I don’t want to hear it. “Where the hell were you?” I demand. “What the hell happened back there?”
Rex barely glances up from the road. “Same thing that happened to you,” he says calmly, as if I’d just asked him to remind me of tomorrow’s weather forecast. “The Mogs got to me too. They must think I’m on your side now. I fought them off, but by the time I got rid of them and made it to you, this guy was already on it.” He points to a lump on the dashboard, which I only then realize is Dust, in his lizard form. “When I found you, you were passed out on the pavement, and Dust’s just sitting there, practically on top of you, watching over you like he’s your mom or something. He barely even let me come near you. Anyway, what’s done is done. We got away. What do you think of the car? I stole it.”
If he expects me to believe any of that story, he’s an idiot. I want to tell him so, but with my head still swimming I only manage to spit out one short sentence. “Screw you, Rex,” I say just as everything fades to black again.
CHAPTER TEN
I COME TO IN ANOTHER PARKING LOT, FINALLY feeling myself again. Sort of, at least.
Based on the light streaming into the car, it must be morning. Rex has the windows rolled down and the air smells vaguely of the ocean.
“Finally,” he says when he sees me stirring. “I was beginning to think you were gone for good.”
I sit up. I look at him. I can’t believe how stupid I feel. I knew exactly what he was up to all along and I let him get away with it anyway.
“You betrayed me,” I say.
He just laughs. “I knew you were going to say that. Kind of funny, right? You’re a traitor to your entire race, and you’re mad at me?”
I get ready to hit him with every bit of tectonic force I have left at my disposal, but as soon as I so much as think about it I start to feel faint again.
“You seriously expect me to believe you weren’t the one who called in the Mogadorian mafia? You go mysteriously missing just as they show up and then you somehow don’t reappear until I’ve fought them all off?”
“I told you,” he said. “They attacked me too.”
“Sure. Right.” I know he’s full of shit, but I honestly don’t know what to do about it. What I don’t understand is why he’s toying with me like this. If he wanted to kill me, he could have killed me by now. He could have called in more Mogs.
Instead, I’m still alive, still uncaptured, sitting unscathed in the passenger seat of a carjacked sedan with Dust on my lap, whining at me.
I look out the window and I see where we are. Sort of, at least. We’re somewhere on the water. A foghorn blares and I squint out the window to see a ferry crawling across the water and into view.
“You wanted to go to Plum Island, right?” Rex says, seeing the confused look on my face. “How else are we going to get there except by boat?”
I still don’t believe he didn’t give the Mogs our location. But then that doesn’t explain why he came to get me, why he helped me escape. He could have just left me at the rest stop, left me to get caught by the Mogs, by the cops, whoever. I need some air. I need to get out of this car. Rex doesn’t try to stop me when I open the car door. Dust jumps out onto the pavement and I’m right behind him.
Rex finds me on a bench half an hour later. I don’t know what else to do, so I’m just sitting. I’ve tried calling Malcolm. No answer. I tried picturing One in my head. It would have helped just to imagine her face. But it wouldn’t come to me. Even golden retriever Dust has given up trying to make me feel better. He’s just lying at my feet.
“I didn’t tell them,” Rex says. He’s standing a few paces away but doesn’t try to come any closer. “The scouts have been following you all along. They missed you a few times and then I think you gave them the drop when you decided to hop the train. But they were going to catch up eventually.”
“Where were you, then?” I ask. “Don’t try to tell me they attacked you too.”
“The truth?”
“Yeah,” I say. “For once. The truth.”
Rex pauses. “I was hiding,” he finally says. “They might have already seen me with you, but I didn’t want them to see me fighting to save you—to think that I’m a traitor. So I hid.”
I examine his face for signs that he’s lying. I honestly have no idea. I don’t know why it matters. But it does.
“So you were just going to let them kill me?”
He looks at the sky. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I was. If it came to that.”
“But now you’re helping me?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
Rex shuffles his feet nervously. “I don’t know,” he says. “I still believe in the Mogadorian cause. I still believe in Setrákus Ra’s principles. When it comes time to fight, I’ll be there with the rest of my brothers—if I’m still allowed to be. War is in my blood. But I’m helping you anyway. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. I can’t explain it even to myself. But it’s the truth.”
I don’t answer him. I don’t know how.
“So do you want to go to Plum Island and rescue the Chimæra or not?” he finally asks.
The ferry doesn’t go to Plum Island. There’s no reason it should—normal Americans need the highest level of clearance even to set foot on the island. That rules out getting there openly.
But in a seaside community like this, most people own a boat, at least a little one. Rex and I spend the afternoon peering into unattended garages until we find ourselves hauling a small rowboat towards the harbor. We stash it behind some trees in the neighboring park until the sun’s going down and we see the last ferry pull in. Then we wait another half hour just to be sure no one will spot us and drag it to the end of the dock. From there it’s easy enough to flip it over and lay it into the water, climb in and start rowing.
While I’d spent my morning passed out, Rex had been coming up with a plan to get us inside the facility. Sitting across from me in our rowboat, he explains it to me. It’s so simple that it sounds absurd.
“I’ll tell them you’re my prisoner,” he says. “That I tracked you from New Mexico until I captured you and brought you here. They’re looking for you, right? They send that many scouts to get you, they think you’re important. It might even go all the way up the chain to Setrákus Ra. If I bring you in, there’s no chance they’ll turn you away.”
“They could just shoot me on sight,” I say.
Rex scrunches his face and shakes his head. In the distance, I see lights. We’re getting closer. “Nah,” he says. “First, they’ll want to know how you took down Dulce. Hell, I want to know that myself.” A quick grin surfaces. “Then they’ll shoot you.”
“Gee, thanks.” I glance over to where Dust is gliding along beside us in hawk form, tilting to one side from time to time so a wingtip knifes through the water. “We don’t know anything about who they’ve got there, how they’re set up, what they’ve heard, what—”
Rex stops me. “Will you relax? Trust me, I know how our military works. I’ve got this covered.”
If I had to make a list of all the people I trusted, it would be a really short list, and Rex wouldn’t be on it. Even if I did trust him, I still wouldn’t like the plan. What if they know Rex has been working with me all this time? What if they kill us before we even get the chance to explain ourselves? It all relies too much on faith—and after yesterday, faith is something I’m pretty much all out of.
But before I can argue, Dust lands on the edge of the boat. He’s flapping his wings furiously, and then he shifts into cat form. Just as quickly, he changes again, this time into a wolf. He’s too big for the boat and nearly tips over, but now he’s shifting so quickly that I start to lose track of what he’s even supposed to be. And he’s making a noise that’s so loud I have to put my fingers in my ears, halfway between a howl and a trumpet blast, deep and quivery. I’ve never heard anything like it.
“Dust,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
I put my hand out to rub him in the hope that it will calm him down. His body feels like liquid, but it does the trick—he’s starting to get control of himself again. As he settles into lizard form, he finally quiets down. He’s still agitated though. He’s darting around the floor of the boat, cocking his head frantically in every direction, sniffing the air. It looks like he’s hearing something that Rex and I can’t—almost like there’s something calling to him.
It’s very weird, but I don’t know what to do about it. The island’s close enough now that I think I can just see where that harbor opens up. Rex pulls the oars in. “You ready to do this?” he asks. I’m not ready at all, but I nod. At least Dust has settled down enough to climb into the pocket of my hoodie. I can still feel him twitching nervously in there, but it seems like he’s getting back to normal.
Rex doesn’t pay any attention to how uneasy this is making me. He just digs through his pockets until he pulls out the plastic ties that he bought from a local hardware store while we’d been waiting for the ferries to clear out for the day.
“Give me your wrists,” he says. Every bit of my common sense is telling me not to do it. Letting myself be tied up and marched into a Mogadorian stronghold by a Mog I barely trust—doesn’t sound like the most brilliant scheme, does it?
Certain I’m walking into some kind of incredibly elaborate trap, I offer up my hands anyway. I’ve come this far. What else can I do but take the risk?
Within seconds Rex has me expertly bound. It’s almost like we’re back to the way we started at Dulce: one guard and one prisoner, this time with our roles reversed.
Hopefully it’s just for show.
We’re a few meters from the shore when a blinding searchlight engulfs us in its dazzling beam and a booming voice calls out. “Stop! Identify yourself!”
Rex straightens. “Rexicus Saturnus, from Dulce,” he shouts back. “And a prisoner!” He grabs my hands and raises them so those watching can see the restraints.
The pause has me sweating despite the chill coming off the waves, but finally the voice replies, “Come ahead.” They don’t offer to pick us up, but instead stay back and let Rex row us the rest of the way in. Typical Mogs.
“Shouldn’t there be regular soldiers here?” I whisper. “Instead of Mogadorians?”
“Used to be that way,” Rex says. “But we’re getting more and more power in the American government lately. Pretty soon the White House’ll be run by Mogadorians too.”
It’s a scary thought—and one that would have made me incredibly excited just a few short years ago.
At the sound of the Mogadorians shouting at us, Dust has crawled from my pocket. And before I have time to even say good-bye, he’s turned into a hummingbird and is gone into the night sky.
