SOMEWHERE OVER THE MOJAVE DESERT
PAP FUSELAGE
NOVEMBER 2ND
4:02 P.M.
They were plummeting. Charlie tried everything. She gunned the gas. She flipped on the autopilot. She pushed the manual override icon so hard her thumb turned purple. Nothing. The plane was responding slower than a deadbeat boyfriend. Behind her, half the gang was screaming and the other half sat eerily silent, stunned by fear, as the gold edges of the PAP plane shuddered around them, jolting from side to side.
“Taz,” she screamed. “What are we not thinking of?”
But Taz just let out a choked groan, his hands alternately clutching at his wig and then typing commands into his touch screen. “Everyone, brace for landing.”
Ohmuhgod. No no no no no.
“Do something!”
“Are you serious?”
The screams and cries from the backseat floated up to Charlie’s ears again, but she couldn’t absorb them. All she could hear was her own internal scream. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Darwin, unable to remove his seat belt, straining toward her desperately. She knew he was trying to communicate to her that everything would be okay. But would it?
In the seconds between the air and the earth, time slowed down. The best moments of Charlie’s life played before her like a 3-D movie trailer. Her mother, Bee, holding a three-year-old Charlie on a Brazille-chartered cruise ship from mainland Africa to Madagascar. Six-year-old Charlie swimming through cliffside caves in Fiji with Dingo and Darwin. Her first slice of New York pizza, at age eight, also with Darwin. Hot springs in Iceland. Snowshoeing outside of Anchorage. Everywhere, every memory, every image had Darwin flitting somewhere in the frame. Then Alpha Academy. Dancing at a beach bonfire with Allie and Skye, tinkering blissfully for hours on her latest project in the Academy’s light bulb–shaped inventor’s lab. The face of her mentor, Dr. Irina Gorbachevski, floating toward her with a helpful critique of Charlie’s latest invention. And then there was Darwin’s face again, swimming toward her, his arms embracing her…
Ka-thunk!
They were down.
She was alive.
Charlie stopped screaming and opened her eyes to peek out the windshield, but just then the plane began to ricochet back into the air.
Ka-thunk!
Down again.
Of course! Remembering the patented bounce technology she had helped to create, Charlie gritted her teeth as the plane bounced to a stop along the hard-packed earth of the Mojave Desert, her body slicked with sweat under her flight suit and her nerves more frayed than Miley Cyrus’s cutoffs. Rebound technology meant the plane was retrofitted with rubberized shocks, but never in a million years did Charlie think she’d experience the “pogo effect” she’d helped invent in anything other than a simulated crash.
Charlie’s tear-filled eyes searched the control panel in front of her, but all indicators were still dead. The control panel’s screen matched the landscape—blank, desolate, barren. In large contrast to the PAP, which was a mess. Wigs were scattered everywhere, blankets and oxygen masks had fallen from overhead compartments. It was total chaos.
Taz whispered from the copilot’s seat. “I don’t crash planes. I crash parties. I thought these things had manual backup systems.”
“So did I,” she whispered back.
Charlie just couldn’t understand it. This model was the result of fifteen years of research by Brazille Industries—it was the most technologically sophisticated aircraft on Earth! And if Charlie remembered correctly, the PAP had three backup systems in case of engine trouble. How could all three have gone bust at once? She smacked the flat of her palm onto the screen, a move she hated seeing other people try when they had a tech glitch. But even though she knew it wouldn’t work, she kept on hitting, unable to stop.
Finally, Darwin placed his hand on hers, his fingers circling her wrist. “Stop, Charlie. We’re okay. We landed. Don’t go beating a dead PAP.”
Charlie nodded a silent thanks, put her now-throbbing hand in her lap, and looked over at Taz. Seeing that he was shaken but unharmed, she twisted around to check on everyone in the backseat of the plane.
“Is everyone okay?” Charlie whisper-cried. Darwin’s hand had found her shoulder during the crash and squeezed, and now that she could see him, the tightly-coiled panic in her chest began to unspool a little.
Darwin smiled at her, his hazel eyes filled with relief. “All good back here. You’re not hurt, are you?”
Charlie wiggled her fingers and toes and did a few neck-rolls just to make sure that, unlike the PAP, all parts of her were in good working order. “I’m okay,” she sighed. “Physically okay. Mentally, the jury’s still out.”
She turned to scan the freaked-out faces of Mel, Allie, and Skye. The backseat contingent had gone from screaming to silent, as if a mute button had been activated during the crash. Skye was pale. Allie’s gaze floated forlornly past the PAP window while Mel wrapped his arms tighter around her and whispered something in her ear. They all appeared stunned and scared but physically unharmed.
“Um, guys?” Skye said, breaking the silence in the PAP. She tapped a polished fingernail on the window. “Where are we? Everything is so… beige.”
Allie pressed her nose against the window. “I think we landed in a Pottery Barn catalogue.”
Had they not just crashed in the Mojave Desert, Charlie might have laughed. Miles of cracked earth, cacti, tumbleweeds, and a few mountains with smooth plateaued tops in the distance were all she could see. Water, food, shade, and shelter, not so much. Nightfall would be their downfall if they didn’t get out of there soon.
“I’m sure Louise and Mayday will come for us,” Allie tried.
“Don’t be,” Skye huffed. “I saw them waving goodbye as we began to fall.”
Don’t start panicking, Charlie, she told herself sternly. Reflexively, she reached for the three cameo bracelets she always wore on her right wrist. Inside each cameo was a picture: one of Darwin; one of her mom, Bee; and one of her DD (dead dad—he’d died in a plane crash before she was born, and touching his picture sent a shiver down Charlie’s spine. They finally had something in common).
Channeling Alpha Academy’s resident yogini, Samsara, Charlie rested her hands on her knees and attempted some meditative breathing in a desperate attempt to achieve calm.
Slow, deep breath in, deep breath out.
Repeat.
But all breathing did was help Charlie focus on just how serious their situation was. And the more she thought about it, the louder her heart thumped out its panicked SOS.
Resolving to solve the problem methodically, Charlie pulled out her aPod. Step one was obviously to figure out exactly what their coordinates were so she could call in a backup unit. But when she tried to get a signal, her aPod screen flashed:
SIGNAL NOT AVAILABLE BEYOND ALPHA BIOSPHERE.
No problem, Charlie swallow-nodded. Every PAP came equipped with a GPS locator.
She pressed a small silver button etched into the smooth white ceiling above her head, sending an ovular, pill-shaped GPS device about the size of a soda can into her lap. But when Charlie powered it on, all that came out was static. Frantically, she began turning a dial on the side of the GPS, waiting for a signal.
“No signal?” Charlie heard Allie cry out behind her, and realized her bestie had been able to see the screen. “Does that mean we’re never getting out of here?”
The rest of the group erupted into high-pitched jabbering and arguing about what to do.
“Guys. Calm down,” Charlie said as calmly as she could. “Of course we are. There should be a way to override this…”
But every channel was the same: a cold, lonely buzz, like the howling of a black hole in deep space. A sound that signaled not just the end of their lives as Alphas, but the end of their lives, period.
Charlie’s hands fell to her sides and her heart followed suit, sinking in her chest. “This isn’t good,” she moaned, putting her head on the white A-shaped steering wheel in front of her.
The inventor in her was still diagnosing the PAP’s engine failure, but the Alpha competitor in her was devastated, certain that now that they’d lost the race, she might never get the chance. And if all systems were truly dead, it wouldn’t be long until they would be, too.
Keep calm and carry on, Charlie thought-chanted to herself. Her mom had always used this expression when things seemed dire.
“It’s all Skye’s fault!” wailed Allie.
Fear is contagious, Charlie remembered. If she acted afraid, everyone would follow suit. Her flight crew would soon turn on each other, which wouldn’t help them figure out a way out any sooner.
“No, Allie, it’s nobody’s—” Charlie tried to cut in before tensions rose, but Skye yelled over her.
“My fault?” Skye shrieked. “I wasn’t flying the plane. I was just sitting here trying not to watch you make out with your boyfriend when we started sinking—”
“You’re the one who agreed to this PAP race in the first place,” Allie hissed. “We’re lucky to be alive right now.”
“Okay, yeah, but was I the one who had this brilliant idea to sneak the boys onto the plane?” Skye yelled. “If I remember correctly, that was one hundred percent you, Al. And we probably went down because the plane was too heavy. Right Charlie?”
Mel whipped off his wig. “Stop attacking Allie!” He put a protective arm around her shoulders. “If my brother was as good a flier as he claimed—”
“Oh, shut up, pretty boy,” Taz snort-replied. “If it were up to you, we’d still be doing each other’s nails right now.”
It was so loud inside the PAP that Charlie couldn’t hear herself think. Only Darwin managed not to join in the shouting match—he shook his head in bewildered disappointment.
“SHUT! UP! EVERYONE!” Charlie yelled, projecting her voice louder than the entire cast of Glee put together.
Yelling wasn’t Charlie’s style. In fact, she never did it. It was so unlike her that it actually worked. Everyone looked at her expectantly, so she lowered her volume and continued. “We all played a part in this. We didn’t think it through carefully, because we were so eager to win. We were careless. We made our beds, and now we have to lie in them.”
“You mean die in them,” Allie said sourly.
Charlie’s shoulders slumped. The last thing she felt like doing was giving the group a pep talk. She needed to think. That was how she worked in the inventor’s lab. A bunch of fighting, squawking voices would only make her mess things up even further.
She reached behind her seat and found Darwin’s hand. She gave it a desperate squeeze, hoping to communicate all this to her intuitive-beyond-his-years boyfriend.
Darwin must have understood her unspoken SOS, because he piped up immediately, using his calm surfer Zen-ergy to cheer everyone up. “We’re hungry, tired, and we don’t know how or when we’re getting out of here. But the good news is that Charlie practically invented the PAP technology. She’ll figure out how to get a signal again, and hopefully have the PAP running in no time. The other good news is that there’s a ton of bottled water behind my seat, and at least twenty BrazilleBlast bars.”
“Thank God,” Allie sniffed, still obviously upset at Skye but willing to move on. “I’m starving.”
Darwin distributed the snacks, and everyone reluctantly stepped out of the PAP into the blindingly bright sunshine of the Mojave. Charlie stayed aboard solo, determined to get the GPS up and running as quickly as possible. While she worked, she heard Mel, Darwin, and Allie rigging up a shade structure by tying a tarp to the plane’s tailfin.
Time ticked by, and Charlie continued to work, doggedly trying everything she could think of. Finally, the door of the plane opened and her sandy-haired boyfriend stuck his head into the cockpit.
“Here. You need to drink,” Darwin smiled and passed her an A-shaped aluminum canteen with a glittery pink shoulder strap. “How’s it going?”
Charlie smiled up at him, wishing she had better news to report. She took a cautious swig from the aluminum canteen, knowing they needed to conserve water. “Thanks.” She tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth were like the PAP—down and out.
“We’ll get a signal soon.” Darwin’s face remained calm and reassuring. Charlie should have felt better, but she still wasn’t convinced. Darwin was a great musician, an awesome cook, and a skilled surfer, but he wasn’t a techie. All he had was blind faith that Charlie could fix anything. And right now, she wasn’t sure that was true.