Seeing how upset I’m getting, she shrugs, trying to seem casual. “We’re both going to have to accept it. My time is running out.”
“No,” I say, refusing to believe it.
But when I turn back to her, she’s already gone.
After a restless night, searching for One and eventually making my way back to the cabin alone, I drag myself out of bed. I brush my teeth, get dressed, finish my morning chores. I work in the village under the baking sun.
What choice do I have? It’s not like I can ask Marco for time off. “Hey Marco, a few months ago I emerged from a three-year coma, during which I lived inside the memories of a dead alien girl, and she’s been my constant companion ever since. But now she’s dying, this time for good.... Any chance you could cover for me at the well today?” Wouldn’t really fly. So I grit my teeth and keep working.
One is not as scarce today as she was yesterday. I saw her briefly when I woke up but she stayed far away, and she’s hanging out at the edge of camp when I return from the village, sitting against the same tree as last night.
“Don’t,” she says, as I walk over to join her. “No puppy-dog eyes, please.”
“One …” I start.
“I’m fine,” she says, interrupting me. “Yesterday was just a bad day. I’m sure I’ve got a few more weeks.”
I’m speechless, heartbroken.
“You’ve got dinner to cook.”
I balk. Dinner? Who cares about dinner when I have so little time left with her?
“You have to leave. Elswit’s giving you funny looks for talking to a tree.” She laughs, waving me off. “Go.”
I head to the kitchen. As we cook, Elswit tells me stories about his rich-kid misadventures, before he got his shit together and dedicated himself to service. Usually I find Elswit’s stories amusing, but my mind keeps drifting back to One, sitting under the tree.
This camp, the village … these have been my sanctuary the past couple months, and it has gotten so easy to imagine a happy future for myself here. But when I look across camp to see One, flickering in and out of sight, leaning wearily against the tree, I imagine what this place feels like to her.
While her people are out there, fighting for survival, she’s stuck here for her last hours, simply because I’ve found a place where I feel safe.
I realize that to her this place isn’t a home. It’s a grave.
CHAPTER 4
I lean back in my airplane seat, staring at the passport in my hand as the jet hums somewhere over the Atlantic: ADAM SUTTON. In the photo, I’m beaming, the tooth I lost in battle with Ivan a small black gap in my smile. Looking at Adam Sutton’s smiling face no one would ever know how afraid I am, what an insane risk I’m taking right now.
Elswit sits next to me, headphones on, watching some first-run blockbuster on his tablet computer while joggling his knees. The joggling is annoying, but I’m in no position to complain: Elswit came through for me big-time.
I didn’t even have to come up with a grand lie for him. I just told him I had a family crisis and needed to get back to the United States. He said that was all he needed to know: he took me to the American embassy in Nairobi, paid for my new passport, and arranged for me to join him on his father’s private jet, already scheduled to bring him home to Northern California for his birthday.
If I didn’t already have an active American identity, none of this would’ve worked. Fortunately my father, “Andrew Sutton,” never bothered to report me missing. I wonder what alarms my passport replacement might have set off at the Mogadorian headquarters, but I guess it doesn’t make any difference. When I show up at Ashwood Estates, either they’ll kill me or they won’t. Knowing I’m coming shouldn’t make a difference.
We touched down in London to refuel, our second refueling stop. Now we’re back in the air, next stop Virginia, where I’ll part ways with Elswit. At that point nothing besides a cab ride to Ashwood will stand between me and my upcoming confrontation with my family.
I sink even deeper into my seat, dreading my arrival.
“Must be scary.” I turn to see One, sitting in the seat next to mine. She’s been gone for most of the twenty-hour trip, off to her own private purgatory. “I can’t even imagine.”
I’m about to see my family again for the first time in months. I expect to be greeted as a traitor. Maybe I’ll be executed for treason: killed where I stand, or fed to a piken. Mogadorians have no particular history or protocol for handling treason; dissent is not a problem they have much, if any, experience with.
I know my only hope is to convince the General that I’m worth more to him alive than dead.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says, a guilty, worried expression on her face. “It’s dangerous. When I talked about taking up the cause, I didn’t mean this....”
