I shake my head. “I’m doing good work, One. I’m helping people.”
“Yeah,” she says. “What about doing great? You could be helping the Garde to save the planet! Besides, do you really think the Mogadorians will spare this place when their ultimate plan takes form? Don’t you realize that any work you do in the village is just building on quicksand unless you join the fight to stop your people?”
Sensing that she’s getting through to me, she steps closer. “Adam, you could be so much more.”
“I’m not a hero!” I cry, my voice catching in my throat. “I’m a weakling. A defector!”
“Adam,” she begs, her voice catching now too. “You know I like to tease you, and I’d really hate for you to get a big head or something. But you are one in a million. One in ten million. You are the only Mogadorian who has ever defied Mogadorian authority. You have no idea how special you are, how useful to the cause you could be!”
All I’ve ever wanted is for One to see me as special, as a hero. I wish I could believe her now. But I know she’s wrong.
“No. The only thing that’s special about me is you. If Dr. Anu hadn’t hooked me up to your brain, if I hadn’t spent three years living inside your memories . . . I’d have been the one who killed Hannu. And I’d probably have been proud of it.”
I see One flinch.
Good, I think. I’m getting through to her.
“You were a member of the Garde. You had powers,” I say. “I’m just a skinny, powerless ex-Mogadorian. The best I can do is survive. I’m sorry.”
I turn around and begin my long walk back to camp.
One doesn’t follow.
CHAPTER 2
Despite my exhausting middle-of-the-night run to Hannu’s hut, I manage to wake up with the other aid-workers the following morning.
“Look at you, getting up early,” jokes Elswit. “Sure you want to cut into your beauty sleep?”
I almost retaliate by teasing Elswit, calling him the prince like the other workers sometimes do. He earned the nickname when he arrived here with a bunch of expensive nonessentials, none more ridiculous than a luxurious pair of shiny silk pajamas. Nobody makes fun of him to his face, though: he also brought a top-of-the-line laptop with high-tech global wireless, a device he lets us all use and that no one wants to jeopardize their access to.
As I get dressed, I notice that One is nowhere to be seen. She’s usually up before I am, hanging around. I figure she’s sulking from our fight in the jungle.
That, or she’s just disappeared for a while. She does that sometimes. Once I asked her about it. “Where do you go when you’re not here?” She gave me a cryptic look. “Nowhere” was all she said.
We step outside to begin our chores, only to find a light rain is starting. It’s good for the village, but it means the water project will be suspended for the day: the soil is too difficult to work with when it’s raining. So after our chores, me, Marco, and Elswit are free to loaf around, and to read or write letters.
I ask Elswit if I can have an hour with his computer. He’s quick to say yes. Elswit might be a spoiled prince, but he’s a generous one.
I take the laptop to the hut and begin poking around on news sites. When I get time with Elswit’s laptop, I always research possible Loric or Mogadorian activities. I may have removed myself from the battle, but I’m still curious about the fate of the Garde.
It’s a slow news day. I double-check to make sure that I’m alone, then open up a program I’ve created and installed on Elswit’s laptop. I’ve hacked into the wireless signals from Ashwood Estates, my former home, and created a shadow directory that caches Ashwood IM and email chatter.
I wish I could claim I was motivated by some heroic agenda. But the truth is my motive is so pathetic I’d rather die than discuss it with One: I just want to find out if my family misses me.
My family. They think I’m dead. The truth is, they’re probably happy about it.
I spent most of my life on earth in a gated community in Virginia called Ashwood Estates, where trueborn Mogadorians live in normal suburban houses, wearing normal American clothes, living under normal American names, hiding in plain sight. But below the granite countertops and walk-in closets and faux-marble flooring, unseen by the mortals of earth, spreads a massive network of laboratories and training facilities where trueborns and vatborn Mogs work and plot together to bring about the destruction and subjugation of the entire universe.
As the son of the legendary Mogadorian warrior Andrakkus Sutekh, I was expected to be a faithful soldier in this shadowy war. I was enlisted as a subject in an experiment to extract the memories of the first fallen Loric, the girl known as One. The plan was to use the information from those memories against her people, to help us track and exterminate the rest of her kind.
The mind-transfer experiment worked only too well: I spent three years in a coma, locked inside the memories of the dead Loric, living through her happiest and most painful moments as if they were my own.
Eventually I woke from the coma. But I came back to my Mogadorian life different, with an abiding distaste for bloodshed, a queasy but consuming sympathy for the hunted Loric, and with the ghost of One as my constant companion.
In the first of my betrayals, I lied to my people, claiming the experiment had failed and that I had no memory of my encounter with One’s consciousness. I tried to change back, to be a normal, bloodthirsty Mogadorian. But with One always around me, whether as a voice in my head or a vision at my side, it became impossible to assist my people in their attacks on the Loric.
As if led by some inexorable force, I became a traitor, working against my people’s efforts. I attempted to save the third Loric marked for death.
This Loric died anyway, gleefully murdered by my father right before my eyes. Despite my pathetic efforts, I failed to save him. Exposed as a traitor, I was thrown from a ravine by Ivanick, and left for dead.
In all of my electronic snooping, I haven’t been able to pinpoint any communication from my family. Maybe that’s a good thing. Something tells me that it would probably just hurt my feelings.
Obviously all official communication from the underground Mogadorian facilities are firewalled well beyond my ability to hack, but the Ashwood Estates signals weren’t too difficult to break into. One chink in the Mogadorian armor is their expectation of total obedience. But as a former suburban Mog kid I know that Mogadorian teenagers often flout their parents’ rules and use the aboveground wireless to talk about things they’re not technically supposed to.
Not that they’re that loose lipped. The cache I’ve created is mostly filled with tedious emails and chats that have nothing to do with Mogadorian secrets. But the last time I logged on, I did manage to decrypt the IM chatter of a particularly bigmouthed trueborn Mog, Arsis. Apparently, this Arsis kid was demoted from combat training to a job working as an assistant technician in the labs. Arsis is so eager for information about combat ops that all he does is whine and blab to some friend from his former unit about everything he sees and does in the lab, all in the hopes that his friend will reciprocate.
So far his friend has been mum, but I’ve managed to learn a good deal about what’s going on below Ashwood.
Arsis: It’s so borrrring. Another hole day guarding the door to Dr. Zakos lab. Apperently they’ve got humans in their plugged into machines. I dont know if they are being tortured or what, cuz Im not even allowed inside …
Whatever sympathy I feel for Arsis is obliterated by his atrocious spelling and grammar. It’s worse than Ivan’s. I didn’t think such a thing was even possible.
Farther down in the transcript, I discover another detail.
Arsis:… there’s only one left, and I guess he’s not even awake, just plugged into machines that drege their brains for info. Doctor Zakos thinks tech will imrpove in the next few years and they will get decent intel from their brains. Whatever. It’s been a hole week and all I get to do is clean the lab equipment.
I’ve never even heard of Dr. Zakos. I wonder if he is Dr. Anu’s successor. I wonder if there’s some connection between this “dreging” they are doing to the captive humans and the technology they used to hook me into One’s memories. I wonder—
“What you doing?”
Startled, I realize that One has curled up beside me on the bed, a cheshire grin on her face. As nonchalantly as I can manage, I click out of my program and close the laptop.
Her grin curls into a frown. “Keeping secrets now, are we?”
“We share a brain,” I say. “It’s not like I can hide anything from you, even if I want to.”
She’s quiet for a moment, no doubt processing everything I’ve just learned from my snooping.
“Answer me this,” she says.
I put my hands up. Shoot.
“If you’re so determined not to get involved, why bother digging around at all?”
It’s a good question, but I brush it off.
“Just because I’m curious doesn’t mean I can do anything.” I pick up the laptop and get off the bed. “I have to get this back to Elswit.”
I pause in the doorway. One has a pensive, inscrutable look on her face. The only thing I can read is her continued disappointment in me.
“Sorry, One,” I say, turning to go. “My answer’s still no.”
CHAPTER 3
The rain finally stops in the middle of the night, so the following morning after chores, Marco, Elswit, and I head back into the village on the jeep and resume our work on the well. It’s muddy, which slows us down and complicates our work. As a result, I’m so involved in my job I don’t even notice One’s absence until I’m halfway done with the day.
I don’t have her usual chatter to help pass the rest of the time, but I’m kind of relieved she’s not around. I’m still haunted by the disappointed look on her face yesterday, and I could use a little time off from her judgment.
After work, me and Elswit make a yam mash for dinner, and then join a few of the other workers for a game of cards in the recreation tent. Around ten, I return to the hut. Marco’s already under the covers, asleep. I undress quietly and slip into my bed, conscious of One’s continued absence. It’s unlike her to disappear for so long.
I scan the room, looking to see if she’s tucked into some corner, hiding, but she’s nowhere to be seen.
“One?” I whisper, as quietly as I can. “You there?”
No answer.
“Come on, One.” A little louder this time.
“Dude.” It’s Marco. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Hearing Marco say “dude” with his funny Italian accent is usually a highlight of my time at the camp. But getting caught talking to my invisible friend, I’m mortified.
“Sorry, man,” I say, blushing, annoyed with One for making me raise my voice.
I still expect to see her emerge from a doorway or closet any minute, laughing at me for getting busted talking to “myself.”
But she’s nowhere to be seen.
