“Duck!”

I instinctively ducked my head just in time for an apple to go whizzing over it. A long-fingered hand caught it directly behind me.

“That’s not a duck, it’s a robin,” Abe quipped as he took a bite of the apple.

Ant came strolling up to the dining hall table. “Sorry, Robin,” he said, grinning. “Your head wasn’t there just a second ago.”

Jackie rolled her eyes. “You guys are going to knock all of her flight-school training out of her,” she said, elbowing me in the side playfully.

I smiled and sat at the table with my plate. Our usual gaggle of Team Hood members were all seated and enjoying another Edgewood-worthy morning spread. It had been a couple of days since we started flight training, and this was the first morning that Rio and Alexy hadn’t woken me up before five in the morning. Instead, I managed to sleep in peacefully and was now about to enjoy my first full breakfast since training had started.

“How is it going, anyway?” Nelson asked with keen interest. She had her usual minimalist breakfast of black coffee and buttered toast in front of her.

I shrugged. “I mean, I’m no Jace,” I answered, only half-joking.

Jace blushed and smiled good-naturedly. He obviously wasn’t used to the constant praise that had been lavished on him since training had started. But it was true; he was an amazing pilot. While I had definitely made progress and felt more comfortable behind the controls, Jace was practically a stunt pilot already. He was turning barrel rolls in the sky by our second day of training. And when I was still practicing landing on uneven surfaces on day three, Jace basically could’ve landed on the edge of a cliff in a tsunami. It was taking a heavy dose of humility not to feel like a continuous second-place contestant in some grand Edgewood flight competition.

“How did that happen again?” Gabby asked.

“Yeah, we were all under the impression that you guys rode buffalo to get around,” Abe said with a friendly smirk.

Jace chuckled. “It’s just a light hand and a good sense of direction. Not that different from riding a bike,” he demurred.

“That’s not what I heard,” Zion said as he approached the table. “I heard the flight teams were so impressed that they offered you a pilot spot.”

I looked over at Jace. I hadn’t heard about that.

“I already have a team,” Jace said humbly. Then he took a bite out of a crisp piece of toast and turned back to his plate, making it obvious that he didn’t want to continue the conversation.

I didn’t blame him. We had basically only talked about airships for the past few days. I was even beginning to dream that I was flying. We were both happy to be with our friends and out of the hangar for once.

The training period had been stressful for multiple reasons, not just the fast pace of the training itself. For one, Nathan hadn’t yet been forthcoming with any additional details. Jace and I knew that we were training on Nathan’s orders, but not what Nathan’s orders regarded. I was starting to feel like we were training for some sort of mission that would never come.

But we weren’t the only ones being kept busy. Nelson and Gabby had been assigned the task of sorting through the archive info, sorting folders by name and year. According to Nelson, it was tedious and monotonous work. But it made her feel like we were moving closer to something too, even if neither of us knew what that was.

Zion smiled approvingly at Jace and then walked back toward his usual table. We hadn’t seen much of him recently, but word on the street was that the combat teams had been in intensive training as well.

In fact, it seemed like most of Edgewood was buzzing with training and preparation for a mission that we didn’t quite understand. Nathan and the tech teams had been working tirelessly to protect their investment in Artemis with constant coding to keep the virus undetectable. The patrol team had been increased around the perimeter of Edgewood, and the pilot teams had begun crowding our airspace during our own flight training.

Team Hood had spent a lot of our downtime in the evenings discussing the things we were seeing and hearing around Edgewood. We were also trying to guess at where the next mission would take us, with no luck so far. The wait was killing me. And I knew Nelson felt similarly.

“So, when do you think we’ll get word about our next mission?” Ant asked.

“It definitely seems like we should be ramping up production now that we have a ground team in Smally and know just how volatile the holding center conditions are,” Jackie added.

The thought was an unpleasant one. After I shared the interrogation events with the team, we had all been warily guessing at the true reason behind Helping Hands and the limiting of adoptions even among the upper classes.

“Nathan is pretty swamped with Artemis right now,” Nelson said. “It’s the most important thing Little John has going on. I get the impression that all of our subsequent missions rely on the information they can find in the government systems.”

“Well, at least we’re having a lot of fun with the archive files,” Gabby said sarcastically.

“It’s necessary to organize those files,” Nelson replied, casting an admonishing glance at Gabby. “But it is very repetitive.”

I turned back to my food. We were all feeling antsy and impatient with the lack of movement. Though we hadn’t been in Edgewood long, we had been really active during that short time, so the new lull in activity was giving everyone a sense of cabin fever. I had even begun to be envious of Denver and Alf’s patrol duties. At least it meant they got to walk outside the bounds of Edgewood’s protective bubble every day. Jace and I might have been flying far outside of the projection, but we hadn’t stepped foot outside of Edgewood in much too long. Edgewood was wonderful, but I was ready to tackle a new mission.

At that moment Kory stopped by on his way to the caveman table (as we had lovingly dubbed it), where he sometimes sat with Denver, Alf, and Cloyd.

“There’s my favorite pilot,” he said as he clapped Jace on the back. “Robin, I heard you’re not too bad yourself.”

I smiled. “Can’t hold a candle to this guy.”

“Jace, there’s still room for you with the rest of us cavemen if you ever feel like visiting,” Kory said before he continued on his way.

Jace looked embarrassed.

“You’re not avoiding that table because of me, are you?” I asked him quietly.

“What? No. I just like hanging out with you guys,” he replied.

“Oh,” I said. “Because if it was just because Cloyd doesn’t like me…”

“Cloyd doesn’t dislike you. He’s just moody,” Jace said. But the way he quickly turned away and back to his plate felt disingenuous.

“So what are you guys going to do today if you don’t have training?” Jackie asked, looking at Jace and me.

But the question was answered for us, as Alexy walked up to the table with a mysterious smile and her hands on her hips.

“You guys had better finish up and get moving,” she said.

“I just started eating,” Abe protested with a mouthful of food.

“Nathan’s orders,” Alexy replied. “He’s called an emergency meeting for us in the tech room.”

Abe swallowed his food down hard.

An emergency meeting signaled some big news. Why else would Nathan get all of Team Hood together? Whatever it was, I was ready to find out. I quickly stood, grabbing my plate to put away, and exchanged excited glances with Jace, Jackie, and Nelson.

Finally, we would be speaking to Nathan again.

We filed out of the dining hall excitedly and followed Alexy and Zion to the tech room. I was filled with excitement and questions for the entire walk. Had Nathan learned something new during his search? Had the information from the interrogations proved useful?

My mind spun with questions.

When we entered the tech room, we found Nathan seated, with his back turned to us. Large screens on all sides were being manipulated by a small team of elite techs, folders opening, codes being written, data being extrapolated. The constant stream of letters and numbers made my head hurt. How did Nelson and Gabby do this all day long?

Alexy announced our presence by clearing her throat.

Nathan turned and managed a smile in greeting. It was obvious that he was tired and frustrated. While Gabby and Nelson had been working their archive project in shifts, it looked like Nathan had barely been able to pull himself away from the Artemis work.

“Stay where you are,” he said.

We froze while Nathan walked over to the wall and flipped a switch, and then suddenly felt a shifting beneath our feet. I stared down at the ground. What was happening? The floor in front of us was splitting open, a large table beginning to rise from beneath the floor in what had previously been empty space. The table came up to about hip height and then stopped. The floor steadied, and we began to walk toward the new meeting space that had been set before us.

Nathan walked to us with what looked like a remote control in his hand. At the touch of a button, the table sprang to life. A large computer projection sprang up from the table in the shape of trees, tiny homes, factories, and roads. It looked like a 3-D holograph of hundreds of miles’ worth of urban and rural land.

I bent down to get a closer look. The model was so lifelike that tiny cars were projected on the roads. I smiled at the sight. It was almost like one of the fancy train sets we had played with back in the Sylvone household.

Nathan assumed the head of the table and began to speak.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt your breakfast,” he said, looking around the table to make eye contact with each of us individually. “But we have intel that we need to act on, and we need to do it now. So you’ll have to forgive my intrusion.”

We stood rapt in our semicircle around the projection and listened to him. The interruption hadn’t bothered any of us; we had been anxious to receive any news from Nathan on what was coming next.

“We’ve received some frighteningly similar reports from some of our scouts outside of Edgewood. Reports of factories closing down and cities emptying. But these cities don’t appear to be emptying organically. It seems to be happening suddenly, and for unknown reasons. And it isn’t just one city, either. Multiple closures and evacuations have been reported.”

Abandoned towns. I thought back to what we had seen previously: strangely empty streets, always in poor areas and always situated around some factory. Many of the nation’s poorest towns were set up that way now. The factories employed most of the able-bodied citizens in an area and paid desperately low wages for backbreaking labor. But the citizens had little choice. Most of the stores in those areas were owned or co-owned by the factory owners, who kept prices high enough that working at the factories was a necessary evil if people wanted to keep food on the table. And with the high food prices and low wages, travel to other factories or better opportunities was almost impossible. These towns were basically full of indentured servants. Very little protection was provided to the workers.

I remembered wondering where all of the inhabitants had gone. At the time, we had been too busy to really consider what may have happened. Now I thought about the chaotic scenes again, towns completely abandoned, with possessions still lying in the streets. Had the townspeople been scared off? Had they left in desperation to find more work—all at the same time? Or was there something more sinister at play?

“As you know, we’ve been very selective thus far with how we use Artemis,” Nathan continued, interrupting my thoughts. “We can only search for topics of great interest or importance, and without being able to communicate directly with our team in Smally yet, we don’t have a great idea of what those topics should be. But we did have a place to start. And that has led us to these abandoned factory towns.”

A place to start. Nathan was echoing our conversation after the interrogation. Something from the conversation with Mica must’ve led them back to these abandoned towns.

“We have been keeping tabs on the disappearances,” Nathan said.

Suddenly the projection sprang to life. Four areas on the map began to glow red, and then lifted above the rest of the map for emphasis. They all looked like run-of-the-mill factory towns, nothing extraordinary about any of them. They were also spread out over the map, spanning an area that looked to be around five hundred square miles. Most of the map was a large forested area in the center. These towns were isolated from major hubs. They looked like towns that nobody outside of the inhabitants would even notice.

“This is where our search must begin. We need boots on the ground to explore these towns and determine what an organization called Helping Hands has to do with these abandonments,” Nathan finished.

Helping Hands. So that was how the interrogation had led us here. Whatever the shadowy organization was doing in detention centers, it was apparently also working with towns that were on the brink of abandonment.

We all stood silently and looked at the map for some time.

“It’s going to be hard for too many of us to go unnoticed,” Alexy said.

“You’re right. It will have to be a small team. Just a pair of you, actually,” Nathan replied.

Two people would make for the smallest mission team we had ever worked with. Four or five people was understandable. Even three was a possibility. But two?

Abe elbowed his brother. “Well, we only come as a twosome, so I think we’d be perfect,” he said.

Ant nodded, casting what was probably supposed to be a furtive glance at Jackie.

“I admire your enthusiasm, boys. But that won’t be necessary. We already have our team selected,” Nathan said.

I sucked in my breath.

Nelson leaned forward, obviously as intent on learning more as I was. Nelson was as ready as any of us were to go out and find her daughter, and I knew she saw this as an opportunity to get started on that. We all did. We had family members to find. We wanted to get back out and keep undermining the regime. As dangerous as the mission was, we probably all were hoping to be selected.

“Robin and Jace,” Nathan finished.

I turned quickly to look at Jace. So this was why we were selected to train together. But I was still surprised that it was just the two of us going.

“We’ll do our best,” Jace replied.

Nathan nodded gravely. “I know you will,” he said.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Jackie ventured delicately, “what about the rest of us?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Nathan said. “We need a large team here in the base for support. Surveillance, communications, research… I assure you, the entire team will be very busy.”

“Where do we start?” I asked.

“We start with these cities,” Nathan replied. “We’ll get you guys out there, and you’ll have the opportunity to roam while we keep an eye on things back here on base.”

“An eye on things?” I repeated with uncertainty. How could they keep us safe from all the way back in Edgewood?

“It’s a dangerous mission, I admit,” Nathan replied. “But we’ll be doing our best to keep it as safe as we can. The rest will be on you two.”

The thought made me very nervous. Jace and I weren’t strangers to dangerous missions, but it was strange to imagine the two of us outside of Edgewood alone. What if something happened to one of us? Could Jace leave me behind if he needed to escape? Could I leave him if the mission relied on one of us getting back safely with new information? I swallowed hard.

“I would start with the first city that was reported by our scouts as being abandoned and move through them chronologically, but that’s entirely your call. I trust your judgment.”

I looked closely again at the four red cities on the map.

“What information do we have on them?” Jace asked.

Nathan shook his head. “Not much more than you probably already know. They’re all factory towns that have been evacuated. The factories were all privately owned, and all seem to have become unprofitable, which led to their closure. It seems that the factory closure usually occurred one week to several days before the cities emptied. But we’re just relying on secondhand accounts there. We haven’t found a single person who lived in any of these towns at the time of the factory closures and subsequent activities to verify that timeline.”

I stared at the towns. Just four random, poor towns situated around a large forested area.

Wait.

“Who owns this land?” I asked, pointing to the large forest between the abandoned towns.

Nathan smiled. “I noticed that pattern, too. It’s government-owned land. So we decided to do a little recon overhead with our X-ray drones, to see if anything was hiding in the trees. Funnily enough, they didn’t find anything.”

That didn’t seem too strange. The drones wouldn’t find anything if there was nothing there but forest. If this was just government-owned forestland then it was safe to assume the drones would’ve only seen trees and undergrowth.

“So maybe it’s just uncultivated land,” Nelson offered.

“I think you misunderstood me,” Nathan replied, somewhat cryptically. “The drones didn’t see anything. There’s X-ray blocking tech over the whole forest.”

So a large forest lying in the center of these abandoned towns was owned by the government and was being protected with expensive stealth tech for no apparent reason. That was definitely suspicious.

“So it’s probably safe to assume that whatever is happening in these towns, it’s related to those woods,” Jace said.

“A lot of money is being spent to hide something in those woods, whether or not it’s related to these disappearances,” came Nathan’s reply.

“Well then, why aren’t we just going straight into those woods?” Abe asked, exhibiting his typical brashness.

“If there is X-ray blocking technology, it’s safe to assume there are other protections there as well,” Nelson answered. “It’d be a suicide mission without more information.”

“Exactly,” said Nathan. “So let’s get into these cities first and find out what we can.”

“What are the cities called?” I asked. It seemed like such an obvious question, but it had escaped my mind in the general calamity of the conversation.

Nathan looked strangely pained by the question.

“Well, this is Bitter Creek,” he said, pointing. “It was evacuated most recently. This one is called Ironfield. This is Ashtown. And this,” Nathan paused, “is where I’d start. It was evacuated three weeks ago. Millville.”

My knees buckled. Millville. My hometown. The city my parents lived in.