AT LEAST WE DIDN’T HAVE TO GO BACK INSIDE THE PODS. I MEAN, IT didn’t feel better at the moment, sardined inside the trunk of Dani’s car with my mother, Eric, Savannah, and Howard, but I tried to look on the bright side: I was conscious, and I wasn’t trapped in the dark alone.
“Does anyone want to sing a song?” Eric asked from near my elbow. “Play a game? I Spy?”
“Shut up, Eric,” said Savannah from somewhere near my knee.
“I spy with my little eye, something black.”
“What shape is it?” Howard asked. He was up behind Eric somewhere.
“Has to be a yes or no question,” Eric said.
“Um . . . is it round?”
“I can’t tell,” Eric said, cracking himself up. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Shut up!” Savannah and I shouted.
“Girls!” scolded Mom, down near the taillights.
No one would hear us, with the possible exception of Dani herself.
“Sorry,” Eric said, though he didn’t sound it. “I was just trying to find a way to pass the time that didn’t involve wondering who it was that farted.”
“Eww!” said Savannah. “It was probably you.”
“Probably,” admitted Eric. “So, want to play Punch Buggy?”
“I’m going to punch you,” I said. I wiggled my arm so he could see I was capable of it. Well, not see, but tell.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “We can lie here in silence all the way to Omega City.”
I’d planned to spend the trip going over Dani’s plan in my head, repeating it so I knew where we were, even from inside the trunk, and could figure out if things were proceeding the way they should or if this, too, was going to turn into a massive mess.
Once you’re all loaded in the car, it should take about ten minutes for us to drive to the edge of the resident portion of the Eureka Cove campus.
We had to have been in the car for more than ten minutes by now, right? I’d lost count somewhere around two hundred fifty Mississippi. Didn’t she have to stop at the security gate and talk to a guard? Maybe not, given that she was a Shepherd.
From there, we’ll head straight to the helipad. If we time it right, it should be between guard shifts. With any luck, my executive-level clearance should help me bypass the necessary authorizations for both the release of the helicopter and the logging of our flight plan.
This was the part I was most nervous about. I didn’t think anyone would bother Dani if she was just driving in a car through Guidant. But Dani taking off in a helicopter for points unknown? People noticed helicopters. Still, she assured us it was the quickest way to Omega City.
And we were definitely under a time crunch. We only had twenty hours before the Shepherd shuttle reached Infinity Base. We had to get to Omega City, get inside, and find a way to contact Dr. Underberg before he fell for the Shepherds’ trap.
“That’s weird,” said Savannah a minute later.
“What?” I asked, wriggling a bit to look in her general direction.
“Ow, Gills. Your elbows,” said Eric.
“Nothing,” said Sav. “I just keep playing with the hexaflexagon, and I thought for a second I felt another side. But it’s gone now.”
“How can you tell in the dark?”
“Well, the shiny omega side is smooth, right? And the brushed side is ridged. And the hidden side, with the Shepherd symbol, is all dirty and stuff, so it feels gritty.”
“Let me feel.” I reached down.
“Gills!” said Eric. “Elbows!”
I’d show him elbows.
Savannah carefully handed me the tiny zipper pull, and I did that squeeze-and-fold movement I’d seen her do to turn the hexaflexagon inside out, over and over. Smooth, ridged, gritty. Smooth ridged, gritty. Smooth, ridged, bumpy . . . wait. Bumpy?
“Whoa!” I said, running my fingers over the pebbly surface. “You’re right.”
“Dani said sometimes they had more sides,” Howard pointed out.
“What is it?” Eric said, crowding up on me.
“It’s another side.”
He jostled me again, and the zipper pull went flying out of my fingers.
“Eric!” I felt around on the carpeted floor of the trunk. “Where is it?”
“Did you lose it?” Savannah asked.
“It was Eric’s fault.”
“Was not!”
“Eric, Gillian,” Mom warned.
I kept patting the carpet, expecting to feel the edges of the metal.
“Let me look,” said Howard. “I have my flashlight.” He shifted to pull it out of his cargo pocket and kneed Eric, whose head knocked into mine. Hard.
“Ow!” we cried.
There was another large bump, then a shuddering around us, as if we were coming to a halt. Everyone went very still, and very, very quiet.
“Hello, Miss Alcestis,” said a voice, muffled, by the pass-through into the car. “Did you schedule the helicopter this afternoon? I don’t have anything on the log.”
“Oh, that’s funny.” Dani’s voice. “Should be on there. Can you get it ready for departure?”
“Sure. Go ahead and park and I’ll get her set up for you.”
The car moved again, slowly and with loud scraping sounds, as if driving over gravel.
“The guard will complicate matters,” she said. “I need you all to stay perfectly still until I get you, and then you need to move as fast as possible onto the helicopter.”
“Got it,” said Howard, and his flashlight flicked on. I bit my lip. Wasn’t he even listening?
Mom covered the light with her hand. “Not now, Howard,” she whispered.
More silence. More waiting. I turned up the cooling setting on my suit as the air in the trunk became stuffy. We heard the guard return, and he and Dani had a short discussion about the helicopter. Her door opened and she got out. More silence. More waiting.
Then the trunk door opened and we all squinted into the bright light. Dani stood over us, her face set in stern lines.
“Now.”
We all scrambled to sit up and scoot out of the trunk. My muscles ached from being cramped up so long, but I ignored them and followed my mom and Howard out of the car. Eric followed but Savannah was still inside, kneeling on the floor and feeling around for her zipper pull.
“Savannah, now,” Mom said.
“Coming!” She ran her fingers across the fibers.
“No, now.” Mom grabbed her arm and tugged.
Savannah leaned over and plucked something off the carpet. “Got it.”
I turned around, trying to get my bearings. We were standing on a small gravel lot near a low building. Nearby was a large asphalt pad with a helicopter sitting in the center like a great glass dragonfly. And near the door of the building lay the guard in a crumpled heap.
Mom turned to Dani, her eyes wide with terror. “What did you do to him?”
Dani shrugged and started toward the helicopter, herding us along. “I tranqued him.”
“What?” Mom shrieked.
“There was no other way.” She pulled open the glass door of the helicopter and ushered us aboard.
“You said you wouldn’t do that anymore!” Mom insisted. The four kids all crowded into the back of the helicopter, while Mom sat down in the copilot seat, still glaring hard at Dani.
Dani climbed inside and shut the door. “Dr. Seagret, as you are so fond of pointing out, I’m a Shepherd. We lie.”
Mom just folded her arms and glared. I looked at the guard through the plexiglass sides of the helicopter, trying desperately to feel any of Mom’s outrage. But the guard had been a Shepherd. Maybe even one of the Shepherds that had attacked Mom and Nate the other day.
Besides, what other option did we have? It was us or Them.
I wondered if the Shepherds felt the same way. When Dad wrote his book on Underberg and got close to exposing the Shepherds’ past and they’d retaliated by destroying his career and our family, it was us or Them, too. Dani said we all learned right from wrong, we just learned different rights and different wrongs, and the further it went, the more it seemed as if their rights were the complete opposite of ours, until everything, even our lives, came to be about us or Them. Until I could look at a man lying in the road and think it was okay because it meant we escaped detection.
Which I guess made me not so very different from the Shepherds.
Dani reached up to a little hook in the roof of the copter and pulled down a headset with big half-sphere earphones the size of softballs and turned to us. “Shoulder harnesses on and locked in, guys. Over each of your seats, you’ll find a headset. You’ll need these during flight, not just so you can hear each other, but also to protect your ears from the sound of the machinery. Put them on, and lower the attached boom mic so you can speak into them.”
We did as we were told. The headsets were thick and heavy, and attached to the helicopter via power cable. They must have come equipped with some sort of noise-canceling technology, for when I put them on, not only did everything go quiet and muffled, but there was a distinct, tinny not-sound in my ears, like a television set to an empty channel.
“Is everyone ready?” Dani’s voice buzzed in my ear.
“I suppose this is the wrong time to ask how much experience you have flying a helicopter?” Mom’s voice was dry as she questioned Dani.
“Yes,” replied Dani, as I felt rather than heard the whoop-whoop of the blades beginning to spin above my head. “It is.”
As we lifted from the ground, my stomach seemed to sink into my lap. This was nothing like flying in a plane. The plexiglass sides made it seem like we were just floating up here, despite the rhythmic roar of the blades. I leaned over to look as the ground receded beneath us. Already the security guard looked more like a squashed bug on the lawn than a person.
“Ahem. Sit straight back there, unless you want us to tip,” Dani’s voice barked in my ear.
I shot back against the seat. Tip? “You’re kidding, right?” I breathed into the microphone.
“No,” Dani said. “Now stop talking. This is harder than it looks.”
Savannah grabbed my hand and squeezed as we rose into the sky.
AFTER A WHILE, Dani seemed to relax. Maybe it was when we reached a cruising altitude, or we got well past the confines of Eureka Cove. Below us, the ground spread out like a bumpy green carpet. Without shifting too much in my seat, I was mesmerized by the sight of the Earth below us. We were flying steadily west as the afternoon sun shone brightly into the cabin.
“Twelve times,” Dani said, breaking a fifteen-minute silence. “I’ve flown a helicopter twelve times.”
“Cool.” Eric’s voice broke through on the headset. “We’ve ridden in one once. Now.”
Dani chuckled. “Every Shepherd is required to get training in multiple types of aircraft. I have certifications in small craft, jets, rotorcraft, paraplanes, and lighter-than-air . . .”
“What’s lighter-than-air?” Howard asked.
“Dirigibles. You know, blimps.”
“Why do you do that?” I asked. “You won’t need blimps in outer space.”
“No, but the training is important, and different skill sets build on one another. For instance, I know much more about moving around in zero gravity because of all my pilot training.”
“How many times have you been to outer space?” Howard asked.
“Not twelve,” Dani said. “I don’t share the fondness for it that Anton does. Or Dr. Underberg, for that matter. But we all have our strengths. My gift is computers. I’ve also done a lot of advanced physical training as well—martial arts, meditation, endurance—pushing the human body to its limits and beyond.”
I remembered her wild cliff dive back on the island.
“So how do you become a Shepherd?” Howard asked. “I mean, what if you wanted to join?”
“Howard!” I cried.
“I mean, what if they didn’t hate us or whatever. Or got over it?” Howard looked at me, as if confused by my reaction. “Or something?”
“You’d join the Shepherds just to go into outer space?” Savannah asked in disbelief.
“You bet I would,” he replied.
Dani laughed again. “Well, I guess that would depend on the person,” she said as we flew on and the sky began to darken around us. “I was born a Shepherd. There was really no other option for me. My mother was recruited because she wasn’t getting to do the kind of work she wanted at NASA. And Dr. Underberg was the same. He thought the government was wasting time fighting wars when we could focus instead on human progress that would make the very reasons for those wars—fights over land or resources—obsolete. Think about it: If every human being had a new planet to live on, or endless energy, or all the wealth of a solar system, who would we fight? And why?”
There were times when Dani sounded almost normal. When all the Shepherds did. When they talked about the vast potential of humanity, and the glorious future that awaited us if we all worked together for our own good. Then they killed bees and kidnapped people’s fathers and pretended that asteroids were going to destroy the Earth to hide the fact that they’d built a secret space station, and you remembered how bonkers it all was.
Howard slumped. “So I’d have to become a famous scientist first?”
“You won’t want to be a Shepherd, Howard,” I said, balling my hands into fists. “Especially not after I’m done with them.”
“They aren’t so bad,” Dani said. “I know it doesn’t seem that way right now . . .”
“Right now, when we’re running for our lives?” said Mom. “No, it doesn’t.”
Dani kept speaking over her. “But it was an amazing way to grow up. Shepherds take children seriously, you know. That wasn’t an act, this weekend at Eureka Cove. They really are very impressed with the children and the fortitude and imagination they displayed in Omega City. If things had gone differently, maybe you would all be Shepherds right now, and none of this would have been necessary.”
“When would things have had to start going differently?” Mom asked. “Back before you ruined my husband’s career? Because I’ll tell you right now, that was the last possible moment that he would have even considered working with you people.”
“Yeah!” I exclaimed. “Go, Mom!”
Mom actually turned around in her seat to smirk at me. Eric looked shocked.
“If there were no Shepherds,” Dani pointed out, “there would have been no Omega City.”
“If there were no Shepherds,” I said, “then maybe you would have grown up knowing your father.”
“Or maybe I never would have been born,” she snapped back.
There was a long silence, and the sound of the engine and the chop-chop-chop of the helicopter blades did little to fill it.
“I know that you made a huge sacrifice for us today,” Mom said, “and no matter our disagreements, we’re more grateful than we can possibly express, aren’t we, kids?”
“Yes,” we all said. I added under my breath, “But I still wouldn’t want to be a Shepherd.”
“Oh, I would!” Howard said. I was mortified—did everyone hear me? Stupid mic! “They send you to space, they teach you how to fly a helicopter. Eric, you should have seen Dani dive off that cliff. It was so cool!”
“You dove off a cliff?” Mom asked her.
“Thanks for sticking up for me, Howard,” Dani said. “Gillian, I understand your perspective. If I were you, I would feel the same way. Actually, I do feel the same way. That’s what I’m doing here.”
I thought about Dani’s home. The pictures on the walls and in the photo albums. Her mother was dead. She’d never met her dad. She no longer believed in the cause she was raised to serve. My father was right now in a spaceship somewhere far above my head, too, but I knew him and loved him. Mom and Eric were a few feet away, as well as my two best friends in the whole wide world. I had everyone. Who did Dani have?
“Sorry,” I said.
Dani’s back was very straight in the front seat as she flew on. “Thanks.”
The sun was low in the sky now, shining directly at us. Howard zipped up the hood and visor on his utility suit, and after squinting into the glare for a bit, the rest of us did the same. We must have made quite a sight—six silver-encased creatures in a big glass bubble. If anyone on the ground caught a picture, we could be the subject of one of my father’s alien classes.
I wondered if Dad would be teaching classes ever again. My eyes began to sting.
Even if we managed to open up a channel of communication with Dr. Underberg in Omega City, there was no guarantee he’d be able to save my father and Nate. Dani believed that if we could really talk to him—have a conversation, and not just a few stilted, coded messages—we’d be able to convince him to negotiate with Elana for the safe return of Dad and Nate. It would, however, require him to compromise his principles when it came to the Shepherds and their lies. Every time I considered that, there was a small, hard place inside me that screamed Never! I knew that place was inside Dr. Underberg, too.
And for him, I feared it was the only thing that mattered.