Flying (28 page)

I take a deep breath and nod. Seppie twitches next to me. I can't read her mind, but I don't need to. We are connected, in this together, best friends for life, which may not actually be for very long. I flip the pop-top of the can. The carbonation makes it all sizzle, threatening to foam over. Just a little jiggle and things could get messy. Instead, I take a sip. It will make me look casual, like I am just so confident that I can take a moment and hydrate.

Mom gasps. “Mana! Don't!”

The man holding her clamps his hand over her mouth. She bites it. He swears and adjusts accordingly, while blood drips down to the floor. Wow. I hope she's up to date on her hepatitis vaccinations and everything, because yuck. Contagion much?

I try to ignore all that and just talk. “If the point is to make sure the chip doesn't get into the wrong hands, it seems like it might be a good thing for me to just destroy it, right? Then nobody would be after it anymore. Everyone would stay alive. Good aliens would be able to go on acting like humans. And the bad aliens could keep on mutilating and abducting in exchange for technology, right? And humans could just keep on keeping on, all oblivious.” I take another sip. The Man in Black closest to me—the leader, the one who actually talked?—his finger twitches on his gun. I can see his shirt move when he inhales.

I meet Mom's gaze.

“But that's not really your goal, is it?” I take another sip. Coke is tasting pretty good right now, sweet good in the middle of all the bitter bad. My mom never lets me have it. She's never let me have any caffeine. I suddenly realize that was all bull. You can't be allergic to caffeine, can you? What does it do? Raise your heart rate? Maybe that's what she didn't want. Maybe raising my pulse makes me hear aliens? Or maybe being near the chip is doing that? Maybe the caffeine makes me stronger, too, more acrobatic. There are so many questions that I need answers to.

“Miss?” The closest Man in Black reaches out his hand, the hand that isn't holding the gun. “Why don't you give me that chip and I'll give you your mother?”

“Are you going to destroy it?”

He nods. “Of course.”

Seppie blinks hard, once. That's our code. It means he's lying. She's so good at reading people, but to be honest, I kind of figured this one out already.

“Send my mom over first,” I say.

“Under no circumstances,” he answers.

“Listen. I'm not an idiot. We're completely surrounded. You have guns trained on us. We're, what? Two girls? Two cheerleaders? What are we going to do? Escape with our pom-poms and bows? Dematerialize in the middle of a toe touch? Get real, okay?”

He raises an eyebrow like some sort of cool, unemotional villain in one of Lyle's graphic novels.

“Fine,” I say, tipping the Coke can. “I'll destroy it now, then.”

I tilt the can more. Someone gasps. I move my chip hand under the can, right in the path of where the soda will flow out.

“Fine,” the Man in Black with the twitchy gun finger says. He snarls a little. He turns to the one touching my mother. “Let her go.”

He lets go.

Mom scurries across the floor toward us.

I move the chip out of the way and spill a little Coke on the floor. Everyone stops. The entire gym is still.

“Oops.” I bob my head from side to side like a total ditz. “My bad.”

Seppie makes a guffaw sort of noise. Mom starts across the gym again. She moves past the Man in Black and says, “Excuse me, Jacob.”

He nods.

My head is buzzing hard and funny. It's like the whole thing is vibrating. It must be the caffeine. I am absolutely wired.

My mother gets to my side, which is exactly where a mom is supposed to be. I hug her. She's soft and strong and smells like snow. She sniffs in my hair and murmurs, “Oh, honey…”

As much as I don't want to, I pull away a little bit. “It will be okay.”

Her voice is a warning. “Mana, we cannot give them the chip. The moment you hand it over, they will kill me, and probably you and Seppie as well, but that's not what matters. My partner and I have only just determined that this chip is really a device that activates a weapon that will kill humans indiscriminately. That's what it's for. It's part of a—”

The Man in Black, the one in charge, holds out his hand, interrupting her. “The chip?”

“Everyone? All humans?” I blurt out, horrified. “Just randomly.”

“The chip,” the Man in Black insists.

This is it. The moment. This is all me, and everything that happens next will be because I decided to do what I am about to do. Nobody can catch me if I dismount poorly, if I make the wrong choice. All the responsibility is mine. So, for one more second, I glance at the metal circle in my hand. I glance at the Coke can. There's no choice. I drop the chip into the hole you drink out of and I toss the can to the lead Man in Black. “Catch.”

The moment I do it, the gym explodes with activity, but to me it's all slow motion. Men in Black are diving for the Coke. They're lifting off their heels. They leap. They lunge. Their faces are twisted with determination. Other Men in Black are aiming at us. Gunfire rocks the place in a slow rumble, a roar. Seppie screams. My poor, sick-looking mom grabs for a bow. Both of them will be too late to defend themselves.

A bullet hits Mom. She staggers back. Blood leaks through her coat.

I hold up my arms. My fingers splay out. They vibrate and buzz. I scream. It's a noise louder than a gunshot. It's a feeling bigger than a caffeine buzz. My hands agitate with some sort of power that whips across the gym like a bluish-white wind, and suddenly everyone, everything, except for my mother and Seppie and me, drops to the floor.

Bullets clatter harmlessly onto the court. The Men in Black splat down. Their faces smash into the wood. Blood comes out of some of their noses. The lights that hang from the rafters drop and shatter all around us, but somehow, miraculously, none of the glass hits us.
Nothing
hits us. There's a three-foot circle all around us and nothing gets in—no bullets, no men, no glass. Silence takes over. Just silence.

“Holy crap,” Seppie says after a couple seconds.

A basketball net loses its hold on the backboard and flutters to the ground.

“Did I…? Did I just…?” I lower my hands, shaking, and freaking scared to death of what just happened, what I just did.

Terror twists Seppie's face. The door to the gym opens up. Mom, wobbling and unstable, tries to lift the bow, but she's too weak from whatever they've been doing to her, and the bullet. I wrap her up in my arms and then think better of it and try to get to the wound, to stop the bleeding. Finding it, I use a hat to apply pressure. The blood still leaks through my fingers.

“You need to sit down,” I tell her.

“If I sit I won't get up, honey,” she says, proving she is the toughest woman ever.

Panic surges through me, but my voice is calm as I order Seppie, “We need to get the car and get her to a hospital.”

Just then China leaps into the room, with Lyle following behind him. They're both holding machine guns.
Lyle
has a
machine gun
!

Another net falls.

In a split second, China takes in the scene. He gazes across the gym at me and Mom … and smiles. “She had caffeine, didn't she?”

“Yes…” Mom nods, falters.

She really has always known—always known I was something different. And China? He knew, too. He must have always known. The secret he's been guarding has to do with me.

“The device?” he asks.

“She put it in a Coke can,” Mom says. China hauls in a breath, leans against the wall. “She was saving…”

I wrap my free arm around her just before she passes out. I catch her, the way everyone has always been catching me.

 

CHAPTER 20

Before he leaves, China and I stand outside the hospital emergency room entrance. They are already working on my mom. I pace back and forth, back and forth, but China is motionless, just observing everything. He gives me a tiny flashlight, kind of like the one that lasered through the locks. Only this one has a laser that kills.

“Just in case,” he says. “I don't want you to … It's not like you'll need it. Not now that the chip is gone, but … I can trust a cheerleader with this, right?”

“I'm not just a cheerleader. I mean, that's not what defines me.”

He smiles enough to show he has actual dimples; I haven't seen them before. This must be his real smile. “I know.”

“And where are you going?” I pocket the laser and cross my arms in front of my chest. “You're just leaving?”

“I have work to do.”

“What about my mom?”

He runs his hand through his hair, then stuffs the hand away in his back pocket, acting all casual, trying too hard. “She'd want me to continue doing what we need to do.”

“Which is?”

“Search for your dad. Catch more aliens.”

So that's it.

“Like me?”

“Not you. You're not an alien, Mana. You are human. You're a special human who can't have caffeine, but I promise you that you are human.” He reaches out his hand. I shake it and stare at him with my mouth wide open. I thought … I was sure I was an alien. I'd come to terms with it and everything. I thought that Lyle and I were both aliens, that we were the same.

I don't even know how to ask him what that means or how he knows, and he just shakes my hand like this is a normal thing to reveal. We stand there for a second and then he lets go. He reaches up and musses my hair. “I swear to you, she'll be okay.”

And then he just gets in his illegally parked Jeep and drives away. Seppie, Lyle, and I watch him from the waiting room windows outside the emergency room wing. He really just drives away into the sunset, like he's some sort of stupid hero, which he is not. He's just an attractive covert agent in a leather jacket who has dimples and an attitude. That's all.

And we stay. Well, Lyle and I stay. Seppie has to go home, eventually, but she comes back over and over again, switching shifts with Lyle to keep me company.

*   *   *

Clutching Mr. Penguinman, I let myself take one last glance at my mom, who is still unconscious in the hospital bed. The doctors say she had internal injuries that happened before she came to the gym. They had tortured her. There is evidence.

Even with the Coke, I'm not one hundred percent sure how I managed to knock all the Men (and Women) in Black to the ground, yank the bullets out of the air, and keep us safe without even moving. I've tried for hours to figure out what happened. Lyle, Seppie, and I all think it has to do with the caffeine and my heart rate. We're still not sure where the mind reading and leaping came from.

The doctors have chemically induced a coma so that Mom can heal. Tubes stick out of her arms. Monitors beep by her side. Everything smells like blood covered up by bleach, like chemicals trying to hide the truth. The entire ICU room resembles something out of Lyle's sci-fi movie collection.

Only it's real.

I tuck Mr. Penguinman in next to my mom's side. I kiss her cheek. Her skin is cold.

“I'm going to go do the right thing,” I whisper. “Lyle is going to stay with you, okay? Keep you safe.”

I straighten and walk away. My sneakers must still be wet, because they're heavy, hard to move.

Lyle has already pulled a chair up by the door and settled in. Our eyes meet. His long legs push him into a standing position by the door. His eyes linger on mine. “You sure you don't want me to come?”

“Of course I want you to come.”

“I will.”

A gulp sticks itself in my throat. The monitor beeps. I whirl around, but it's just a beep, not an alarm.

We haven't kissed again. We haven't talked about the kiss. We act like everything is the same, when everything has changed. Lyle and Seppie and I are all tied together now, more than we ever were before. It's not just what happened that ties us together, it's the knowledge of what
could
happen. The knowledge that Lyle isn't human and neither am I, exactly. We got my mom back, but his parents have vanished. Well, his mother has been taken by China somewhere, and we think his dad is on the run.

“I'll be okay,” I manage. I play-poke his chest. “Thanks for standing watch.”

He stands up out of the chair and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Mana…”

“I'm good. Don't worry.” I poke him again, trying to be all tough girl. But I'm not. Not really. “You are the best friend ever. You know that? Seriously.”

“I don't want you to go.” He yanks me in, hugging me. He smells like the spaghetti sauce he had for lunch, and beneath that is his normal minty smell. He's the best of me, I think, the good and solid best of me, and it doesn't matter if he's human or alien, or if his mom kidnapped Seppie and threatened me. What matters is that he is Lyle—beautiful, strong, sexy, geeky do-gooder Lyle. I am so terribly lucky to have him in my life.

“I'm worried about you,” he says. “I don't want anything to happen…”

He doesn't finish his sentence. He doesn't have to.

I repeat, like doing that will make it true, “I'll be okay. Don't worry.”

“Like I'm not going to worry.”

I nestle in for one second, just one second, because that's all I can spare. “Take care of her, okay?”

He inhales so deeply that my head moves with his chest and his breath and then he says, “I promise.”

*   *   *

Before I can blink, really, I am on my way to the airport.

In the taxi I pull the card out of the front pocket of my backpack. I found it there right after China left.

P
ATRICK
K
INSELLA

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