The Always War by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

alreadyslamming his hand against the release for the door. The door slid open, and instantly he had his hands raised in the air.
    “I surrender!” he screamed out into the open air. Tessa could tell he was trying to make his voice as loud as possible, to reach the ears of snipers who might be hundreds of feet away. “I surrender! I surrender! I …”
    Gideon stopped talking.

CHAPTER
21
    It’s amazing what you can notice in a split second. In the instant after Gideon’s voice died out, Tessa stared at him so hard that she could see the individual beads of sweat caught in his eyebrows. She could see the crust of a scab already forming over the cut on his cheekbone. She could see the way his hands trembled as he held them in the air. She could see the slight smear of what might be vomit on the formerly pure-white cuff of his uniform sleeve.
    But she didn’t see any recoil in his body from bullets hitting it; she didn’t see any bloom of suddenly gushing blood on the section of the uniform covering his heart.
    She kept looking. She seemed incapable of doing anything else.
    Not Dek.
    “What?” Dek demanded, her voice hoarse with fury or fear. Tessa couldn’t be sure which one it was. “You can’t just stop like that. You’ve committed to this course of action—you keep surrendering until they’re carrying you away in handcuffs and leg irons!”
    Gideon turned his head very, very slowly.
    “I don’t think there’s anyone out there,” he said in a near whisper. “There’s nobody to surrender
to
.”
    Dek stared at him in disbelief for a moment; then she scrambled toward the door herself and peeked around the edge of it.
    Tessa realized that she’d slumped down in the copilot’s seat in a way that protected most of her body from the doorway. Only the top of her head and her eyes were exposed.
    What do you know,
Tessa thought.
Guess I have survival instincts I never knew about.
    But the longer Gideon stood in the open doorway, not being shot, the more foolish Tessa felt for cowering in terror. She even thought Dek looked kind of foolish, clutching the curve of the wall and only barely looking past the strip of rubber that lined the door. Tessa felt like she’d done way too much cowering since she’d stepped onto this plane the night before. She’d done way too much cowering her entire life.
    On trembling legs she stood up and went to stand beside Gideon. Standing freely, on her own, she gazed out into enemy territory.
    At first glance it looked like Gideon was right: There was no one in sight. There was, actually, very little in sight. Very little except for a vast field of grass, stretching out in all directions.
    Or—was this still what you would call grass? In Tessa’s experience grass was tufts of muddied green blades that tried to spring up in bare patches of dirt, when people didn’t trample it too badly. She’d seen pictures in books of expansive lawns trimmed to almost scientific perfection in the luxurious, prodigal era before the war began. But that had always seemed too fantastical to believe, like gazing at drawings of unicorns or fairies or trolls.
    This field did not look like a lawn. For one thing the grass was too tall. Half thinking,
Maybe it’s not too smart to just keep standing here, a clear target,
Tessa stepped down into the grass. Much of it reached all the way up to her waist; a few hardy stalks were level with her shoulders. A breeze shuddered across the field, and Tessa almost forgot herself watching the glory of it all, seeing the acres and acres of grass bowing together. It was like music, like a dance. The grass seemed more fully alive than any of the people Tessa had ever known.
    “I … surrender?” Gideon called again behind her, his voice gone soft and uncertain.
    “Would you two idiots stop and think for a second?” Dek hissed from her position still crouched at the edge of the door. “Just because they haven’t killed us yet, that doesn’t mean nobody’s going