The Always War by Margaret Peterson Haddix Read Free Book Online

glowing windows crowned the skyline. Tessa stared in amazement, her awe too great for her even to gasp. And then, as the city receded, the lights blurred into one another, all the patterns growing clear. It was a broken pattern, the string of streetlights missing entirely in one section of the city.
    It was the same section where the bottom of every building stood in darkness.
    Is that where Gideon and the follower and I were walking?
she wondered.
Is it possible the lights went out only in that one area? Why? Was it on purpose? Who did that?
    These were more questions Tessa couldn’t answer.
    At the front of the plane Gideon was screaming even louder.
    “No! No! Override!”
    The plane dipped and swooped wildly, the window under Tessa’s cheek spinning to show her the sky, the city, the sky, the city, each view little more than a flash before it vanished. And then the plane lurched, and the hand strap Tessa was holding on to was jerked from her grasp. She plunged backward, falling, falling, falling …
    She landed, hitting hard. Her head struck the corner of something—a handle? A partially open door?
    And then everything went black.

CHAPTER
12
    Tessa woke to light.
    She was bathed in it, swimming in it—it was the most glorious light she’d ever seen. Even with her eyes still closed, she could feel it teasing against her eyelids:
Wake up! Rise up! It’s such a bright world out here!
    Tessa opened her eyes.
    For a moment she was too sun-dazzled to actually see anything. But then her eyes focused on something in the light: Gideon.
    He had his white uniform on again, and Tessa tried groggily to remember if he might have been wearing that last night and she just hadn’t noticed. But he was bent over the copilot’s seat, as if tidying up, and Tessa figured out what must have happened.
    He was wearing other clothes last night. He had the uniform in his duffel bag or backpack or whatever he carried onto the plane. He changed while I was … sleeping.
    Tessa was still trying to put together everything that had happened the night before: the darkness, the follower, Gideon’s conversation with the oily-voiced man, the crazily swooping plane. It was still too hard to make sense of, too hard to reconcile the darkness and the screaming of the night before with this glowing vision before her eyes now: Gideon in his uniform.
    Tessa wanted to say something, to get Gideon to turn around and notice her. But even in the sunlight she wouldn’t be gleaming. She could feel something caked in her hair—blood?—and her face felt puffy and bruised. She looked down and saw that both her sweatshirt and her ragged jeans were streaked with mud.
    She remembered what she’d been called the last time she’d seen Gideon in his uniform:
gnat … flea … slug …
Tessa calling out to Gideon now would be like a gnat trying to speak to a god.
    Gideon smoothed down his already perfect hair. Tessa realized the plane had stopped moving; everything was still. In the absence of any other motion or sound, Tessa was acutely aware of Gideon taking a deep breath. His shoulders rose, resolutely. He did not let the breath back out right away. Instead he took a single step toward the door and hit a switch.
    The door slid open, the light pouring over Tessa in even greater abundance. How could Gideon not see her now? But he wasn’t looking in her direction. He was standing in the doorway, facing out into the blinding light.
    Tessa saw him take another deep breath.
    “I am sorry,” he said in a booming voice. Tessa’s eyes were too light-dazed to see who he was speaking to.
    Gideon kept talking.
    “I came to apologize. You can arrest me, kill me—punish me however you see fit. I am the one who killed your countrymen in this place….”
    In a flash Tessa understood.
    Gideon had flown them into enemy territory.
    He’d flown them to the very spot where he’d killed all those people.
    He was willing to be killed too.
    No—he was asking for