in one show of weakness. The sound of her dropping the gun followed. More feet trampled. Multiple Grounders detained her. High collars and gray-blue uniforms filled the screen, all scrambling against each other. Even her gun hadn't stopped them. I spotted a bloody sleeve. She had hit a Task Force member.

  But I no longer saw her.

  "You must," the hooded man said, stepping into the room without injury. He wore the same black garment as before. It flowed around him and settled around his feet as he stopped, watching the struggle. "We are convinced that you have helped to plan this attack. Our scanners have picked up evidence of you tampering with this ground before the landing. We will extract the information from you by any means necessary."

  Then the man faced the camera.

  It was him, more skeletal than before. The man's white-blond hair was thinner now, almost ghostly, and dark shadows hung under his eyes. Without so much as a smile, he reached up and shut off the camera.

  I had been holding my breath. I forced air into my lungs and sat back in the chair as I got my bearings.

  The Great Council had captured my parents. My fears were confirmed.

  The same Grounder had evicted us twice.

  They would take the information from my mother's head by any means they could.

  That could mean Grounder tentacles to the brain.

  I wedged the tablet under my left arm and ran back outside, not bothering to close the door behind me. A little shard of reason told me that I couldn't leave any evidence of my being here.

  The ladder remained down for me. The headlight had stopped moving but stayed aimed at the house. It appeared ghostly, like a mere memory. I scrambled up, the tablet under my arm, trying not to cry. It was the hardest thing I'd done.

  I couldn't give up. Mom and Dad were counting on me now. If I hadn't come back, they'd have no hope. I had failed as an Earther once. I couldn't do it again.

  I poked my head up into the walker and found Matt seated at the movement controls, peering out the window. I sat down beside him and let out a breath. I wanted him to ask me what I'd seen, what was wrong.

  But he jumped to the conclusion on his own. “The Grounders got to your parents, didn't they?”

  Another burst of rage drove through me. “You didn't have to come here!” I shouted. Now that I was here, facing Matt, my anger burst to the surface. He and the tracking capsule were the reason the Grounders had taken them away. Of course, they'd suspect Earthers of helping with any plan that involved fighting the Great Council. My grandfather had helped form the Earthers, after all. Mom was already suspect. Matt had caused her to fall off the cliff into danger. I
thought of Mom, bravely firing on the Grounders, but even that hadn't been enough. Matt had put us right back in that horrible night at Rockville.

  Matt hung his head. “I had to,” he said, looking away. “Your parents agreed to participate out of their free will. I explained to them that they didn't have to plant the capsule here if they didn't want to.”

  “Are you telling your first lie?” I asked. I didn't like how he wouldn't meet my eye.

  He hesitated. “No.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Are you sure?”

  Matt wrenched it away from me. “I'm right that they agreed to this. You know that they did.”

  “But you could have chosen another park!” I shouted so loud that my throat burned. I would feel stupid about this outburst later, but anger ruled. Adrenaline raced through my veins. “You didn't have to come to this one!”

  Matt rose from his chair. “I did!” he yelled. “We needed a park close to the Great Council. We can't march across the planet to reach them. That will give them time to stop us.”

  “There are others who will fight!” I wanted to hit Matt, even though I knew that it made no sense. The Grounders had taken my parents, but they weren't here. I needed someone to blame, someone to hate.

  Someone other than myself to blame. I led Matt here and left Winnie, after all.

  “Your mother is the daughter of Luis Volker,” Matt said. “That's why I came here. Your grandfather was the Grounders' biggest opponent. He used to coordinate attacks on their headquarters. A lot of Grounders died. I knew I could trust his daughter. Oh. Let me guess. You didn't know that, either.”

  “What?” I felt like Matt had punctured the balloon of rage in me. It deflated, only to get replaced with shock. I knew that my grandfather had been one of the founders of my party, but not that he was a huge enemy of the Grounders who killed a bunch of them. I had never met him, even though I thought about him a lot. He had died of a rare infection two months before I was born, from a virus that the doctors couldn't identify. The sickness had remained a mystery ever since.