Stan can’t tear his eyes away, but I feel like I have to, I have to see what else is going on, so I look to the sky—the drone that fired the missile is long gone, and so are its companions. Hovering in their places are several more drones, smaller than the first ones, that look like roving eyeballs with helicopter blades.
Think, Lorna! Okay. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. There has to be some sort of Wi-Fi or cell network or something going on here that the army is using. How else could these drones work, transmit images? I pull out my phone, and, lo and behold, there is a signal. I open up Twitter and hit record, and all I can do is hope this signal holds long enough for me to broadcast this. Unless this is some secret territory under some secret governance, we’re in Canada. And the soldiers have U.S. flags on their shoulders, they’re obviously American, and so are we. Someone’s watching with those drones. There’s no way off this island, or if there is, they’re there waiting for us, and we can’t hide, because they’ll find us. It’s not that big of an island. And the Iceling leader came from below the surface, but there’s no way we’ll figure out how to go down there like he did before they capture or shoot us.
So we need to run right up to the soldiers. We need to tell them we’re Americans—not for them, not because they don’t know it. But for our phones and whoever might end up seeing this.
I grab Stan and Emily and Jayson and everyone else around and tell them what to do.
“What?” someone says. “Are you kidding? That’s the plan?”
Stan stares down the girl who said it, and then another girl opens up Snapchat, and a guy opens up Periscope, and down the line they go, with Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.
And right when we rush out, phones in front of our faces to try to save our siblings’ lives like we’re all in some ridiculous ad about how my generation is selfish and ruining everything, someone nearby calls out.
“Stop firing!” He’s talking to the soldiers, not us, but we all stop anyway. “That is a fucking order!”
Something about that voice makes me stop and put my ear to the air, and I know Stan hears it too, because he’s also frozen in place and searching my face for an answer. I turn around, and then I see him.
Bobby. Bobby from the road trip, Bobby with an Iceling sister. Only he’s swapped out his fashionable clothes for a uniform and a baseball cap with E.T.R. on it, the same three initials on the helmets and under the flags of the people who are attacking us. He’s running into the middle of all this, elbowing soldiers out of the way, and Icelings too. He’s barking cease and desist orders through a bullhorn, and he’s just about the only thing we can hear over the bullets, and the drones, and the jeeps, and the flamethrowers.
“What. The. Hell,” says Stan. “So Bobby’s . . .”
“He’s with them,” I say.
The guy who bought us dinner yesterday, who kept everyone calm, who kept me calm, who claimed to have devoted his life to studying the roots of language so he could find a way to say something to his sister, who lost his brother, this guy, Bobby, if that’s even his goddamn name, is one of them. He was with us, getting us here.
“He was the shepherd,” says Stan.
“And this was the slaughter,” I say.
Bobby’s still screaming, “CEASE FIRE!” at the top of his lungs, but the soldiers don’t listen. They just keep firing on the already dead pods until they’re more bullets than bulbs and ashes, the desiccated bits just floating off into nothing.
We stop in our tracks when the guns keep firing. At no point did I think they’d just fire at or around us when we started running. We’re just kids. We’re American kids!
“What the hell were they shooting for?” says Emily, quietly, to no one. “Whatever’s in there was already dead.”
Bobby’s ditched the bullhorn and is knocking the muzzles of rifles to the ground around him and screaming, “CEASE YOUR GODDAMN FIRING!” over and over until his voice starts to give, only just barely. The guy can shout, I’ll give him that.
And that’s all I’ll give him.
The shots keep ringing out, and I can’t look away, because I need to keep my eyes on Callie, I need to make sure they’re still only shooting at the ground and not at people. I hear a scream so loud I feel it might shatter the freezing cold air before making its way to my eardrums, and then I realize the scream is coming from me, because in the middle of the field, about a dozen Icelings throw themselves down on top of the remains of the pods, where the soldiers are still shooting. And the soldiers keep shooting, and now instead of just ripping apart the pods, they’re ripping apart our brothers and sisters, and I myself feel ripped apart as I watch them get hit by bullet after bullet after bullet. I don’t see Callie, and I run out toward Bobby, and I’ll kill him if she’s dead. I swear to God, I’ll kill him. Iceling and soldier blood stains the snow and ice and all that I can see, and then a soldier hurls something at the Icelings, and then they’re gone, replaced by a burst of fire.