I try to sleep, tossing and turning as the room fills up with the other aid-workers, one by one. But sleep doesn’t come.
For all of One’s comings and goings I’ve never gone a whole day without seeing her—not since those three years I spent plugged into her memories. She’s just always been there.
Eventually I give up trying to sleep. I half dress, put on my sandals, and shuffle out to the compound’s backyard. It’s surprisingly cold and I clutch my arms to my chest for warmth. It’s dark outside, barely illuminated by moonlight and the dim lamp next to the latrine, and it takes me a minute for my eyes to adjust.
That’s when I see her, a faint outline crouched beside the baobab tree at the center of the yard.
I approach slowly. “One?”
She looks up at me. I can’t tell if it’s a trick of the moonlight, but there’s something strange about the way she looks: it’s like she’s both luminescent and too dark to see.
She remains silent. I stop in my tracks.
“Come on. This isn’t funny.”
“Oh,” she says, laughing bitterly. “I agree. This isn’t funny at all.” I can tell from her voice that she’s been crying. “I didn’t want you to see me like this,” she says.
Now I’m spooked. “See you like what?”
But up close I understand what she means. Her skin, her whole being, is strangely milky, almost translucent. I can look right through her.
“I keep disappearing,” she says. “Lately it’s been taking all my strength to keep myself visible.”
I’m quiet, afraid to speak. But I’m also afraid to listen, afraid of what she’ll say next.
She turns to me, staring right into my eyes. “Remember when I told you I went ‘nowhere’ when I was gone from you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I thought you were just being mysterious....”
She shakes her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I was being literal, actually. I really do go nowhere. I disappear completely.” Now she’s crying freely. “Each time, I can feel myself getting weaker. Less real. It keeps happening. I can still fight it, but it’s getting harder. It feels like I’m dying all over again.”
She closes her eyes. As she does, she flickers in and out of visibility. I can intermittently see the bark of the tree behind her.
“Well,” she says, opening her eyes again. “Dr. Anu never promised this would last.”
“One,” I begin. “What are you saying?” I ask the question even though a part of me—the One part of me—already knows the answer.
“My existence … us … this …” She gestures to the empty space between us. “You’re forgetting me, Adam.”
“That’s impossible, One. I’ll never forget you.”
She smiles sadly. “I know you’ll always remember me. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s one thing to remember I existed, it’s another for me to stay alive inside of you.”
I shake my head and turn away, not following, not willing to listen.
“It’s been a while since we were connected in Anu’s lab. Too long, I guess. I’m fading. The way we are, the way we talk to each other, the way you can see me, the way I feel alive even though I died years ago. Maybe forgetting is the wrong way of putting it. But whatever you want to call it, this wasn’t built to last. It’s breaking down.”
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.”
Yeah, I say. I don’t need to say any more: One knows what I’m thinking.
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....”
This is what we have to do, I say. I sound way more certain than I feel. But I have no choice: I can’t lose her.
“Once we land, we don’t need to go to Ashwood. We can go anywhere, try to find the other Loric …”
Screw the others, I say. Though my plan is vague, I know that my only hope of saving One, of keeping her by my side, lies somewhere in the laboratory beneath Ashwood Estates. I’m not doing this for them.
“I know,” she says. “You’re doing this to try and save me, to find some way to keep me alive. You think if you go back, you can maybe find some way into the labs. And maybe my body’s still there, maybe you can reengage the mind transfer, restore me, buy me a few more years.” She bites her lip, worried about the risk I’m taking. “Seems like a lot of maybes to risk your life over.”
She’s right. But I don’t have a choice: without One, I’m nothing. Even a 1 percent chance of succeeding is worth pursuing.
In the cab on the way to Ashwood Estates, my fear is like a fist in my stomach, pushing upwards. We’re getting close, maybe ten minutes away.
Nine minutes. Eight minutes.
I feel bile churning. I ask the driver to pull over to the side of the road and I rush out to the tall grass at the edge of the highway and throw up what little I’ve eaten since leaving Kenya.
I take a moment. To breathe, to look out over the grass to the open fields beyond. I know this is it: my last chance to run.
Then I wipe my mouth and return to the cab, grateful that One isn’t around to see me like this.
“You okay, kid?” the driver asks.
I nod. “Yeah.”
The driver just shakes his head and gets us back on the road.
Six minutes. Five minutes.
We enter the suburbs surrounding Ashwood Estates. Fast-food-glutted intersections give way to middle-class townships, then to upscale gated communities indistinguishable from Ashwood. The perfect hiding place.
From above we’re just another suburb: no one would imagine the strange culture inside those tastefully bland McMansions, the world-destroying plans being hatched below. In all my years living at Ashwood we’d never fallen under even a moment’s suspicion from the government or the local police.
As Ashwood’s imposing gates loom into view up the road, I find myself darkly amused by the irony that a walled fortress has been such an effective way to deflect suspicion in suburban America.
I tell the driver to let me off across the street, passing him the last of the money that Elswit was kind enough to give me to get home.
I approach the front gate’s intercom system, glad I threw up back on the highway: if I hadn’t then, I would now.
There’s no point being coy. I step right in front of the security camera and press the buzzer for my house and look right into the camera. Every house has a direct feed to it. I will be identified immediately.