Ted has broken the circle. He’s lumbering forward and straight into the middle of the once-trembling, now-still ice field of shriveled pods, which are so much more than shriveled pods, of course, but what they really are is just . . . unspeakable. Ted lunges violently and picks up a pod, and he hurls it up at the drones, which are hovering low now, flitting in and around as if following him. He makes contact, and one of the drones veers into the rocky hillside it was hugging, and then down and down it tumbles.
But the truly scary thing, the thing that’s more shocking and upsetting and so far beyond the word “surprise” that it’s actually almost funny, the thing that makes Ted hurling a pod and hitting this drone with such force that it crashes into a small mountain seem like just nothing at all, is that Ted is screaming, has been screaming this whole time. The sound is unlike anything I’ve ever heard, like death whistling through the leaves of a tree, but magnified a thousand times. Blood is falling from his mouth in awful streams.
One of the remaining drones rears up, but instead of aiming for Ted, it’s heading right to the Iceling leader. It hovers for a bit, but then we see its gears moving, and it releases a small rocket, which comes soaring out, its aim terrifyingly true. And this is it, I think. This is as far as we go. My name is Lorna Van Allister. I’m seventeen years old. I was born and raised in Abington, Pennsylvania. My sister’s name is Callie. I have a boy I won’t call my boyfriend named Dave, a mom named Judy, and a dad named Tom, and they probably work for the government, and this is where I’m going to die.
“LOOK OUT!” so many of us shout as we either scatter or lunge toward the Iceling ring to try to drag our siblings to safety, knowing they won’t understand but needing to scream all the same. But somebody does understand. The Iceling leader seems to hear us, which I only say because he looks at us, then at the missile hurtling toward him. It’s him they were aiming for, we can see the path of the missile clear enough as it’s hurtling death through space, and then the missile hits. It smacks his foot against the ice until it breaks, sending violent shards of broken ice and the last remaining shreds of the withered-up pods flying. The Iceling leader—definitely injured but probably not dead—dives down and disappears under the surface of the field.
Callie’s down there. My Callie. Where that missile hit. I start to run to her, but I fall back and down, and everything hurts.
TWENTY-TWO
AND THEN EVERYTHING starts to come apart.
When the missile hit, we flinched and took cover, only peeking out from the shields we created with our arms or by curling completely into ourselves when the world-shattering noise from the first missile started to quiet down. It’s good the Icelings were in a kind of horseshoe around their leader, because it’s only the specific place where he was standing that’s completely gone now. In its stead is a smoking craterlike hole. The ice is holding, but who knows for how long.
For a moment, I let myself pretend I live in a world where I get to interpret the lack of an immediate follow-up missile as a sign that the soldiers have decided to lay down their arms and acknowledge the limits of violence to solve anything. But then one of the soldiers shatters that illusion by hollering something I can’t make out from here, but by its tone and cadence I can tell it’s an order, and my stomach goes sour and drops. I can’t make out what the commanding officer said, but immediately after it's said, the troops scatter and fall back into a new line. It’s increasingly obvious that everything they’re doing is going according to a plan we’ll never be a part of, and they file back into the jeeps and start the engines.
The jeeps full of soldiers turn their noses straight for the field, for us and our brothers and sisters, and they drive as a fleet down the hill. Callie, Greta, Tara, and a whole bunch of other Icelings are running to the pods to try to shield them. I want to shout out that they’re dead, that there’s nothing they can do, but of course I can’t, for too many reasons than there’s time to explain. Besides, this isn’t my world anymore. It’s Callie’s.
The jeeps go slowly down the hill. All the Icelings who aren’t guarding pods are standing defiantly in front of the ones who are.