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feel awkward … and like an outsider.
    Madison glanced around the lab and her green eyes landed on Ethan. She scowled. “Blackwood. Just who I was looking for.”
    “What now?” Ethan said.
    “The shower room is overflowing.” Madison strolled over and snorted a laugh. “You need to get down there and clean it out.”
    Madison’s nose was a smidge crooked and her hair was wild (spiked and sticking straight up today). There was something other than her weirdo looks, though, that made Ethan feel butterflies in his stomach when she was near.
    He crossed his arms over his chest. “Me not flying and being on toilet duty is no joke, Madison.”
    “I know. Our roster was down a
bunch
of pilots with the flu already before you and Paul had to out-boy each other for Stupid of the Year award and get grounded.”
    She thought he was a pilot like Paul? Not a trainee? That was news to him.
    Ethan didn’t get her. How she could be mean one second and almost sweet the next. It reminded Ethan that the strangest alien species on Earth wasn’t the Ch’zar—it was girls.
    “Felix said he was going to try to talk to the colonel about it.” Madison shook her head. “I don’t know, though. She’s really mad. You messed up pretty good.”
    “
I
messed up?”
    She shrugged. “Well, Paul did … mostly. But you let him trick you into that race. What were you thinking?”
    He hadn’t been. Thinking, that is. He’d let his anger get the best of him.
    But he didn’t say
that
to Madison.
    She sat on Dr. Irving’s desk, leaned closer, and whispered, “Just get over it, will you? Something else is going on I wanted to talk to you about. Every officer on base shuts up whenever one of us gets near them.”
    “I know.”
    Ethan had seen that. And something was superwrong if it made Dr. Irving as worried as the rest of them.
    He glanced over to the computer. “I think, though, I can find out what.”
    He sat and his fingers hovered over the keyboard.
    Madison rolled her eyes. “Sure, what do you have to lose? Get thrown in the brig with Paul for
spying
. Not that it’s going to do you any good. I’ve been trying for years to figure the password to my grandfather’s comp—”
    Ethan tapped in
StormFalcon
.
    The computer screen flickered to life.
    A map of the world covered with red dots came into focus.
    Madison’s and Ethan’s mouths fell open at what they saw.

  7  
MORE NUMSKULL PILOTS
    ETHAN AND MADISON STARED AT THE MAP on the computer screen. North America had glowing green outlines and the oceans burned with crisp blue edges. Red dots were
everywhere
, though, like the continent had the measles. The dots clustered mostly near lakes and rivers and valleys and a few places in the deserts.
    There were none up in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, or the Appalachian Mountains (where the Seed Bank was hidden).
    That made Ethan feel … safer.
    He shut his open mouth.
    Those dots were bad news. He didn’t know why, but his brain churned just staring at them.
    Madison leaned over his shoulder and whispered, “Is that what I think it is?”
    “A map?”
    “Duh!” She whacked him on the side of the head. “I can see that. I meant— Hey! How’d you get that password?”
    Ethan ignored her question. There was no need to get into that right now.
    “Dr. Irving said his numbers were right.” Ethan continued to study the map. “I don’t see numbers.”
    On the bottom of the screen was a menu.
    He tapped a control to zoom in.
    The image moved to the Florida coast, where there was an enormous cluster of red dots next to Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades. As the image grew, the tiny dots resolved in greater detail and looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
    Only they weren’t.
    Ethan leaned forward. They were the outlines of insects.
    Madison pushed him out of the seat and took over. “Let me drive, rookie.” She typed in commands.
    The gigantic holographic projector in the lab lit up.
    The map on the computer