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
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.
“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
