62

“THAT WOULD BEGYOZA, ” Fang murmured at Nudge.

“Where do you come from,Gozen?” I said, feeling fresh rage wash over me at what he’d done to Angel. “Whose henchman are you?”

Gozenturned his big head to look down at me- looked down with his nonhuman eyes that glowed blue. “I amGozen. I am the leader. You will be quiet.”

“Good luck with that,” I heardIggy mutter.

“We will be landing in fourteen hours, thirty-nine minutes,” saidGozen.

Okay, what was fifteen hours away from Antarctica? Well, actually, most of the world. Not Canada or northern Europe, not the Arctic. But we could be headed most other places. Good thing I had narrowed that down.

“Where are we going?” I tried.

“That is not your concern.”

“Au contraire, YourTrollness,” I said, standing up. “We’re very concerned. We haveappointments. Places to go, people to see. Now tell us where the hell we’re going!”

Faster than my eyes (with raptor vision) could track, one thick leg shot out and whipped my feet out from under me. I caught myself on my hands just in time for him to kick my side hard enough to make my breath fly out of my lungs and give me that so-attractive fish-gasping expression.

The flock, except for Angel, was on their feet in a second, but I made a “Don’t attack” gesture- just in time, because the soldiers had once again shifted forward. With iron control, I slowly sucked in my breath, hoping they wouldn’t startlasering everything in sight. I took inventory: legs okay; ribs really, really bruised, maybe cracked. It hurt a surprising amount, which made me realize that it had been a while since I’d had broken bones. Clearly I needed to review my street-fighting skills.

“You do not give orders,”Gozen said in his weird almost-human-but-not-quite voice. “You follow orders.”

I bit my lip so I wouldn’t tell him to go stuff his orders. Apparently he picked up on things like that.Gozen was unlike anything we’d come up against before. He was bigger, faster, human enough to be subtle but machine enough to have no conscience. I did think he was probably too heavy to fly, soyay for that.

I gathered my feet under me, refusing to wince. Keeping a sharp eye onGozen, I stood up cautiously, motioning the others behind my back to stay out of his range. Unless he could shoot bullets from his eyes, which I wasn’t putting past him.

“We are against global warming,”Gozen intoned.

Was that a statement or a question? Were we part of the “we”?

“Uh-huh,” I said carefully, backing away slowly. “That’s good.”

“Therefore we are violently opposed to your kind,”Gozen went on.

Not so good.

I quickly decided I believed in global warming. “But we’re against it too!” I said, keeping one wary eye on the Transformer-bots. “We were in Antarctica helping to stop global warming!”

“No. Humans created the problem. Humans are destroying the earth. You are destroying life.”

“Okay, now, see, you’re wrong here on a bunch of levels,” I said quickly. “First, we’re not even completely human! Did you miss the wings? I mean, jeez. Plus, as I just pointed out, we were trying to stop global warming! We’re totally against it!”

“Yeah!” saidGazzy. “We’re trying to save the world! It’s our mission!”

Gozenturned slowly, and my heart sped up when his gaze stopped onGazzy. I moved to put myself between them.

“You are part of the problem,”Gozen said with a machine’s horrible, inflexible logic that always turns out to be wrong because there’s something crucial missing from the formula. “I will enjoy your death.” With that, he turned and exited through the door at the front of the cargo area. I wished one of us- okay, me- had thought of trying to escape through that door whileGozen wasn’t looking.

Once the door was shut behind him and we heard the ominous click of the lock, Fang said, “That guy has no sense of humor.”

“No,” I agreed, sitting down gingerly to avoid hurting my ribs even more. “And I’ve thought of something else, much worse.”

“What?” asked Nudge.

“We have fourteen hours to go,” I said. “And I doubt we’re getting meal service or in-flight entertainment.”