Read Online The Resisters by Eric Nylund - Free Book Online Page A

protested.
    “Oh, I’ll admit they look scary. But if they’d hit you, they would have pumped you full of a tranquilizer and put you to sleep. That’s it.”
    It was true that the Ch’zar had only started firing lasers at them once they were in the fighting suits. Could they have just been trying to capture them?
    “What about the robots that tore the mountain apart to get us? One of them almost smashed me flat.”
    Coach snorted. “A direct hit inside one of those fighting suits would have barely knocked you down.”
    Ethan recalled how easily he’d caught the fist of one of those monster robots—and how easily he’d tossed it aside.
    “I know you’re confused, son,” Coach said. He stood and came around to Ethan’s side of the desk. “But we’re the good guys here. You’ve got to tell us … where did you hide the fighting suit?”
    The good guys? Ethan almost laughed.
    He was a long, long way from trusting anything Coach said … and yet pieces of his story seemed to fit.
    Could
some
of it be the truth?
    One thing
didn’t
make sense, though.
    “I thought you guys had cameras everywhere,” Ethan said. “Didn’t you
see
the wasp suit?” He made a fumblinggesture at the closed window and the soccer field beyond. “And my crash landing?”
    “We tracked your trajectory into the valley,” Coach said, and sat on his desk, distorting the hologram. “But getting an
exact
position with radar was impossible because the suit has an active stealth technology we don’t yet understand.”
    How could Madison and Felix have technology
more
advanced than the Ch’zar? There was an important piece of the human-Ch’zar story still missing.
    “Then your ‘wasp,’ as you call it,” Coach continued, “dropped low into Santa Blanca, and its antielectronic systems jammed every camera within a mile of the school.”
    “That must have been inconvenient,” Ethan said.
    His sarcasm was a shock. Ethan had been raised never to talk back to adults. This once, though, it kind of felt good.
    Coach’s rugged face froze for a split second, and then he frowned.
    Then it sank in what Coach had just told him … and what it meant.
    They
didn’t
have the fighting suit.
    If Ethan could somehow get to it, he could fly out of here—to where, he wasn’t sure, but it would give him time to think and come up with a plan.
    “What’s so important about that suit?” Ethan asked. “They said they stole it from
you
—maybe they added afew things—that antielectronic whatsit. But the mighty Ch’zar Collective, fourteen alien races all working peacefully together for the common good … you guys have to have better technology than two kids. Don’t you?”
    More sarcasm. And this time Ethan was certain it felt good.
    Coach’s jaw set, and he ground his teeth. He leaned closer, his face an inch from Ethan’s, and whispered, “Just tell us where the suit is, son.” He leaned back and exhaled. “Do the right thing. Help us bring these criminals to justice.”
    Do the right thing
.
    Ethan opened his mouth and started to tell Coach where he’d stashed the suit.
    He realized that “doing the right thing” was a knee-jerk involuntary reaction—what he’d been taught to do for the last twelve years by his teachers and every book he’d read in Santa Blanca.
    But Ethan had also been raised by Franklin and Melinda Blackwood, who’d taught him to think for himself.
    And while he was thinking for himself, another very important fact clicked in his brain.
    “You didn’t get them—Madison and Felix got away. If they hadn’t … you’d have
their
suits and you wouldn’t need the wasp.”
    Coach went back to his side of the desk without comment.
    Ethan was relieved that Felix and Madison hadn’t been captured or killed. Leaving a fight was a mistake he’d never make again, if he got the chance. Coach Norman closed Ethan’s file. He got out a rubber stamp and blew the dust off it.
    “Please, Ethan,” he said.