No seatbelts, no seats. No way to brace themselves for a crash landing. "Lock your elbows together! Hook your legs around each other," Starkey tells them. "We'll be one another's seatbelts."

The storks obey, huddling, locking limbs, turning themselves into a tangled colony of flesh and bone. Sitting on the floorboards, no one can see out the windows to know how close the lake is-but then Trace comes on the intercom. "About twenty seconds," he says. Then the angle of their descent changes as he pulls up the nose of the jet.

"See you on the other side," Starkey says, then realizes once more that it's something you say when you're about to die.

Starkey counts down the last twenty seconds in his head, but nothing happens. Was he counting too fast? Did Trace misjudge? If this is twenty seconds, then they're the longest of his life. Then it finally comes-a jarring jolt, followed by calm.

"Was that it?" someone says. "Is it over?"

There's another jolt, then another and another, each one coming closer together, and Starkey realizes the plane is skimming like a stone. On the fifth skim, a wing dips, acting like a rudder that pivots the plane to a diagonal, and suddenly it's the end of the world. The Dreamliner begins to flip end over end, turning cartwheels against the unforgiving surface of the lake.

Inside, the mob of kids is launched from the floorboards and pulled apart by centrifugal force, thrown in two separate cl.u.s.ters to either end of the main cabin. The hooking of arms actually saves many of them, as they're cushioned by the bodies around them, but those on the outside of the tumbling crush of kids-those acting as the cushions-become the sacrifices. Many of them are killed as they're slammed against the hard surfaces of the Dreamliner.

The cache of weapons, which had been stowed in the overhead compartments, flies free as well, as those compartments tear loose and burst open. Pistols and rifles and machine guns and grenades become ballistic, creating casualties without ever having to go off.

Wrapped in the forward twist of bodies, Starkey feels his head hit something hard, leaving a gash on his forehead, but that's nothing compared to the exploding pain in his battered hand.

Finally the tumbling jet comes to rest. The cries and wails sound like silence compared to the noise of the crash. Then somewhere toward the back of the cabin there's an explosion: a grenade that lost its pin. It blows a hole in the side of the jet, and water begins to pour in. That's when the electrical system fails, and they're plunged into darkness.

"Over here!" Bam calls. She pulls a huge lever and opens the cabin's front port-side door. A life raft automatically inflates and detaches, then drops to the water, and with a "Sayonara," Bam leaps right out after it.

Starkey's instinct is to get out now . . . but if he's going to be seen as the protector of the storks, then he must be their protector in action, not just words. He waits, shooing kids out the door, making it clear he is not the first one out-but neither does he plan on being the last.

Farther back in the foundering jet, kids pull open wing exits and a midship hatch-but only on the left side. On the right, a slick of jet fuel has ignited in the water and burns beyond the windows.

"The weapons!" Starkey shouts. "Take the weapons! We still have to defend ourselves!" And so kids pick up any and all weapons they can find, throwing them out onto the rafts before jumping out themselves.

The fire outside provides enough light for Starkey to see to the far recesses of the main cabin, and he wishes he hadn't looked. The dead are everywhere. Blood is smeared on every surface, sticky and thick. But there are more living than dead, and more kids running than crawling. Starkey determines right then and there to save only those who can make it out on their own. The critically injured are just liabilities.

The angle of the floor has quickly changed as the jet begins to sink tail-first. The rear cabin is already flooded, and the water level rises in a steady, relentless surge past the central bulkhead. Then Starkey hears a m.u.f.fled voice from the front of the jet.

"I need help here!"

Starkey makes his way to the c.o.c.kpit door and pulls it open. The windshield is shattered, and the entire c.o.c.kpit is a mess of smashed gauges, open panels, and exposed wires. The pilot's chair has jammed forward, and Trace is pinned.

Which leaves Starkey in an interesting position.

"Starkey!" says Trace, relieved. "I need you to pull me out of here. I can't do it by myself."

"Yes, that's a problem," Starkey says. But is it his problem? They needed Trace to get them this far, but they don't need a pilot anymore-and didn't Trace already threaten to kill him? If Trace survives, from this moment on he'll be nothing but a threat-and a dangerous one, at that.

"I never had the guts to try the great water escape," says Starkey. "It killed Houdini, but I'm sure it'll be easy for a big boeuf like you." Then he backs out of the c.o.c.kpit and closes the door.

"Starkey!" Trace yells. "Starkey, you son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

But Starkey's decision is final, and as he returns to the main hatch, Trace's m.u.f.fled voice is drowned out by the sounds of panicking storks. There are about a dozen kids left-the slow ones, the injured ones, the ones afraid to jump because they can't swim.

"What's that awful smell?" one of them whines. "What is that out there?"

He's right-there's a stench to this lake like a fish tank left to putrify, but it's the least of their problems. Water's already pooling at their feet, and the floor is at a thirty-degree tilt.

Starkey pushes past the lingering kids. "Jump or drown, you've got no other choice, and I'm not waiting for stragglers." Then he hurls himself out the door and into the foul-smelling brine of the Salton Sea.

78 * Trace

Trace's calls for help go unanswered, and in furious frustration he pounds the console and bucks in the chair, but it doesn't give. He's so tightly wedged in by the accordioned c.o.c.kpit, not even a boeuf of his strength can get out. He forces himself to calm down and review his options. All he can hear now are the diminishing moans and wails of kids too injured to escape, and of course the relentless rush of water. That's when he realizes there are no options left to him anymore. Starkey made certain of that.

The lake begins to pour in through the broken c.o.c.kpit window so quickly there's no time to prepare himself. Trace cranes his neck, trying to keep his head above water as long as he can. Then he takes one deep gulp of air, holds it, and he's underwater. Suddenly there's silence all around him except for the metallic complaints of the sinking jet.

His body burns through the last of its oxygen; then, resigned to his fate, Trace releases his final breath. It bubbles away from him in the darkness, and his body gets to the business of drowning. It's as awful as he ever imagined it might be, but he knows it won't last long. Five seconds. Ten. Then the injustice of it all doesn't seem to matter anymore. As the last of his consciousness filters away, Trace holds on to the hope that his choice to fight on the side of the AWOLs instead of the Juvenile Authority will be enough to pay his pa.s.sage to a truly better place.

79 * Starkey

The water tastes like rubber and rot and is neither warm nor cold, but tepid, like tea left to steep an hour too long. The last of the plane disappears beneath the surface, leaving nothing but white water bubbling up through the brine and the fuel slick, which has almost burned itself out. Starkey looks around to see kids in the water, kids on rafts, and kids who've drifted too far away to see at all, calling out for help.

There's a deserted sh.o.r.e just a few hundred yards way. Trace, rest his soul, knew enough to bring them down near the unpopulated side of the huge lake. Even so, people will have seen the crash and will come to investigate. They have to get away from the scene as quickly as possible-the attention of the locals is the last thing they need.

"This way!" Starkey tells them, and starts swimming, pulling himself forward with his good hand. The kids in rafts paddle, the kids in the water swim, and in a few minutes they're pulling themselves out of the fetid water onto a spongy sh.o.r.e of pulverized fish bones.

Starkey sets Bam to do a head count, and she comes back with 128. They lost forty-one in the crash. Around him the survivors try to tally exactly who is missing, which just makes Starkey angry. Sitting here will do nothing but get them captured. He knows he's cunning enough to make it on his own; somehow he's got to extend his survival smarts to all of them.

"Everybody up! We can't waste our time licking our wounds and mourning the dead. We've got to get out of here."

"Where do you suggest we go?" asks Bam.

"Right now, anywhere but here."

Starkey knows he needs to give these kids direction and purpose. Now that they're free from the holding pen of the Graveyard, their priorities need to change. Connor might have been happy to just keep kids alive, but Starkey has to make this about more than just survival. Under his leadership, his storks can be a force to be reckoned with.

He goes to the nearest kids nursing their exhaustion and lifts them to their feet by their collars. "Let's move! We'll rest when we're safe."

"When will we ever be safe?" someone asks. Starkey doesn't answer, because he knows they'll probably never be. But that's all right. They've been complacent for too long. Being on the edge will keep them sharp and focused.

As the storks all gather their strength for an uncertain journey on foot, Starkey searches through them until he finds Jeevan, relieved that he's one of the survivors.

"Jeeves, we'll need the same type of setup you had in the ComBom, but mobile. I need you to be our eyes and ears and gather all the intelligence you can from the Juvenile Authority."

Jeevan just shakes his head in panicked disbelief. "That was all high-end military software. We don't have it anymore. We don't even have a computer!"

"We'll commandeer as many computers as you need," Starkey tells him. "And you'll make it work."

Jeevan nods nervously. "Yes, sir."

Even before they leave the sh.o.r.e, Starkey's grand plan begins to take shape. He will step up the campaign of vengeance he began in Tucson-only this time it won't just be a handful of avenging storks, it will be all of them: a guerrilla army 128 strong, heaping punishment on anyone who would unwind a stork. Their numbers will grow with every stork they rescue. He doesn't doubt that in time they could take down entire harvest camps. And then the Akron AWOL will be nothing but a sorry footnote beneath his own legacy.

Drawing strength from his powerful vision, Starkey leads them into the mountains east of the Salton Sea. His first trick will be to make them all disappear, but that's only the beginning. From this moment on, there will be no end to the magic.

80 * Miracolina

Miracolina's head is spinning as she awakes. That's how she knows she's been tranq'd. This is the fourth time she's been tranq'd-she knows the drill by now. Memories of the events leading up to it come back, but slowly and not in order. She suppresses the nausea and sets to the task of determining her current circ.u.mstances and defragging her mind.

She's moving. She's in a vehicle. She was traveling with Lev. Is she in the back of a pickup? No. Is she in the baggage compartment of a bus? No.

It's night. She's in the backseat of a car. Is Lev with her? No.

They weren't in a vehicle at the end, were they? They were walking. By a fence. Toward an old air force base. Is there more? There must be, but try as she might, she can't remember anything after walking toward the gate.

Although she knows it will makes her feel as if her brain wants to escape through her ears, she sits up. There's a thick gla.s.s barrier between her and the front seat. A police car? Yes-two Juvey-cops are in the front seat. This should be good news for her. It means that she's finally surfaced out of the underworld that Lev has dragged her through. It doesn't feel good at all, though, and it's more than just the tranqs. That she's in a squad car doesn't bode well for Lev, and she can no longer deny that she cares about what happens to him in spite of herself.

The Juvey-cop at the wheel glances in his rearview mirror, catching her gaze. "Well, look who's awake," he says pleasantly.

"Can you tell me what happened?" The sound of her own voice makes her head pound.

"Police action at the aircraft salvage yard," he says. "But you already know that, don't you?"

"No. I was tranq'd outside the gate." And then she adds, "I was out for a walk," which is a stupid thing to say, considering how isolated that road is.

"We know who you are, Miracolina," the cop riding shotgun says. The news makes her have to lie back down on the sticky leather of the backseat, but she leans the wrong way and ends up slumped against the door.

"He told you?" she asks. She can't imagine Lev voluntarily giving her name to the Juvies.

"No one told us," he says, and holds up a small electronic device. "DNA tester. Standard issue for Juvey-cops since Happy Jack."

"I'd like to know what 'he' she's talking about," says the cop driving.

Well, if they don't know, she's not going to tell them. If Lev hasn't been caught, then he wasn't with her when she was. But would he just leave her? Lev is such a mixed bag of contradicting ethics, she can't be sure. But no-that's a lie-the kind of lie she used to tell herself just to demonize him. Deep down she knows he wouldn't leave her voluntarily. If he did, he had no choice. Still, there's no telling whether he's free or has been captured.

"What I want to know," asks the cop riding shotgun, "is how you wound up outside the gate and not inside like the rest of them."

Miracolina decides to tell them an edited version of the truth, since they're not going to believe it anyway. "I escaped from a parts pirate with a friend," she tells them. "We were looking for a place of safety."

The two cops look to each other. "So you had no idea that the airplane graveyard was an AWOL stronghold."

"We were just told to go there-that we would be safe from the parts pirates."

"Who told you?"

"Some guy," she says, which sounds like something any kid would say, and effectively throws a wet rag over the question.

"How did you get tranq'd?"

When she doesn't answer, the driver looks at his partner and says, "Prolly a trigger-happy rookie." His partner just shrugs.

"Well, you're here, and you're safe. Was your friend a t.i.the too?"

Miracolina has to suppress a smile. "Yes," she says, "he was." She's pleased she can lie to them in complete honesty, because after all it is the best policy.

"Well, no t.i.thes turned themselves in," Shotgun says. "Perhaps he got hauled off with the rest."

"The rest?"

"Like we said, police action. Rounded up a huge nest of AWOLs. A few hundred at least."

Again, something that once would have been good news for Miracolina-justice prevailing, order restored-now brings her nothing but melancholy.

"Any bigwigs brought in?" she asks, knowing that if Lev or his friend, the Akron AWOL, were caught, it would be big news-they'd all know.

"No such thing as a bigwig AWOL, sweetie. They're all nonent.i.ties. Otherwise they wouldn't be where they are."

Again she sighs in relief, and the cops a.s.sume her sigh is exhaustion from the tranquilizers. "Lie back down, honey. You've got nothing to worry about. The parts pirates can't get you now." But she stays upright, not wanting to slip into a post-tranq stupor. There's something off about the way they're treating her. After all, she is an Unwind with a questionable story-and even though she's a t.i.the, she's never known Juvies to be so nice to kids about to be unwound. As they said, they see Unwinds as nonent.i.ties. You don't call nonent.i.ties "honey" and "sweetie."

As they pull into the local Juvey headquarters, she begins to wonder what the process is now. "I was supposed to go to Wood Hollow Harvest Camp," she tells them. "Will I still go there, or to a camp in Arizona?"

"Neither," the driver says.

"Excuse me?"

He parks the car and turns to her. "From what I understand, your parents never actually signed the unwind order."

That leaves Miracolina speechless.

They never signed it. Now she remembers them telling her that as she stood at the door-but she told them it was her choice to go, and she got into the van anyway.