Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream.
Even though we were attached to the wire with carabiners, it still felt like free fall. Wind whooshed by my ears, and I ducked my head into the zippered collar of my utility suit, barely registering the scenery as it grew larger and larger beneath us. I could hear Howard’s labored breathing as he fought to keep hold of the wire between his sneaker soles. The smell of burnt rubber stung my nostrils, and I wondered what would happen if the friction burned through his sneakers entirely.
“Brace yourself!” Howard called.
I dared to look. We were about thirty feet off the ground and falling fast.
“Howard! Brake!”
“I’m trying,” he gasped. But it wasn’t enough.
We flew through the air and the ground rushed up to meet us. I was too frightened to scream. We were going to crash!
Desperately, I swung my legs up and hooked my legs around the wire, bracing myself for the stinging bite as the metal cut through the thin silver material of my suit.
A humming, metallic zing filled my ears as the suit rubbed the wires, but we slowed. A second later, we hit the ground hard, tumbling to a heap on the rocky surface at the base of the outcrop.
“Uff!” I grunted from underneath Howard. “Get up!”
“I’m getting us unhooked.”
“Up!” I moaned, and shoved at him. “We have to hide in case anyone saw us on the zip line.”
We disentangled ourselves from the wire, and Howard shoved his feet back into his sneakers. The soles were completely rubbed through in the center. I checked out the backs of the knees on my utility suit. Where the wire had rubbed against them, the silver was even brighter, and hot to the touch, but otherwise undamaged.
“Wow,” I said. “Someday, we’re going to have to find out what this stuff is made of.”
“I’ve been trying all summer,” Howard said. “I know you and your dad are fans of the battery, but I can’t wait until they start making this suit.”
I stared up at the outcrop, marveling at how far we’d come in seconds. It wasn’t flying up through the fiery depths of a rocket-ship silo, but it was still quite the ride.
Now that we were down on the ground, I felt disoriented. Which building was the one we’d seen Eric and Savannah disappear into? They all looked the same—boxy slabs of concrete overgrown with tangled green vines. I didn’t even see doors on them.
“Come on.” I urged Howard forward. “Let’s get out of here before the Shepherds find us.”
I started off, but Howard stopped me. “They went that way.” He pointed to the right-most building, and together, we headed in that direction.
Even up close, where the dull walls were visible beneath the matted ivy leaves, it looked impenetrable. Why would someone make a building with no windows and no doors? I thought about the drones that had fed the sheep. “What if the entrances are on the roof? For drones or helicopters or something?”
Howard looked up the sides. “I’m not climbing this ivy.”
Me neither. I might smell like a chimpanzee, but that was as far as it went. Still, Eric and Savannah had gone somewhere. We started circling the building, looking to see if there was a door or window we’d missed.
“Gills,” said Eric’s voice. I spun around, but saw nothing.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Howard.
“Gills!” Eric cried again. “Watch out!”
The last thing I saw as the greenery beneath my feet gave way was a pair of hands shooting up through the leaves.
I dropped through the ground in a tangle of dead leaves and dust. Twigs scratched the bare skin of my face and vines snagged on my arms and legs. I twisted and writhed, fighting against the vines and the hands reaching out of them.
“Let go!” I cried, swinging wildly at whatever had me in its grip. “Let me go!”
I fell hard onto a debris-ridden concrete floor about four feet below the surface.
“Geez, Gills, try not to knock out my fake teeth, too.” Eric pulled back, brushing bits of vine off his arms, and I realized he’d only been trying to break my fall.
I stood, shaking my head and looking through the shadows at the dusty faces of Eric and Savannah, who was sitting with her back to one of the far walls, a sheaf of paper on her lap. We were alone in a small, concrete depression in the earth. To one side was a narrow band of windows leading into the basement of the nearby building. This well must have been built to allow light into the basement. A rusty ladder led down from one of the concrete walls, and the entire surface above our head was covered with a carpet of vines.
“Gillian?” Howard crouched over the hole I’d just made in the overgrowth. “Hey. What are you all doing down there?”
“Hiding,” said Eric.
“Howard!” Savannah beckoned to him. “Get down here quick, and let’s get covered up again.”
Howard hopped down beside us, and Savannah and Eric worked to prop up the edges of the vines to make the space look undisturbed.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
“Safe,” said Savannah. “Or safer, at least. Were you guys chased, too?”
“No,” I said. “In fact, it was kind of the opposite.” Quickly, I explained what had happened up at the tower.
“So Dani was the one sending those messages?” Savannah blinked incredulously at me. “Do you think she’s the one running the show here?”
“Her,” I said, “or Anton. Maybe when Elana decided to move Guidant off the island, he moved the Shepherds in.”
“And you think Anton has the Shepherds tampering with the Capella data to make it look like an asteroid is going to hit the Earth?”
“You heard him at dinner!” I exclaimed. “All that stuff about how we need backup colonies of humans all over the solar system in case the world gets destroyed.”
“Hmm,” Savannah said. “But he also said we don’t have colonies and stuff. It’s not like he can say we’re going to get hit by an asteroid, and so we all pack up and move to Mars tomorrow.”
“Well the other option is we are going to get hit by an asteroid, and he’s hiding the data that warns us.”
We all looked up through the vines at the sky. I hoped that wasn’t the case, either.
“I want to hear more about how Dad called Mom and told her to get back here,” Eric said. “Maybe she can stop this flood of crazy that’s happening.”
“Oh, I told Gillian she was acting crazy,” said Howard. “Back when she said Elana was a Shepherd.”
“And I am on your side now,” I replied. “We caught Dani red-handed.”
“Dani,” echoed Savannah. “Elana’s assistant.”
“Believe me, she’s not a huge fan of her boss,” I said. “She jumped off a cliff when we said we’d called Elana and she was coming to get us.”
“Yeah, and she said we should run, too,” Howard added.
“Run?” Savannah asked. “From Elana?” She looked pensive.
“What?” I asked her.
“I was just thinking about how the only people Fiona was afraid of were the Shepherds. She told you to be afraid of them, too.”
“Well, I am afraid. And Dani is a Shepherd.”
“So then, what does it say that Dani is afraid of Elana?”
“It says she’s her boss,” Eric cut in. “And that the Shepherds won’t stop Elana when she comes to rescue us. Come on, Sav. Don’t encourage her.”
I looked from Savannah to Eric. “What is that supposed to mean?” I stood up and put my hands on my hips. “You all think I’m crazy?”
“No,” said Eric. “We’re here, aren’t we?” He seemed to regret those words the second they left his mouth. His face changed completely. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Of course it is.” Mom left Dad because she thought he was crazy, too. Maybe she’d think Eric and I were crazy now. “Don’t worry about what Mom will say when we see her. You can tell her this was all my idea.”
“Gills . . .”
The leaves over our head began to shake; then the ground began to rumble. We crouched, clinging to one another, as the shaking grew stronger and stronger, then faded away.
“What is that?” I asked. It was the same thing that had happened at the chimp habitat.
“The launch of phase two?” Eric suggested. “It happens every thirty minutes or so.”
“They aren’t launching anything,” said Howard. “We would have seen it from on top of the cliff.”
“We didn’t see anything, but trust me, you can feel the rumbling from the ground,” Eric said.
“Have you been chased the whole time?” I asked.
“No,” said Savannah. “But this hiding spot is better than the last one.”
“Yeah,” said Eric. “Savannah’s practically made it her office. She’s been reading.”
“I just want to know what’s going on with those chimps.”
So did I. I drew closer.
Savannah wrinkled her nose and scooted away from me. “I notice you didn’t stop to dunk your head.”
“It wasn’t like there was a bathroom up there on the cliff. Or anywhere else.”
“Tell me about it,” Sav said. “Your brother used a tree.”
I peered into the windows against the building’s wall, but the interior was too dark to see anything. “Think there are bathrooms in here?”
“It’s worth a shot. Whatever they have has got to be better than a tree.”
I ran my fingers along the window frame. “Could we kick it in?”
“Let’s try.” Eric lay down on his back with his feet across from a window. “Help me. On three.”
I lay down beside him and drew my legs back.
“One,” I said.
“Two,” he added.
“Three!” We kicked out.
The windowpane popped free from the frame, and a second later, I heard it shatter against the floor in the room below.
Eric stuck his head through the hole. “Some kind of basement. This window’s up near the ceiling, but we can lower ourselves down.”
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
“Desks.” He shrugged. “A few computer terminals. Looks abandoned, like everything else around here.”
“Well, maybe they left the water on,” I said. “Let’s check it out.” Carefully, Eric and I lowered ourselves, feet first, into the room. My feet scrabbled against the side of the wall as I reached tentatively out with my toes for a ledge or a shelf or a tabletop, but I felt nothing.
“I can’t hold on,” I said in a huff as the corner of the ledge dug into my armpits. “Eric?”
“Got it,” his voice floated up beside me. He’d lowered himself all the way down, and was hanging by his fingertips. “Just a second.” He let go of the ledge and slipped down the wall. There was a huge crash.
“Eric!” I screamed, hanging from my arms on the ledge, my feet wheeling out into darkness.
“I’m okay,” he called from below. “I just . . . flipped the table or whatever I was standing on. It’s fine. Just drop.”
I did as he said, landing hard on the floor several feet down. Something crunched and crackled beneath the soles of my feet.
The dark room smelled stale and brown, like a root cellar or an old shed. The dim light from the window wasn’t enough to illuminate anything, and got even dimmer as the shapes of Savannah and Howard blocked the window as they followed us. I stepped away from the wall to let them drop, and kicked something on the crackly ground. It skittered away from me.
Savannah and Howard crunched down behind me as I brushed debris off my pocket and reached inside for my flashlight. Time to see what was going on in here.
I flicked the switch. The beam caught the white glow of a skull, lying an inch deep in a brown, wriggling mass on the floor.
Wriggling . . .
I raised the flashlight to my brother. His feet, his legs, his entire body was crawling with—bugs.
Shiny, crackly-carapaced, six-legged beetles crawled everywhere. The floors, the walls, the tipped-over legs and broken edges of the aquarium table we’d upended, and, worst of all, the glimmering silver material of Eric’s utility suit. There must be hundreds of them. Thousands.
I dropped the flashlight and clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle my own scream. There was nothing, nothing my brother hated more than bugs. The beam of light washed weakly over the walls.
“What is it?” Eric swiped at his face and the beetles went flying. “What?”
I reached for my flashlight, and a beetle crawled over it. I grimaced as its stubby little antennae waved across the beam. The shadow of a giant bug head graced the wall.
“Um, Eric,” I said gently, kicking the flashlight to dislodge the bug. “Don’t freak out, but—”
Howard flipped on the lights, bathing the room in a wan fluorescent glow. Giant aquarium tanks lined the walls, and inside each lay fresh white bones and thousands upon thousands of brown-black beetles. Savannah and I shied away from the bugs spreading like a puddle across the floor. Eric was positively covered in them.
He looked down at his body, let out a high-pitched squeal, and started jumping up and down. “Get them off! Get them off, getthemoff, getthemoff!”
He batted at his legs and shrieked. “Gillian! Help me!”
“Hold on!” I started swiping at his clothes. “Eric, hold still!”
“I can’t! I can’t!” He danced from side to side, pumping his legs like a giant silver grasshopper, which only made him lose his footing and fall back among the beetles. He tried to turn over, smacked into bare skull, and went completely berserk as the beetles swarmed his arms.
Savannah threw back her head and laughed.
“Sav!” I hissed as I knelt among the crunching black carapaces and swatted bugs off my brother. “Not funny! He’s going to get eaten alive!”
“Nah,” she said, and kicked waves of the bugs away with her feet. “Those are dermestids.”
“Derma-what?”
“Dermestid beetles. Oh, you are so not country, Gillian.”
I paused in my frantic attempts to delouse Eric. Horseflies I knew, and carpenter ants. What was an especially backwoods bug?
Howard came forward with a broom, sweeping a clear path among the insects. He started brushing them off Eric. The broom worked way better than my hands. “They use them in taxidermy. My dad has a colony. They’re flesh eaters.”
Eric whimpered.
“Dead flesh,” Savannah clarified. “They’re super gross, but they don’t bite humans.”
Eric shot to his feet and shook out his hair. “Are there any down the back of my suit?” He shuddered. “Help me. Help me!”
I double-checked for stragglers on my brother while Howard swept the bugs back into the remains of the broken aquarium, and Savannah examined the other tanks.
“These look like more chimpanzee skeletons,” she said sadly.
“They gave the chimps to the bugs to eat?” I asked, horrified.
“They gave corpses to the bugs,” Sav said. “Dermestid beetles only eat dead things, remember? That’s what makes them so great for taxidermists trying to get skeletons. They’ll clean a skull in no time, and it’s much easier and you get way better results than trying to do it yourself, or using chemicals. All the hunters in town—even Mr. Noland—keep a tank or two in their workshop for when they clean deer carcasses for stuffing.”
“You people have these things in your basements?”
“Not me,” said Savannah. “I don’t have a basement. And Mom doesn’t hunt, anyway.”
“Museums use them, too,” Howard added. “It’s not weird or anything.”
“Um, yes it is!” insisted Eric. “It’s super weird.”
I nodded in agreement. There was no way museums used bugs to clean off specimens. And I bet Savannah wouldn’t be so calm if they’d been crawling all over her!
“Your dad keeps maps of Area fifty-one,” Savannah shot back. “At least these bugs are real.”
Eric was too scared to argue. “Can we please go now?” he begged, his eyes wide.
Sav had her hand pressed against another tank. “Look, this one was a juvenile,” she said.
I made the mistake of glancing inside. An even smaller, more childlike skeleton was nestled among the crawling beetles. “This is disgusting.”
“I wish I knew why they were doing it,” Savannah said softly. She shook her head. “Those beautiful creatures!”
“Please tell me she’s not talking about the bugs.” Eric had his back flattened to the wall farthest from the tanks. “Let’s get out of here. Come on. What are we waiting for?”
“But where is here?” I asked. “Let’s figure out a plan. We have to hide from the Shepherds until Elana and Dad come.”
“Do we know where they’re meeting us?” Savannah asked.
I looked at Howard, who stared at the floor and shrugged.
“We . . . kinda didn’t finish the conversation with them.”
Eric and Savannah turned to me.
“I . . . um, might have thrown the phone off a cliff.”
“Oh, Gills . . .” Eric let his head thump against the wall. He looked pale. “What, did they threaten to put Mom on the phone?”
“Hey!” Savannah and I cried.
“It’s true!” Eric said, indignant. “She shuts down the second Mom tries to do anything with her. She has all summer!”
“That’s hardly important now,” Savannah said. I loved her for sticking up for me, but it didn’t stop the lump in my throat.
I stared down at my hands. “It wasn’t Mom,” I said softly. “It . . . it was Dad.”
“What was Dad?” Eric leaned forward.
“He didn’t sound like himself,” I said. “He was talking about how angry he was that I’d gone off grid, and how it was okay for us to sacrifice our freedom for safety.”
“You mean he sounded like a normal person for a change?” Eric said.
“You’re right,” I snapped. “Dad’s not normal. He doesn’t think like normal people, like Mom. But that’s what I mean. He sounded different. And I didn’t like it.”
“I’d like it,” Eric said. “I actually really liked it this summer, knowing that dinner wouldn’t poison me and the house wasn’t going to burn down every night. I liked that Mom was there with clean laundry and to take me to swim practice. If Dad was like that all the time, I wouldn’t want to go to Idaho, either.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “If Dad were like that all the time, no one would be going to Idaho, because—” My jaw snapped shut.
It was so silent in the room you could almost hear the crunch of thousands of dermestid mandibles ripping apart thousands of scraps of dead meat.
If Dad were like that all the time, he and Mom would not be divorced. He’d still be at the university. We’d still be a family, and Omega City would be nothing but a myth.
I drew in a single, shaking breath. “We’ll go back to the beach,” I said with finality. “They can’t miss us there.”
Savannah took the cue. “Great. But you, Gillian, are finding a bathroom first. We need to wash that poop out of your hair.”