Connor’s grafted hand balls into a fist. That iron fist the Admiral had spoken of, perhaps. Didn’t Trace say that there were people itching for a reason to take the Graveyard out? If they couldn’t find a reason, it would be pretty easy to manufacture one.
“Where’s Trace?” Connor asks. “If something’s really going on, he would know.”
Hayden just looks at him, confused. “Trace? Why would Trace know?”
“Never mind why, he just would. I have to talk to him.”
Hayden shakes his head. “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“No one’s seen him since yesterday. I figured you sent him on some mission.”
“Damn it!” Connor punches the wall, cracking the fiberglass interior of the corporate jet. So Trace finally decided which side he’s on—and without him, they have no escape plan. No one but Trace can fly the Dreamliner.
“There’s more,” Hayden says, hesitating long enough for Connor to know that there’s yet another round of bad news. “All three homes had Unwinds—and they burned the day before the Juvey-rounders were due to take them to Harvest camp. I checked, and the kids were on our list. And all three of them were storks.”
• • •
“What the hell were you thinking?”
Connor doesn’t hide his fury as he storms into GymBo, where Starkey works out like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell you don’t!”
Around them other kids leave their equipment and slowly approach, taking menacing positions. Only now does Connor realize that Starkey has completely surrounded himself with members of the Stork Club. There’s not a single bio-raised kid there.
“How many of you were with him?” Connor demands. “How many of you are as crazy as he is?”
“Let me show you something, Connor.” Starkey saunters over to a kid sitting on a side bench, who looks both angry and scared at the same time. “I’d like you to meet Garrett Parks, the newest member of the Stork Club. We liberated him last night.”
Connor looks the kid over. He has a black eye, a swollen lip. He was pretty roughed up during his “liberation.”
“They burned down your house—you know that, don’t you?” Connor asks him.
The kid can’t look Connor in the eye. “Yeah, I know.”
“He also knows,” adds Starkey, “that his so-called parents were about to have him unwound. We saved him, and sent a message.”
“Yeah, you sent a message, all right. To the Juvies. You told them that it’s time to take every last one of us out. You didn’t save him, you’ve condemned him. You’ve condemned all of us! Do you really think they’ll stand for us burning down homes?”
Starkey crosses his arms. “Let them try to take us down. We’ve got weapons. We’ll fight them off.”
“How long do you think we can last? An hour? Two? No matter how many weapons we have, they have more, and they’ll just keep coming and coming until we’re all dead or captured.”
Finally Starkey begins to show a hint of uncertainty.
“You’re just a coward,” shouts Bam, glowering at him just as she did the day Connor fired her.
“Yeah, yeah, a coward,” the others echo.
The chorus of support gives Starkey all the justification he needs to bury any doubts beneath his own blind confidence. “I’ve been here long enough to know that you’re nothing but a babysitter. We need more than that. We need someone who’s not afraid to take this battle to the streets. I gave you every chance to leave on your own, but you wouldn’t go. You leave me no choice but to take you down.”
“Not gonna happen.”
Connor is clearly outnumbered. Starkey’s inner circle of storks advance on him—but Starkey’s not the only one with tricks up his sleeve. Suddenly Hayden and half a dozen others, who’ve been waiting outside, begin piling through the door, firing tranq pistols at every stork in their path until half of Starkey’s inner circle is unconscious on the floor of the jet, and the others drop their weapons.
Connor looks straight into Starkey’s eyes. “Cuff him.”
“With pleasure,” says Hayden, pulling Starkey’s hands behind his back and cuffing them together.
Connor has been foolish enough to trust him, and to believe that Starkey’s ambition was healthy, not blind.
“The difference between me and you, Connor,” Starkey says, still defiant, “is that—”
“—is that you’re in handcuffs and I’m not. Get him out of here.”
Hearing the gunfire of tranq pistols, dozens of kids have gathered in front of GymBo, as they haul Starkey out and down the stairs.
“Put his little mutiny team in the detention jet with two armed guards,” Connor says.
“Starkey, too?” Hayden asks.
Connor knows he can’t put Starkey in the same holding pen as his coconspirators. It would just lead to more plotting.
“No. Lock him in my jet,” Connor orders, and one of the kids holding Starkey throws him to the ground, but Connor pulls the kid back.
“No! We are not the Juvies. Treat him with dignity. Whether he deserves it or not.”
They obey, although no one helps Starkey up. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he has to wiggle and contort himself to get to his feet.
“This isn’t over!” Starkey yells.
“Yeah, that’s what they always say when it is.”
Starkey is taken away, and Connor begins damage control. He tunes in to the rumbles of conversation on the perimeter. Some kids are just wondering what the hell happened, but there are other voices. Disapproving voices. The Stork Club. He wonders how much support Starkey has. It might be a mile wide, but Connor hopes it’s only an inch deep.
“Listen to me, all of you,” Connor says, knowing he has to sell himself as their leader more than ever. “Whether you’re a stork, or a ward, or bio-raised, we have to stand united now. What we do now will decide whether we live or die. The Juvies are about to make a move. We have to work together, unless you want to end up in pieces.”
His speech meets with affirmations and a sense of solidarity until someone in the back asks, “What about Starkey?”
Then everyone waits to see what Connor will say.
“Starkey is one of us,” Connor tells them. “And I won’t let a single one of us be unwound.”
• • •
With no one to fly the Dreamliner, there is no escape plan, so Connor calls together Hayden, Ashley, and half a dozen others—some from the Holy of Whollies, and other kids he knows he can trust. They meet in the ComBom—a makeshift war room for an unlikely general—and Connor pulls plan B out of thin air.
“We set up two fronts—here, and here.” He points to a hand-drawn map of the Graveyard. “The Juvies will come in through the north gate. Once they’re in, we drive them right down the main aisle, then ambush from both sides, with about fifty of us.”
“Live ammo?” Hayden asks.
“We hit them with everything we have. Live ammo, tranqs, everything.”
“They’ll have more than us,” Ashley points out. “No matter what we do, they’ll outlast us.”
“Yes, but it’s all about buying time,” Connor tells her. “When our ammo runs low, we retreat to here—behind the fuel tanker, east of the fighter jets.”
“Won’t they corner us?” another kid asks.
“When they start to close in, we blow the tanker and run east.”
“We’ll never make it!” says Ashley.
“Here’s the thing, though. The second the fifty take on the Juvies, more than six hundred fifty will be scattering to the south.” And on the map, Connor draws a dispersal pattern of kids spreading out like a fan toward the remote southern fence. “That fence is full of holes.”
Hayden nods, getting it, and points to the main aisle. “So if the fifty do their job here and then draw the Juvies to the east, keeping them engaged and distracted, by the time they realize everyone else is on the run, they’ll never be able to catch them.”