Dead Zone Read Free Page A

too—anything she could legally go after, and sometimes not even legal stuff.
    That life seemed so far away. It didn’t even feel real anymore.
    Another silhouette appeared at three hundred yards and she knocked it back down.

THREE
    “JACK, FORGIVE ME,” WAS THE last thing he heard from her. Jack guessed Aubrey was skipping the wall, or something near it. She was surrounded by the clunk of knees against wood, the scrape of rubber on logs, the grunting of lambdas fighting through pain.
    He wished she’d take training more seriously. She had the makings of a good soldier, but she also had the makings of a court-martial. He’d known when she’d snuck out of her barracks to find him at night, and he’d made sure he was hidden from view. Not that he didn’t want to see her—he wanted to see her every minute of the day. He didn’t want her to get into trouble. If she got in trouble, then she could be pulled from their team. They wouldn’t be together.
    But maybe a court-martial would be better. Maybe he should encourage Aubrey to get thrown in lockup. He heard everything that was said at the base—he could hear and see and smell it all. And he’d heard about the attack in the North Pacific. The three carriers that had sunk. The invasion force that was making its way toward Washington State. The Tomahawk missiles that blew up midflight, for no apparent reason. The squadrons of fighter jets that had simply fallen out of the sky.
    There were plenty of theories about the Russians’ secret weapon—something that acted like an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. Weapons like that could fry every piece of electrical equipment for miles and miles.
    But it couldn’t be an EMP. Those were caused by exploding a nuke in the high atmosphere, and no one had reported a nuke. In fact, Jack heard the generals say that both sides in this war were doing everything they could to avoid nuclear strikes. The Russians wouldn’t use them freely—that would give the Americans an excuse to use their own, and then the world would be over.
    It had to be something else. Some kind of targeted EMP-like device, probably mounted on the prow of Russian ships—something to fire when they came close to the American fleet. Would they be able to use it on land, too? They must be able to—there was no way the Russians would attack the biggest superpower in the world without being supremely confident in their abilities.
    That had been the scariest thing Jack had heard: the commanders of this base were pinning a lot of hopes on the lambdas. Even though most of them weren’t much better than regular soldiers. Jack could do amazing things, but he wasn’t a weapon. He was a spy. Same with Aubrey: she was a spy who was being forced to learn the art of soldiering.
    Jack had been pulled from basic training to attend a mini air-assault school, learning to rappel from a helicopter with a group of other lambdas.
    “What do you hear?” Josi asked, as they sat at the bottom of the rappelling wall.
    Jack looked at her. She was one of the few lambdas he’d met in the Dugway testing facility who’d ended up at this training camp in Oregon. Krezi, a fifteen-year-old from Las Vegas, was another. The three of them, and a young kid named Rich, had spent a week together training.
    “What do you mean?” Jack asked with a smile.
    “Whenever you get quiet,” Josi said, “I know you’re listening to something.”
    “You eavesdrop as much as I do,” he said.
    “Ugh.” She grimaced. “Imagine if I could hear everything you did.”
    Josi took photographic memory to a new level. She remembered everything she’d ever heard—every word, every cough, every gust of wind—and everything she’d ever seen, down to every single leaf on every single tree. It was a good thing she didn’t seem to have any physical debilitations accompanying her powers, because the mental stuff was already overwhelming.
    “I know what he was listening to,” Krezi taunted.