Homicidal Aliens and Other Disappointments (19 page)

“Fine by me,” Michael says with a grin. The tension eases just a bit.

“You’ll let me know if anything changes with Zack?” I ask, even though I know she will.

“Of course,” she says, then hurries Michael away down the path.

“Can we go for a walk?” I say to Lauren when it’s just the two of us.

“I don’t really have time. I’m supposed to type up some reports, and we’re having the first meeting of New Bloods tonight. Are you even coming?”

“Of course,” I say as if I’m hurt she’d think I wouldn’t, though the truth is that I kind of forgot about the New Bloods meeting. But the air warms at least a whole degree. Okay, maybe a half. “I need to talk to you about what happened. Just a short walk?”

“Fine,” she says, “but I’ve got to be back here in this spot in half an hour.”

We walk over to the picnic area. “I’m really sorry,” I say, sitting at one of the tables. She doesn’t sit next to me. Instead she actually walks around the table and sits across from me. “I just did what I felt I had to do. You were going to stop me. I needed to get Michael. I made a decision, and I’m sorry it hurt you but I’m glad I did it.”

Okay, the
but
definitely sends the temperature falling again. I try to add another
but
to get it to rise.

“But I am sorry, I really am, for what I did to you. It was wrong.”

“I believe you,” she says.

“Good.”

“And if it was just me, I’d get over it.”

“Who else is there?” I ask. I didn’t knock out anyone else as far as I remember.

“Everyone. Everyone who is here in this camp.”

“New America?”

“That’s right. New America.”

“I think they’ll forgive me. They came to the workout. Some of them even congratulated me on getting my friend.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” she says, leaning forward.

“I guess I don’t.”

“You think about yourself first. I know you went back for Michael, but you did it because
you
wanted to. You wanted to save Michael, and you risked everything to do what you wanted. What if they’d captured you?”

“They didn’t,” I remind her.

“But what if they had and they’d gotten our position out of you?”

“I wouldn’t have told them.”

“Right. You forget I know how strong they are. People here think you’re strong, but they don’t know the aliens the way we do. The aliens are stronger. They would have forced you. Anyway, the point is you put your friend over the whole group. That’s not a leader. A leader makes the difficult choices. If that means one has to be sacrificed to save the rest, then that’s the way it has to be. You haven’t learned to be a leader. And you may have caused one innocent boy’s death.”

She wields Zack’s injury like a weapon, and maybe that’s her right, but it makes me angry. “I never said I wanted to be a leader.”

“No?” she says, raising an infuriating eyebrow. “Then tell me why you won’t make people see that there is no such thing as the Warrior Spirit.”

“I’ve told people,” I say, but I don’t sound very convincing, even to myself.

“You like it. You like them thinking you’re destined to lead them and save them. You like that they think you’re a strong fighter.”

“I am a strong fighter,” I say. I can’t help it. She’s so sure about everything, so self-righteous.

But there’s something that bothers her more than the Warrior Spirit, more, even, than my crazy rescue mission to Austin. I can feel it in her, but she still surprises me when she says, “When I said we could lead together, you looked at me like I was crazy.”

I frown. “No, I didn’t. Or if I did, it’s just because the idea surprised me. I hadn’t really thought of myself as wanting to lead New America. I told you that.”

“Right,” she says. And then the thing that she’s been holding in spills out: “You think that just because I don’t have that much telepathic power, I can’t lead. You’re wrong, you know. I’m not like Catlin or you, but I know how to lead people and you don’t. You or Catlin.”

“And what about Dylan?” I say. “Does he know how to lead, too?”

For a second she looks a little guilty. Just a second. Just a little. Then she glares at me.

“I just know we can’t trust you.”

“You really believe that?”

She doesn’t say anything. And in that silence is everything. I knew it before, I guess, but I didn’t admit it. I do now.

“You’re going to help Dylan?” I ask, because I need to hear her say it.

“He understands about leading.”

“What about SAF?”

“I’ve been rethinking that, too. I was letting my feelings for you cloud my judgment. Stay and fight sounds like you. It’s what you do well — fight. But what about everyone else? You saw us today during the training session. We can’t fight them. Not fight and win. If we can’t win, we have to change tactics.”

“You don’t know we can’t win,” I say, though I’ve thought the same thing many times.

“We both know,” she says, standing.

“So you’re going to help Dylan?”

“He’s not as bad as you make him out to be. Anyway, he can lead these people. He wants to. You don’t. You should be what you are, Jesse. Just stop pretending.”

“Right,” I say. I stop myself from saying “That goes two ways,” and later I’m glad I didn’t say it. It will seem like I did one little thing right.

“I’ve got to get going,” she says.

“Okay.”

“See you around, then,” she says.

“See me around?”

“What do you want me to say?” she says sharply.

I don’t have an answer.

She makes a little sound of contempt and strides off without looking back. I sit there in the middle of the forest and think how twisted everything has become. It was simple just a little while ago. I liked a girl. She liked me. Of course, there was the whole alien invasion, but I was, at least, sure about Lauren.

I feel tired. I feel so tired I can’t imagine walking to my tent or even into the woods. I lean forward and rest my head in my arms on the table and drift off almost immediately.

We do see each other around. In fact, we see each other at dinner that night, but we don’t sit together. She sits with Zelda. I sit with Catlin and Michael. She does come over to ask Michael to come to the meeting of New Bloods tonight.

“I hope you’re still coming,” she says to me.

I don’t answer.

“What does she mean, ‘still’?” Catlin says when Lauren walks off.

“We aren’t together anymore,” I say.

“Because of what we did?”

“Because of a lot of things.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Dude,” Michael says, “I gotta say she didn’t really seem exactly right for you. I wouldn’t have said it before, but it’s true.” With typical Michael subtlety he adds, “Not your dream girl.”

Catlin does her best to pretend that he hasn’t spoken, and I do the same.

One of the healers who works in the hospital comes up and tells Catlin that Zack is awake. Catlin’s face lights up. She says she’ll let me know how he is as soon as she can, but if he’s awake that’s huge.

Catlin starts toward the hospital.

“Are you coming?” Catlin asks the healer.

The girl shakes her head. “Go on ahead. I’m going to grab a cup of coffee.”

“Okay. I’ll see you there,” Catlin says.

But the girl doesn’t head toward the coffee. Instead she lingers at our table. I look over at Michael, wondering if he’s been talking the girl up.

“Want to sit with us?” I say.

She shakes her head.

“I heard you and Lauren broke up,” the girl says.

“News travels fast in a telepathic rebel camp,” Michael says.

The girl’s looking at me. “Is it true?” she asks.

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

She frowns. “Do you even know how amazing Catlin is? We have a healer at the hospital. A good one. And her daughter, too, who was training to be one before the invasion. Catlin can do things our healer could never consider doing. She’s totally brilliant. No one else could have brought Zack back.”

“I know she’s good,” I say, a little confused about why she’s telling me this.

“Not just good. My mother is good. I’m good. Catlin is amazing. You’d better not hurt her.”

The girl walks away and leaves me sputtering. “What was that all about?”

Michael shakes his head. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

I put down my fork. I’m not hungry anymore. “Not really.”

“I was just being nice,” he says. “You’ve never known what you’re doing.”

“Thanks.”

“Welcome. Looks like everyone but you can see the obvious.”

“Can we just talk about something else?” I say.

He says we can as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with little green aliens.

We argue about which superhero would win the decathlon if there was a Superhero Olympics. It feels like one of our old arguments. He says Superman, which I call an obvious and uninspired choice.

“Of course it’s obvious, because anyone with half a brain would go with Superman.”

“I guess you’re proof of that.”

“Who do you think then, Chosen One?”

“Thor, god of thunder.”

“He’s not a superhero.”

“Son of Odin.”

“Not a superhero. A god, I think. A
full
one.”

“Some people would call him a superhero.”

“Shut up.”

Michael and I go up to the hospital tent to see Zack. Zelda is already there. Zack is sitting up on his cot.

“I was just telling Zelda how totally awesome you and Catlin were,” Zack says. “You saved me. Then she saved me.”

Catlin smiles at him.

“He didn’t save you,” Zelda says to Zack. “He put you there in the first place.”

Zack shakes his head. “I wanted to go. I begged him. And when that alien struck me, Jesse did something. He turned his strike somehow. If it had hit me full-on, I’d be dead.”

Zelda doesn’t seem impressed.

“Catlin says I can leave tomorrow,” Zack says. “I’m going to start training with you again as soon as I can. I’ll be ready for the next fight.”

“Good,” I say. “That’s good.”

I say we’d better get going and let him rest. Catlin says she has one more patient to see. She’ll see us back at the camp. I don’t even notice Zelda is following us out until we’re outside the tent.

“I’m not going to thank you for preventing his death when you’re the reason he was there in the first place.”

“I don’t expect —”

She holds up her hand.

“Just listen to me. He worships you. He thinks you’re some kind of hero. Just don’t you ever put him in a place where he can be killed again. Don’t you ever do that.”

I want to say okay. I want to tell her that from now on, Zack will be safe. That she’ll never have to sit by his cot again and worry that he might die. But in spite of what Lauren thinks, I do know that there will be hard choices ahead.

“You know I can’t promise you that,” I say as gently as I can.

Her face gets even more angry. She walks back into the tent.

Michael and I start down the path toward our campsite. Sam and Dylan come walking up it. Better than Lauren and Dylan, I guess, but still not great.

Sam says, “You guys headed to the town meeting?”

“I guess,” I say.

Dylan’s eyes lock onto mine. “I need a word with the Chosen One first,” Dylan says. “You go on ahead.”

“Come on, Jesse’s friend,” Sam says.

“My first town meeting ever,” Michael says as they walk off. “Maybe you could guide me through it.”

“What do you want?” I say to Dylan.

“I want you to go away.”

“I want you to do a few things I doubt you’ll ever do, too.”

He pauses, as though he’s deciding whether it’s worth trying to explain himself to me. Lucky me. He seems to decide it is. “Even when I was a kid, I knew I’d do something great. I saw how my people were so careful because they were afraid. I had big plans for my clan and house. We wouldn’t have just wasted our talents like my dad’s generation and those before it, and we wouldn’t have hidden them, either. We would have used them. We would have made people understand we weren’t the freaks, the misfits; we were what humans could become. We were the future.”

“The future how?”

“I would have joined the houses. Together we would have been too strong for the untalented. We would have improved mankind, taken it to a new level.”