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  Fifteen minutes later, Charlie, Allie, and Skye emerged from the residence dressed in platinum flight suits, clear gladiator sandals strapped to their feet and aviator glasses on their heads. They walked side by side with the three Brazille brothers—manicured, wigged, and done up in full Alpha-glam style.

  “Remember your posture,” Allie reminded the boys. “Shoulders back, chest out, hips swaying. The wrong kind of gait could be a dead giveaway.” Mel, Taz, and Darwin nodded like hungry pupils.

  “Man, being a chick is rough,” Skye heard Taz mutter under his breath.

  Trying to appear as natural as possible, the six of them began to make their way across the island. As they walked past the great lawn, Skye nearly crashed into Taz, who had stopped to eavesdrop on two bikini-clad Hillary Clintons and a Beyoncé sunbathing on giant gold towels.

  “Oof! Keep walking!” Skye whisper-shouted. “You’re wearing a dress, remember? It’s going to seem a little funny if you keep checking out other girls.”

  “Hang on,” Taz murmured, his ear cocked. Skye crossed her arms and strained to hear what could be so fascinating.

  A Snooki-colored Hillary Clinton took a swig from an aluminum water bottle. “No contest. Taz is totally the hottest one. He’s Efron and Lautner put together.”

  “And he’s the best dancer,” added Blair B., smoothing a layer of sunscreen over her shoulders. Blair was a championship figure skater and budding film director from the Beyoncé house. Not only was she like Skye on ice, she’d already screened three movies at Sundance. Even under his girly makeup, Taz’s face glowed with pride. He gave himself a self-congratulatory nod.

  Skye’s blush was deep and immediate, like an allergic reaction to shellfish. Her stomach lurched, and she swallowed hard before her morning muesli made a reappearance in her mouth. Taz was cocky enough, and Skye certainly didn’t want to hear how coveted her crush still was now that they weren’t together. She put her hands on Taz’s back and shoved, hard. He staggered back on his platforms and shot her an annoyed look.

  “What?” he said. “I heard my name!”

  “How do you know they weren’t talking about another Taz?” Skye shot back, exasperation mixed with flirtation warming her like an après-dance hoodie. “You think you’re the only guy on the planet with that name?”

  Charlie and Allie stifled their giggles, or at least tried.

  “Uh, yeah.” he smirked. Skye wasn’t sure, but she thought she detected a molecule of playfulness in his voice. She stared at his broad-shouldered back as they walked single file toward the hangar and tried to take her own advice: Eyes on the prize. Was it her or were they getting more glances than normal? Alphas were notorious for their once-overs, but this felt different. Skye picked up her pace. The faster they got to the hangar, the sooner this whole thing would be over.

  “Wow,” Skye whispered, her aquamarine eyes widening as she stepped across the threshold of the decahedron-shaped PAP hangar. It smelled like fuel, fresh paint, and the year 3000.

  Light streamed in from all ten sides of the enormous structure, illuminating row upon row of specially designed gold aircraft. Skye had never bothered to visit the hangar before, but she vowed that if she ever had the chance to sneak back at night, she’d throw an ah-mazing party here.

  “Charlie, tell me you’ve flown one of these things,” she called out, pointing to a plane that looked like a shiny black boomerang and another smaller aircraft that seemed composed entirely of chubby silver tubes with a tiny seat in the center.

  Charlie whirled around on her feet and flashed Skye a lopsided grin. “I wish. I mostly stick to PAPs and the occasional jet-pack.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Skye giggled. “Not.”

  The group came to the PAP launchpad in the middle of the hangar, where two perfectly round bubble-shaped planes awaited them. Charlie had already been there early this morning to choose their vehicle—Darwin’s PAP—and she hopped inside to check that all systems were fully operational while Allie and Skye waited casually on the platform for Louise and Mayday. Meanwhile, the three Alpha “girls” hustled into the backseat of the plane, whisper-laughing as they smacked each other’s skirted butts.

  “How will we all fit?” Skye whispered to Allie, who was busy using her aPod to check the coordinates of Louise and her QE flight crew.

  “Shhh, they just walked in the north entrance of the hangar.”

  Skye hurriedly began stuffing her copious white-blond waves into a cute flight helmet she’d swiped from one of the Frisbee-planes, straightening up just as Louise and Mayday strutted onto the platform. Mayday’s headgear was just like Snoopy’s—an old-fashioned leather number from the 1920s. Her neon-red hair peeked out below it, and her green eyes twinkled with calm amusement as she sized up Skye and Allie.

  “She almost looks like a real pilot,” she quipped to Louise, whose carrot cake–colored face wrinkled in a fit of laughter.

  “That almost looks like a real tan,” Allie shot back.

  “Let’s go over the route and start flying,” Charlie called from inside the plane. “So we all agree we’ll fly forty miles east across the Alpha ocean toward Mojave and through the desert until we go above Flowering Cactus Mountain. Then we’ll circle back,” Charlie said, her hands busy checking the readings on the PAP’s touch screen.

  “Yep.” Lou nodded up at her, her brick-red lips forming a confident half moon. “First PAP back wins.”

  Charlie stuck her head out of the porthole of their plane. “I’m bringing some friends for moral support. ’Kay?”

  “Fine with us,” shrugged Mayday, zipping up her metallic bronze flight suit. “Bring as many people as you want—they’ll just weigh your craft down.”

  “They don’t weigh as much as Louise’s makeup bag, so we should be okay,” Skye snapped.

  Before Lou or Mayday could come up with a response, Skye half-pirouetted around on her heel and skipped toward the plane.

  “All right.” Taz pulled his fake hair back into a ponytail with surprising skill and adjusted his aviators. “Everyone buckled in?”

  “Yes,” the group responded from their squashed seats.

  “Everyone ready?” he asked. The reply this time was more hesitant, but Taz didn’t seem to notice. “Great. Let’s do this.” And with that, he pulled back the controls and the PAP soared swiftly into the air.

  High above the island, in a PAP packed tighter than Kim Kardashian’s Spanx, Skye studied Taz’s profile in the cockpit. He was copiloting next to Charlie, but they took turns maneuvering the round little aircraft along the unpredictable air currents of Shira’s woman-made biosphere. They hadn’t been flying long, but what little air there was left in the PAP was already filled with tension. Charlie was right, Taz was a good pilot. But Mayday McGrath was excellent.

  “Left, left!” Darwin yelled from the backseat. Skye covered her left ear, which was uncomfortably close to Darwin’s head. “You need to get more torque going before you flood the gas.” Everyone who wasn’t actually flying the plane—Darwin, Skye, Allie, and Mel—sat squished together behind the cockpit in a second row of flip-up flight seats.

  Allie turned. “I thought these were electric planes.”

  “The computer system runs on electricity, but the planes run on biodiesel unless they’re coasting,” Charlie said from the front.

  Skye turned to gaze behind Darwin’s big head out the window at the competition’s aircraft, whizzing back and forth just behind them. Through the translucent glass of Louise and Mayday’s PAP, Skye could see two sets of hands gesturing wildly and two flame-red mouths moving quickly, talking over one another. Even with only half the people in their PAP, they looked as miserable and stressed-out as the Jackie O’s. Apparently, things weren’t going as well for them as Louise had predicted. They’d been neck and neck for the majority of the race, but for now the Jackie O’s had a slight lead.

  The sound of Allie’s perfect ski slope–shaped nose sniffing the air brought Skye’s attention back to h
er own team. “Does anyone smell that?” Allie asked.

  “What?” Charlie asked nervously.

  “It’s… kind of like McDonald’s French fries,” Allie said in a confused tone. She licked her glossy lips. “Yum.”

  “Forget the food court, Allie, they’re pulling ahead,” Charlie replied. “Gun it, Taz!”

  But Skye smelled it, too. She looked at Allie and raised her eyebrows.

  “Darwin, did you leave an old Happy Meal box in here?” Allie asked.

  “Yeah, ’cuz my mom is always taking us to the drive-thru,” he joked.

  “Seriously,” giggled Mel, adjusting part of his leggings. “It reeks like McFarts.”

  Everyone burst out laughing. And then the engines went from roaring, to sputtering, to completely silent. The plane was just… floating; a runaway balloon drifting in the afternoon breeze.

  Skye could hear her own heartbeat thudding in her ears.

  Calmly, Darwin said, “Everyone buckle your seat belt. Now.”

  Everyone started to scream.

  5

  SOMEWHERE OVER THE MOJAVE DESERT

  PAP FUSELAGE

  NOVEMBER 2ND

  4:02 P.M.

  They were plummeting. Charlie tried everything. She gunned the gas. She flipped on the autopilot. She pushed the manual override icon so hard her thumb turned purple. Nothing. The plane was responding slower than a deadbeat boyfriend. Behind her, half the gang was screaming and the other half sat eerily silent, stunned by fear, as the gold edges of the PAP plane shuddered around them, jolting from side to side.

  “Taz,” she screamed. “What are we not thinking of?”

  But Taz just let out a choked groan, his hands alternately clutching at his wig and then typing commands into his touch screen. “Everyone, brace for landing.”

  Ohmuhgod. No no no no no.

  “Do something!”

  “Are you serious?”

  The screams and cries from the backseat floated up to Charlie’s ears again, but she couldn’t absorb them. All she could hear was her own internal scream. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Darwin, unable to remove his seat belt, straining toward her desperately. She knew he was trying to communicate to her that everything would be okay. But would it?

  In the seconds between the air and the earth, time slowed down. The best moments of Charlie’s life played before her like a 3-D movie trailer. Her mother, Bee, holding a three-year-old Charlie on a Brazille-chartered cruise ship from mainland Africa to Madagascar. Six-year-old Charlie swimming through cliffside caves in Fiji with Dingo and Darwin. Her first slice of New York pizza, at age eight, also with Darwin. Hot springs in Iceland. Snowshoeing outside of Anchorage. Everywhere, every memory, every image had Darwin flitting somewhere in the frame. Then Alpha Academy. Dancing at a beach bonfire with Allie and Skye, tinkering blissfully for hours on her latest project in the Academy’s light bulb–shaped inventor’s lab. The face of her mentor, Dr. Irina Gorbachevski, floating toward her with a helpful critique of Charlie’s latest invention. And then there was Darwin’s face again, swimming toward her, his arms embracing her…

  Ka-thunk!

  They were down.

  She was alive.

  Charlie stopped screaming and opened her eyes to peek out the windshield, but just then the plane began to ricochet back into the air.

  Ka-thunk!

  Down again.

  Of course! Remembering the patented bounce technology she had helped to create, Charlie gritted her teeth as the plane bounced to a stop along the hard-packed earth of the Mojave Desert, her body slicked with sweat under her flight suit and her nerves more frayed than Miley Cyrus’s cutoffs. Rebound technology meant the plane was retrofitted with rubberized shocks, but never in a million years did Charlie think she’d experience the “pogo effect” she’d helped invent in anything other than a simulated crash.

  Charlie’s tear-filled eyes searched the control panel in front of her, but all indicators were still dead. The control panel’s screen matched the landscape—blank, desolate, barren. In large contrast to the PAP, which was a mess. Wigs were scattered everywhere, blankets and oxygen masks had fallen from overhead compartments. It was total chaos.

  Taz whispered from the copilot’s seat. “I don’t crash planes. I crash parties. I thought these things had manual backup systems.”

  “So did I,” she whispered back.

  Charlie just couldn’t understand it. This model was the result of fifteen years of research by Brazille Industries—it was the most technologically sophisticated aircraft on Earth! And if Charlie remembered correctly, the PAP had three backup systems in case of engine trouble. How could all three have gone bust at once? She smacked the flat of her palm onto the screen, a move she hated seeing other people try when they had a tech glitch. But even though she knew it wouldn’t work, she kept on hitting, unable to stop.

  Finally, Darwin placed his hand on hers, his fingers circling her wrist. “Stop, Charlie. We’re okay. We landed. Don’t go beating a dead PAP.”

  Charlie nodded a silent thanks, put her now-throbbing hand in her lap, and looked over at Taz. Seeing that he was shaken but unharmed, she twisted around to check on everyone in the backseat of the plane.

  “Is everyone okay?” Charlie whisper-cried. Darwin’s hand had found her shoulder during the crash and squeezed, and now that she could see him, the tightly-coiled panic in her chest began to unspool a little.

  Darwin smiled at her, his hazel eyes filled with relief. “All good back here. You’re not hurt, are you?”

  Charlie wiggled her fingers and toes and did a few neck-rolls just to make sure that, unlike the PAP, all parts of her were in good working order. “I’m okay,” she sighed. “Physically okay. Mentally, the jury’s still out.”

  She turned to scan the freaked-out faces of Mel, Allie, and Skye. The backseat contingent had gone from screaming to silent, as if a mute button had been activated during the crash. Skye was pale. Allie’s gaze floated forlornly past the PAP window while Mel wrapped his arms tighter around her and whispered something in her ear. They all appeared stunned and scared but physically unharmed.

  “Um, guys?” Skye said, breaking the silence in the PAP. She tapped a polished fingernail on the window. “Where are we? Everything is so… beige.”

  Allie pressed her nose against the window. “I think we landed in a Pottery Barn catalogue.”

  Had they not just crashed in the Mojave Desert, Charlie might have laughed. Miles of cracked earth, cacti, tumbleweeds, and a few mountains with smooth plateaued tops in the distance were all she could see. Water, food, shade, and shelter, not so much. Nightfall would be their downfall if they didn’t get out of there soon.

  “I’m sure Louise and Mayday will come for us,” Allie tried.

  “Don’t be,” Skye huffed. “I saw them waving goodbye as we began to fall.”

  Don’t start panicking, Charlie, she told herself sternly. Reflexively, she reached for the three cameo bracelets she always wore on her right wrist. Inside each cameo was a picture: one of Darwin; one of her mom, Bee; and one of her DD (dead dad—he’d died in a plane crash before she was born, and touching his picture sent a shiver down Charlie’s spine. They finally had something in common).

  Channeling Alpha Academy’s resident yogini, Samsara, Charlie rested her hands on her knees and attempted some meditative breathing in a desperate attempt to achieve calm.

  Slow, deep breath in, deep breath out.

  Repeat.

  But all breathing did was help Charlie focus on just how serious their situation was. And the more she thought about it, the louder her heart thumped out its panicked SOS.

  Resolving to solve the problem methodically, Charlie pulled out her aPod. Step one was obviously to figure out exactly what their coordinates were so she could call in a backup unit. But when she tried to get a signal, her aPod screen flashed:

  SIGNAL NOT AVAILABLE BEYOND ALPHA BIOSPHERE.

  No problem, Charli
e swallow-nodded. Every PAP came equipped with a GPS locator.

  She pressed a small silver button etched into the smooth white ceiling above her head, sending an ovular, pill-shaped GPS device about the size of a soda can into her lap. But when Charlie powered it on, all that came out was static. Frantically, she began turning a dial on the side of the GPS, waiting for a signal.

  “No signal?” Charlie heard Allie cry out behind her, and realized her bestie had been able to see the screen. “Does that mean we’re never getting out of here?”

  The rest of the group erupted into high-pitched jabbering and arguing about what to do.

  “Guys. Calm down,” Charlie said as calmly as she could. “Of course we are. There should be a way to override this…”

  But every channel was the same: a cold, lonely buzz, like the howling of a black hole in deep space. A sound that signaled not just the end of their lives as Alphas, but the end of their lives, period.

  Charlie’s hands fell to her sides and her heart followed suit, sinking in her chest. “This isn’t good,” she moaned, putting her head on the white A-shaped steering wheel in front of her.

  The inventor in her was still diagnosing the PAP’s engine failure, but the Alpha competitor in her was devastated, certain that now that they’d lost the race, she might never get the chance. And if all systems were truly dead, it wouldn’t be long until they would be, too.

  Keep calm and carry on, Charlie thought-chanted to herself. Her mom had always used this expression when things seemed dire.

  “It’s all Skye’s fault!” wailed Allie.

  Fear is contagious, Charlie remembered. If she acted afraid, everyone would follow suit. Her flight crew would soon turn on each other, which wouldn’t help them figure out a way out any sooner.

  “No, Allie, it’s nobody’s—” Charlie tried to cut in before tensions rose, but Skye yelled over her.

  “My fault?” Skye shrieked. “I wasn’t flying the plane. I was just sitting here trying not to watch you make out with your boyfriend when we started sinking—”

  “You’re the one who agreed to this PAP race in the first place,” Allie hissed. “We’re lucky to be alive right now.”