“Why do we have to attack another harvest camp?” asks Elias Dean, one of the mouthier kids. “Haven’t we done enough already?”
Hayden smiles. The fact that kids are voicing their reservations out loud is a very good sign. “Starkey says we’ll keep it up until either the harvest camps are all gone, or we’re all gone.”
More spiders, at more tables. The kind that bite.
“One of these days they’ll be ready for us,” someone else mumbles, “and take us all out before we even get through the gate.”
“Starkey’s a genius and all,” Elias says, “but it’s a little much, don’t you think?”
“Not my job to think, although I occasionally do,” Hayden says. “I’m glad that you do too.” And that’s as far as Hayden will take it. God forbid he be accused of fomenting dissent.
• • •
The “reconnaissance team” returns at noon.
“They’re back,” announces a guard running in from his lookout at the rusty front gate of the plant. At first Hayden thinks the plan must have failed—or that maybe Bam and Jeevan scrubbed it, unable to go through with it. Maybe their accomplice, the gardener, never showed to make the capture feel authentic. But when Bam and Jeevan enter, Starkey is not with them—a fact that the lookout was not observant enough to notice.
“Where’s Starkey?” comes the obvious question—not just from one stork, but from many, whispering the question to one another, not daring to ask Bam or Jeevan. The storks are afraid. They’re hopeful. They’re angry. They are filled with too many emotions to sort.
Hayden approaches Bam and Jeevan with caution, knowing he’s being watched, knowing that all three of them are being measured in the moment.
“Don’t tell me—you got stranded in a mountain pass, and had to do like the Donner party,” Hayden says. “If you ate Starkey, I hope you saved me some breast meat.”
“You’re not funny,” Bam says, loudly enough for Hayden to know it’s for show. “We were ambushed by parts pirates. We’re lucky we’re still in one piece.” She hesitates as more kids drift into hearing range, drawn by the curious gravity of tragedy. “They recognized Starkey, so they tranq’d Jeevan and me, and left us there. When we came to, Starkey was gone. They took him.”
No gasps, no cries, just silence. Jeevan tries to slip away, not wanting to be within this little center of attention, but Bam holds him tightly by the shoulder, preventing him from leaving.
“Starkey’s gone?” asks one of the youngest, smallest storks—one whom Hayden recalls having trouble wielding his weapon at the last takedown.
“I’m sorry,” says Bam. “There was nothing we could do.”
And to Hayden’s amazement, Bam’s eyes begin to cloud with tears. Either she’s far better at deception than Hayden ever gave her credit for, or at least part of her emotion is real.
“What do we do?” someone asks.
“We go on without him,” Bam says with subtle authority. “Gather everyone on the turbine floor. We have decisions to make.”
Word quickly spreads, and the somber sense of hopelessness lifts as everyone begins to grapple with the idea of a world without Starkey. The three girls in his personal harem alternate between comforting and sniping at one another. They are inconsolable, but they are the only ones. Even Garson DeGrutte and Starkey’s other supporters have quickly overcome their grief, and are now promoting themselves, jockeying for a leadership position in the new hierarchy. But when Bam addresses the storks later that morning, she’s a commanding presence that makes it clear who’s in charge. No one has the audacity to challenge her authority. From here on in, all the jockeying will be for positions beneath her leadership.
She doesn’t so much give a speech as tell everyone how it is. It’s not a rallying hyperbole-filled war cry like Starkey might have delivered, just a bracing dose of harsh, heavy reality. She drives three key points home:
“We’re a fugitive mob of unwanted kids with a price on our heads.”
“Our friends, the clappers, are worse than our enemies.”
“If we’re going to stay whole and alive, we’re going to have to stop taking down harvest camps, and disappear. Now.”
And although there are some who bluster about vengeance, and what Starkey would want, those voices are weak and find no resonance among the storks. With Bam’s declaration, their suicide run has ended, and their new mission is to live. Hard to argue with survival.
“Well done,” Hayden tells her, catching her alone in one of the ammunition storerooms. “Are you going to tell me what really happened?”
“You know what happened. Your plan happened, and he fell right into it, just like you said he would.”
Bam tells him about the video, carefully recorded and duplicated, and stashed in various virtual locations like defensive nukes, should Starkey launch an offensive.
“Are you really sure he won’t just come right back here?” Bam asks.
Although nothing is ever 100 percent, Hayden is pretty sure. “In the battle between ego and vengeance, Starkey’s ego wins. His image is more important than his need to get back at you. He might try, but not until he he’s scrounged himself up a new murder of storks to follow him.”
She gives him the sneering curl of her lip that feels less intimidating than it used to. “It pisses me off that you know him better than I do.”