When he’s close enough, the warrior lunges, burying his sword in One’s back, the blade emerging from her abdomen. From this moment on, he will be a hero to my people.
Maybe the only good thing about death is that you never have to relive it. You never have to remember the pain. Except, One does. Though she’d been gone since the airport, ghost-One is suddenly next to me again. She’s hunched and sobbing, her mind crying out to mine through the link we share. She can feel herself dying.
Her mind throbs with pain and fear. As it does, I feel the mental block she’d been maintaining crumble and fall, just like the walls of the stilt house. She’s lost control over her memories.
Now is my chance to return to the Loric airstrip, to see the identities of the other Garde.
As Number One’s body slips lifeless to the ground, everything begins to blur again, like it did when I first entered One’s memories. Only now, I’m in control. I cycle backward through her memories, knowing exactly what I want to see.
CHAPTER 10
I sit on the beach, waiting for One to emerge from the water. When she does, her wet suit dripping, surfboard slung under her arm, I stop the memory. Then I loop backward a bit further, watching her surf a wave and then return to the beach again.
This is the memory I chose to return to. I replay the scene over and over, unsure how many times I watch her come out of the water, until eventually ghost-One appears beside me. She looks surprised to see me here but sits down on the beach next to me. For a while, we don’t say anything; we just stare out at the ocean, watching Number One surf through one of her last happy days. Part of me wishes I could grab a board and go out there with her, but that’s not the way this works. This moment will have to do.
“I’m sorry you died,” I blurt out, meaning it.
“Yeah,” answers One. “That sucked.”
I think back to the floating vision of the solar system. What will happen when my people commence their invasion on Earth? Will this beach look like the ones on Lorien must now?
“I don’t understand why any of this has to happen,” I say.
“Maybe you should ask your pops. He’s got all the answers, right?”
I nod my head slowly, even though the thought of bringing these feelings to the General makes me feel nauseous. One is watching me, a small smile forming at the edges of her mouth.
“I’m going to,” I say, feeling suddenly resolute. “I want to know why.”
“Good,” replies One, and she squeezes my hand, even though I can sense that part of her is still sort of repulsed by me.
A shiver goes down my spine, and without quite knowing why, I quickly pull my hand away.
“What happens now?” I ask One.
“Now,” she says, “you wake up.”
CHAPTER 11
I wake up in my bedroom. My bedroom, back at Ashwood Estates. I’m not in One’s life anymore.
It’s morning, and my eyes adjust slowly to the early light. It hurts to open them.
My entire body feels sore and weak. I can’t sit up, but I take a few deep breaths and focus on wiggling some feeling back into my toes.
I’m covered by two layers of blankets. One of my arms—pale, paler than usual—rests on top of the blankets, hooked up to a plastic tube that leads to a nutrient drip. Strange.
How long have I been out that they had to hook me up to an IV?
I hear a noise at my bedside and slowly, painfully turn my head. There’s a girl kneeling on the floor next to my bed, her back to me. She’s narrow and gawky in that almost-a-teenager sort of way. There’s something oddly familiar about her, and I struggle to place her from around the neighborhood. What’s she doing in my bedroom?
The girl has a Build-a-Piken set spread out on the floor before her. Resembling one of Earth’s toy chemistry sets, it’s one of the few “games” we Mogadorians are permitted. I’m too weak to speak, still working moisture back into my desert of a mouth, so I watch in silence as the girl drags a scalpel down the belly of a wriggling earthworm. Then she fills an eyedropper with a clear solution and dribbles it into the worm’s open wound.
The worm only writhes at first, but then its body begins to contort and change. Nubs of pliable flesh begin to protrude from the wound where the solution hit. The girl grabs a pair of tweezers and carefully stretches out the flesh, helping it to form into six spindly, spider-like legs. Haltingly, the tiny piken manages to get these legs under it, hefting the twisting remains of the worm’s body. It scuttles a few steps across the floor, then collapses.
The girl watches, her head cocked, as the piken-worm tries to regain its footing. It can’t, toppling onto what would be its back, legs kicking helplessly in the air. After a few moments of futile struggling, the piken’s legs stop moving and it disintegrates into ash. The girl wipes up the ash with a damp washcloth and produces a new worm from a nearby box.
Something about this makes me feel incredibly sad. Not for the worm but more for the girl. It’s disturbing to see how casually she alters and extinguishes the worm. It makes me uncomfortable to think how little my people value life. As soon as I have this thought, I get a strange, sick feeling in my stomach. It goes against everything written in the book; everything my people believe.
An image of One impaled on a Mogadorian blade springs to mind. I push it away.
I try to shift in the bed a little bit more, and it makes a noise. The girl turns her head sharply, her eyes widening when she sees me watching her.
“You’re awake!” she shouts, excited.
Kelly. The girl is my sister. But … she’s grown up. When she springs to her feet, it’s clear that she’s almost a foot taller than when I last saw her, which should’ve been just yesterday afternoon, although it feels much longer. Was much longer, apparently.
“How—” I cough, my throat aching. “How long?” I manage.
Kelly has already sprung to the doorway, shouting downstairs for our mother. She rushes back to me.
“Three years,” she says. “By Ra, you’ve been sleeping for three years!”
CHAPTER 12
I stare at myself in my bedroom mirror. I’m taller than I was. I’m skinnier, too, even though I didn’t think that was possible. Whatever my parents had me hooked up to during my coma, it certainly didn’t build any muscle. I suck in a deep breath and watch my rib cage protrude through my chest’s too-pale skin.
Even standing in front of the mirror, examining my three-years-older body, takes a physical toll. I must look wobbly, because my mother grabs me by the elbow and leads me back to bed. She’s been quiet since shooing Kelly and her rapid-fire questions from the room, giving me time to gather myself. I’m grateful for that. My mother has always been the gentle one in the family, often to the General’s chagrin.
I can tell by the way she looks at me that she didn’t expect me to wake up. She strokes my hair.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Strange,” I reply. It’s true; my body feels weak and foreign, having grown up without me. But it’s more than that. It feels strange to be back here with my own people, knowing what I do now. Even my mother, here stroking my hair, is a brutal warrior at heart, intent on killing the Garde.
I picture the Mogadorians swarming One, feel her fear and anger anew. I can’t help but see my mother’s face on one of the soldiers. As she gently takes my hand in hers, I’m imagining my mother plunging a sword into One’s back.
Suddenly I don’t trust my own family.
“I don’t remember anything,” I say, even though she didn’t ask. “The machine didn’t work.”
My mother nods. “Your father will be disappointed.”
I decided to lie when I was still living in One’s memories, when we were sitting on the beach together. I won’t be telling my people anything that I saw. Not that anything I learned would help Mogadore win its war anyway. What could I even say? That unlike Mogadorians, the Loric are allowed to develop individuality? That their freedom from doctrines like those in the Great Book is simultaneously their greatest strength and ultimate weakness? That I’ve seen what our people did to Lorien and that it looks like shit?
Yeah, that would go over big.
I’m grateful for the chance to practice this lie on my mother. When it comes time to tell the General, he won’t be so gentle.
“Dr. Anu will have to go back to the drawing board, I guess,” I say, probing a bit to see if she bought it.
“That won’t be happening,” replies my mother. “When you didn’t wake up …”
She hesitates, but I don’t need her to finish telling me. I can picture the General enraged, storming into Anu’s laboratory and drawing his sword.
“Your father never liked Anu. Honestly, the way that old man talked, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
There are heavy footfalls on the staircase, approaching my room. So here comes the General at last. Here to debrief his only trueborn son, probably to rebuke me for not waking up sooner.
“What’s up, skinny?”
Ivan leans in the doorway, grinning. How old would he be now—fourteen? He looks like he could play linebacker for a college football team. Like me, Ivan has grown taller in the last three years, but he’s also grown wider in every conceivable way. I imagine all the strength and combat training he’s been doing without me, likely coached by the General himself. I wonder how his Mogadorian theory grades have fared without me around to coach him.
“Did you have a nice nap?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Thanks.”
“Awesome,” he says. “Anyway, Father wants to see you downstairs.”
I feel my mother grow tense beside me.
Since when did Ivan start calling the General “Father”?
“Adamus needs his rest,” says my mother.
Ivan snorts. “All he’s been doing is resting,” he says, then turns to me. “Come on, get dressed.”
There is a familiar note of authority in Ivan’s voice. He sounds very much like the General.
CHAPTER 13
I’m expecting Ivan to lead me to my father’s office, but instead we take the elevator down into the tunnels beneath Ashwood Estates.
“You woke up just in time for some action,” he says.
“Great,” I reply, struggling not to sound halfhearted. “What’s happening?”
“You’ll see,” he says. “Big shit going down.”
When the elevator doors hiss open, Ivan slaps me hard on the back. In my weakened state, I stumble forward a few steps. I’d probably have fallen right to the floor if not for Ivan grabbing me. He pulls me into a brotherly embrace, but in addition to an intimidating amount of strength, I feel a kind of menace in the way Ivan pats me roughly on the back. My palms begin to sweat.
“Seriously,” he whispers. “So glad you’re awake. Father’s going to be pleased that his favorite son is finally up and about.”
Ivan leads me to the briefing room. There, two dozen Mogadorian warriors sit in a semicircle before the General. My father is as big as ever, his towering presence commanding the attention of everyone assembled, none of them even noticing when Ivan and I slip into the room.