The Wild One Read Online Free Page A

He’d broken out of his incubation pod sometime in the winter. He knew that. But he’d already looked like a human who was around seven years old. So did that mean he broke out of the pod on his seventh birthday, or on his
first
birthday, or what?
    There was no use thinking about it, really. All he cared about was the date social services had assigned him for his birthday. Less than six months away That’s the day he would finally get his freedom.
    â€œI’ll call you soon.” Mr. Cuddihy headed out the door.
    Yeah, he’d call, and the whole foster family garbage would start again. All the little getting-to-know-you talks. All the rules-of-this-house crap. Michael sighed and started stickering the water bottles again. At least he wouldn’t have to see Mr. Hughes’s superior little smirk anymore. And he was finally getting near the end of the whole fake family thing. That’s what he hated the most. If foster families were just like motels or something, it would be okay. But there was always this idea that you were supposed to care about them. And that they were supposed to care about you. As if that ever really happened.
    Well, maybe it did happen sometimes. He’d seen a few kids down at social services who seemed close with their foster families. But they were mostly little kids. Cute little kids.
    When Michael was a little kid, he wasn’t cute. He was weird. He was “seven years old,” but he didn’t know how to talk or use a fork or use a toilet or anything. He learned fast, but he still wasn’t exactly the kind of kid that adults looked at and went “awww” over.
    The alien wind chime jangled again, and Max walked in. Michael checked his watch. Quitting time.
    â€œI’m out of here, okay?” he called.
    â€œSee you tomorrow,” Kristen called back from her office.
    Michael grabbed his jacket. “Let’s go.”
    â€œHey, I wanted to do a little shopping first,” Max protested. “Do you have any of those maps of where the aliens live?”
    Michael snorted. “A lady actually asked me that once,” he said as they headed outside and over to Max’ss Jeep.
    Max swung himself into the driver’s seat. “Okay, where to tonight?” He pulled out of the parking lot and headed out of town.
    Michael took his map out of his pocket. He studied all the little shaded sections, all the places he and Max had searched for their parents’ spaceship over the years. He figured the government—or Project Clean Slate—had moved the ship to a Storage facility somewhere near the crash site. He didn’t think theywould have risked transporting it too far. Michael planned to keep looking until he found it.
    But what was he going to do when he’d shaded in the whole state on his map? Would he just give up the search? How could he? The ship was his only way back to his planet, his real home. No, there was no way he was giving up. If he shaded in the whole state, he’d just start over and check every inch of the desert again and again and again.
    â€œI heard there are some caves about fifteen miles southwest of the crash site,” Michael said. “I want to see if we can find any of them. Maybe there’s one big enough to hide the ship. They’re supposed to be hard to see. The mouths are just cracks in the desert floor—like our cave.”
    Michael, Max, and Isabel didn’t know much about their past. But they had figured out that their parents were on board the ship that crashed in the desert in 1947. The markings on their incubation pods matched markings on debris found near the site. They didn’t know how their pods got from the ship to the cave where they broke free. Maybe one of their parents managed to save them before they died.
    Michael liked that idea, although he would never admit it. He liked the idea of someone caring enough about what happened to him to make sure he was