Free The Always War by Margaret Peterson Haddix

wasn’t afraid to take up a lot of space—in fact, it didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.
    Gideon shoved Tessa down, away from the window.
    “They’ll be shooting at us soon,” he muttered. He turned his head toward Dek at the front of the plane. “
Please
tell me you’ve got the antiaircraft defense shields up!”
    “Of course!” Dek snarled back at him. “
I
never disabled anything but the engine, and as you can hear, it’s working now. You disabled, what? Forty separate systems? Fifty?”
    “Only the ones that had your bosses’ tracking codes embedded in them,” Gideon muttered. “They must not trust you much, to have that much backup. What’s the system—every time they sell a plane, you stow away, make it look like it’s broken, and then steal it back?”
    Tessa expected Dek to deny this, but she only shrugged.
    “Usually the buyers are so rich and so drunk, it’s kind of a safety precaution, getting the plane away from them,” she said. “It’s my way of making sure all the rich drunk guys stay alive so they can keep buying things from my bosses.”
    She sounded distracted, huddled over the instrument panel. She slammed her hand against her seat.
    “Come on, cameras—now! We need you!”
    The plane lurched to the side—automatically dodging antiaircraft fire? Automatically dodging something else? Or just … by mistake? Tessa didn’t know enough about flying to be able to tell.
    “You should let me take the controls,” Gideon said, inching along the floor toward the pilot’s seat. “To keep us all alive.”
    Dek didn’t even look at him.
    “In an emergency the rule is you let the most experienced pilot fly,” she said. “And in this plane that’s me. I’ve got hundreds of flying hours.
Real
flying hours.”
    Tessa expected Gideon to argue, but he didn’t.
    “You went to the military academy too,” he said, watching Dek’s scrawny hands dance over the instrument panel.
    “Wrong,” Dek corrected him. “I was
selected
for the military academy. Didn’t go. There’s a difference.”
    Gideon gasped.
    “It’s not a choice,” he said. “You’re selected to go, you go. Or else—”
    “Or else you cease to exist,” Dek finished for him. “So I ceased to exist. In the official records.”
    Tessa supposed she should feel good that both of the people on the plane with her were such geniuses that they’d beenselected for the military academy. But it just made her feel even more dull and witless than usual.
    And then she forgot all her inadequacies, because her body felt so weird. The plane rocked with the force of speeding faster, soaring higher, fighting the pull of gravity. Maybe Dek wasn’t using the standard, approved method for taking off. Even more than the night before, Tessa felt plastered to the floor, tugged backward and down.
    “Yes!” Dek shrieked. “The cameras are coming back on … right … now! So we’ll see …” Suddenly she gasped. “What’s that?”

CHAPTER
18
    Gideon and Tessa both struggled toward the front of the plane, toward Dek and the computer screen. Gideon got there first, but Tessa wasn’t far behind.
    Tessa pulled herself up on the side of the pilot’s seat and squinted at the screen. It took her a moment to figure out what she was seeing. She was braced for a view of squadron after squadron of fighter planes circling them, firing off one shot after the other. But she saw no other planes around them at all.
    Instead Dek was pointing to something on the ground, a huge U-shaped arc of metal that curved across a mighty river and had somehow cut a swath through a vast forest on the other side.
    Now Gideon was gasping, too.
    “It’s the Santl Arch,” he said. “It’s … down?”
    “Yes, down,” Dek repeated. “Of course it’s down! We’re up, it’s down—but what is it?”
    Gideon seemed a little dazed.
    “It was one of the enemy’s most impressive feats of architecture,” he said. “This must have just happened, that it