Everyone knows their next mission. Starkey made an announcement, and rallied the troops. He hasn’t told them yet that their ultimate objective is the extermination of the Mousetail tithes. They may never know. The only reason Hayden knows is because Bam shared it with him. Hayden suspects Starkey has selected an elite team to do the dirty deed once the harvest camp has been taken down. Or maybe he plans on herding the tithes into a single building and doing it himself with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. They certainly have bunker busters that can do it in one fell swoop.

But that’s tomorrow. It doesn’t explain why Starkey isn’t here today. Hayden knows why. After all, it was his plan. The storks, however, can’t know the truth.

“He went with a special team to do some reconnaissance,” Hayden tells the masses when people begin to question Starkey’s absence. Most of the kids accept it, and are relieved because maybe it pushes their imminent attack on Mousetail back a day or two. Of course, there are some kids who are suspicious. Garson DeGrutte is full of questions.

“Why didn’t he tell us? Why didn’t the clappers do reconnaissance for us, isn’t that their job?” And, of course, the question that’s most on his mind, “Why didn’t he take me?”

Hayden plays it cool with a shrug. “Who can read the mind of the master?” Hayden tells him. “And maybe he left you here because he wanted to give you more quality time with Abigail.” And then, for the second half of his one-two punch, Hayden gets quiet and whispers. “You know, with Starkey off-site, that office he likes to hang out in is empty . . . and very private. . . .”

With that suggestion, all the blood leaves Garson’s brain and goes other places, leaving him with no further questions. Hayden then quickly finds Abigail and assigns her to shuck the thousand ears of corn that showed up in their last shipment, ensuring that she’ll have no time for Garson. Even when Garson joins her, frantically shucking corn to speed up the process, Hayden knows it will take all day. He suspects that Abigail would rather shuck Hayden’s corn in the kitchen than Garson’s in the office.

Hayden walks the floor all morning, taking in the conversations, or lack thereof, trying to get a bead on today’s mood. A mob, he knows, can be as dysfunctional as a family, given a bad enough parent—and Starkey is as dysfunctional as they come. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why so many of these kids have been willing to follow Starkey: He reminds them of home.

“These waffles suck,” says a malcontent stork who said the same thing when they were getting watery powdered eggs that actually did suck. Now the applause department supplies them a much higher quality of food than they could get for themselves. But there are always the complainers.

“Sorry,” Hayden tells him. “The seafood breakfast buffet is tomorrow. I’ll make sure they save you some crab legs and caviar.”

He gives Hayden the finger and continues to scarf down his waffle. Since arriving at the plant two weeks ago, Hayden has not only been in charge of inventory, he’s overseeing food preparation as well, due to the fact that the former kid in charge of the kitchen died in the Horse Creek Harvest Camp attack. It seems all of Hayden’s jobs of late have been the result of terminal vacation of post.

With each harvest camp takedown, the mood among the storks has become progressively more somber and volatile. There have been more threatening glares, more fights over nothing, more issues among kids who had plenty of issues already. The last attack brought a numbness and an indefinable throbbing like the ache of a phantom limb. There is a vacuum left behind by the dead that can’t be filled by the new faces added to their numbers, and there’s no way to predict the names and numbers of the casualties yet to come from their next mission.

Starkey still has his die-hard believers who try to compensate for the plunging morale by screaming and cheering the loudest when he tries to rally them to the fever pitch he feeds on, but their efforts are less and less effective.

“Where are they, Hayden?”

He turns to see a girl loudly dropping her plate into the bus bin next to her table with an angry clatter as the punctuation to her question—although clearly it’s an accusation. This is one of the girls liberated from Cold Springs Harvest Camp, where the director convinced everyone that Hayden was working for the Juvies. Those kids still cling to the belief that Hayden is a traitor. The one saving grace of the haters is that they keep him on his toes, never allowing him to get too complacent or comfortable.

“Where are what?” asks Hayden. “The sausages, you mean? They’re gone, but there’s still plenty of bacon.”

“Don’t play dumb. You said Starkey went with a team, but I’ve been checking around, and the only ones not here are Starkey, Bam, and Jeevan. That’s not the kind of team Starkey would take. If you ask me, I think you have something to do with their disappearance.”

A few other kids have taken notice of this little confrontation. One kid meets eyes with Hayden, rolling his as if to say I’m on your side—these Cold Springs kids are nuts. As more and more are added to their numbers, the voices of the Cold Springs haters mean less and less. In spite of them, Hayden knows he can be a leader here if he wants to. Good thing he doesn’t want to.

“Anyone with half a brain could see that Starkey needs an assault team leader to scope the place out, and a hacker to figure out how to foil the security system,” Hayden tells her, “otherwise more of us could die in the attack.” Hayden makes sure to emphasize the word “die.” Which has the desired affect. Everyone at the accusational girl’s table becomes uncomfortable, as if spiders have just crawled into their laps from beneath the table.