“Adamus?” It’s my mother. Her voice cracks on the second syllable, and at the sound of it my legs almost give out.
I know she’s a monster. She wants nothing more than the destruction of the entire Loric race and domination of this entire planet. But the sound of her voice hits me hard: I’ve missed her. More than I realized.
“Mom,” I say, struggling to keep my voice from breaking.
But the intercom line has gone dead.
She’s probably pulled an alarm. Notified the General. Within minutes I’ll be on a rack, or thrown into a piken’s feeding pen …
“Adamus?!”
Her voice again. It’s not coming from the intercom.
I step around the intercom panel to see my mother in the distance through the gate. She’s run out of our house at the top of the hill. She’s in a sundress, the kind she wears when she’s baking, running down the hill barefoot. Running towards me.
In rage? In confusion? I steel myself for her approach.
“Adam!” she cries, getting closer and closer, her bare feet slapping against the asphalt. Before I know it she’s swung open the pedestrian access gate and has pulled me into her arms, hugging me, crying.
“My sweet boy, my fallen hero … you’re alive.”
I’m stunned. She’s not greeting me with anger. She’s greeting me with love.
CHAPTER 5
I sit on our living-room couch, sipping the lemonade my mother brought me. She’s talking up a storm, and I’m careful not to interrupt: I need to tread carefully, to figure out what happened here before I commit to a particular story.
“I didn’t believe them,” she says, sitting next to me and putting a hand on my knee. “I couldn’t believe them.”
I take another sip, buying myself some time. Didn’t believe them about what?
“They told me everything and I knew it had happened, but I didn’t believe it … I knew you couldn’t really be dead.”
Oh. She couldn’t believe that part.
“I’ve always known physical combat wasn’t your gift. I told your father a thousand times you’d be better suited to a tactical role, but he was determined not to break with custom, and insisted we make no distinction between combat and strategy. Everyone must fight in the war. But when he told me you’d been killed, that that disgusting Loric had thrown you off a cliff … it felt like my worst fears had come true.”
My mind reels. It was my adopted brother Ivan who threw me into the ravine, under my father’s approving gaze. I hadn’t been killed by a Loric: I’d joined the Loric cause.
“They said they searched high and low for you …”
A lie. They left me for dead.
“… that they were as heartbroken as I was …”
More lies.
“But they didn’t find your body, and that gave me some hope. I knew in my heart that somehow you had managed to survive.”
She hugs me again. It takes all of my effort to receive her hug without betraying the revolution going on inside me. I expected to return home to a Mogadorian firing squad, but instead I’ve come back as a fallen soldier.
“No.” His voice. My mother and I turn at once to see my father in the doorway, his mouth open in shock.
“He’s come back to us,” my mother exclaims. “Our boy’s alive!”
I have never in my entire life seen the General at a loss for words, but there he is, too stunned to speak.
In a flash I understand everything. My father lied to my mother. My father lied to the rest of the Mogadorians. Whether to protect his ego from disgrace or to maintain his authority as a general, or both, he fabricated an honorable death for me. No one here except my father—and Ivan, wherever he is—knows that I turned against the Mogadorian cause.
I only have a moment to act, to interpret my father’s stunned silence and play it to my advantage.
I leap off the couch and embrace him.
“I’m alive, Father.” I feel all six and a half feet of his body stiffen in disgust, but I forge ahead with my ruse. “I’ve come home.”
I tell them a story of my return to Ashwood. Washing up on the shore at the bottom of the ravine, being rescued by a local, recovering at the aid camp. I adjust the truth slightly, characterizing my human friends as fools, claiming that I deliberately manipulated Elswit for his assistance in order to get back here, painting myself as the Mogadorian loyalist I no longer am—but this version is close enough to the truth. And I know it’s what they need to hear.
“I had to get back here to see you,” I conclude. “To keep serving the cause.”
I force myself to stare right into my father’s eyes. It takes all of my effort not to flinch from his gaze, just as I know it’s taking all of his will not to lunge across the coffee table and strangle me where I stand.
In the kitchen, the oven timer dings. My mother, clucking over my heroic and daring escape, excuses herself to check on whatever is in the oven.
“So …” I say to my father, waiting for his reaction.
He says nothing but jumps at me, gathering my shirt in his fist and lifting me off the ground. I hover inches from the floor, held tight by his grip.
His face, getting redder every second, glowers before mine. “Tell me why I shouldn’t break your neck right this instant.”
“If you wanted the truth to come out, wanted people to know how I failed you, you wouldn’t have bothered to lie to everyone.” My twisted collar is beginning to cut off my oxygen. I force myself to keep talking. “How’d you convince Ivan to keep your secret?”
He ignores my question. “If you think having this over me will keep you safe, you are sorely mistaken. If I killed you now, the only person I’d have to tell the truth to is your mother.” He gives me a violent shake. “She’d learn to accept it. She’d have no choice.”
My heart seizes: I know he’s serious. He could kill me. He wants to kill me.
I quickly switch tacks, hoping I’m not too late.
“I’m sorry, General.” Channeling my own mortal terror, I will repentant tears to my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
He looks at me with renewed contempt: the sight of his son groveling for his life is probably as hard for him as the sight of me turning against the cause. I know my new tactic is as risky as my old one: he could just as easily kill me out of disgust as out of anger.
But I keep going. This is the only gambit I have.
“I failed you and I failed my people. I’m a coward. I don’t have what it takes to kill. On the field of battle I … I couldn’t stand to see bloodshed.”
My father releases my shirt and I drop hard to the floor.
“I knew coming back was a risk. That I might be justifiably executed for treason. But I thought it was worth it.”
“Why?”
“Because,” I say, pausing for dramatic effect, scrambling back onto my feet. “I hoped you would give me a chance to make up for my failure.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
I fix my shirt and give him the most unblinking stare I can muster. “Clearly, I don’t have what it takes to be a warrior. I’m not like Ivan.”
At that, my father lets out a derisive snort. “Son, you are unworthy of even an unflattering comparison to Ivanick.”
“But I am a better tactician. Ivan never would’ve gotten through his early studies if I hadn’t been there to do his work for him, every step of the way.”
The General’s not even looking at me anymore: he’s staring towards the kitchen, no doubt preparing himself for the explanation he’ll have to give my mother once he’s killed me. I can see I’m losing him. Yet I press on, trying not to let my desperation show.
“I found Number Two first. Back in London, well before your entire team of surveyors managed to pinpoint her location. And in Kenya I got to Number Three ahead of Ivan. I didn’t have the will to kill them myself, but I found them first. I could be one of the best trackers you have if you just give me a chance—”
My father lunges at me again, grabbing me by the throat this time. I can’t breathe.
This is it, I think. This is the end.
“One week,” he says. “I’ll give you one week to show me what you can do.”
He releases me.
“And if you fail to produce a miracle for me in that time …” He trails off. I can tell from his look he expects me to finish his statement.
“You’ll kill me.”
His level stare confirms that I’ve guessed right.
I nod, accepting his terms.
CHAPTER 6
I lie in my old bed, in my old bedroom, staring at the wall. I was surprised to find everything just as I left it, half-expecting it to be stripped bare following my supposed “death.” I guess my mother won that battle with the General.
I try to get comfortable. After months on a bare cot at the aid camp, my expensive pillow-top mattress should feel unbelievably fluffy and soft. But it feels like a bed of nails.
After a strained dinner, during which my father and I both pretended to be happy I was home, alone in my room I can finally let my guard down and drop the fake smile. I’m exhausted and scared. Even if I somehow manage to avoid being executed within the trial week the General has granted me, that’s no guarantee I’ll manage to break into the labs. And even if I do, that’s no guarantee I’ll find a successful means of reviving One, of keeping her imminent disappearance at bay. And even if I manage to save her, I have no plan for how to save myself, for how to escape this place once I’m done.
I’ll need to figure that out, because right now death doesn’t even feel like the worst-case scenario. Passing my father’s test and being “allowed” to remain in this place, having to indefinitely maintain the pretense of being a loyal Mogadorian, feels like the grimmest fate of all.
“That was hard to watch.” One appears, standing in the doorway.
I sigh, grateful for her presence.
“Didn’t realize you were there.”
She ambles towards me and sits at the foot of the bed. “I hung back. Tried to stay out of your line of sight. Figured you needed to focus.” She gives me an affectionate look. “Performance of a lifetime, huh?”
“You said it.”
She looks guilty, worried for my safety. “You sure I’m worth it?”
I manage to fake a confident smile. “Definitely.”
My bedroom door opens and my sister Kelly swings in.
Surprised, I hop off the bed.
“So you’re back,” she says bluntly, sizing me up.
“Yeah,” I say. I’m not sure if I should rush up and embrace her.
I decide to wait and follow her lead.
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” She fiddles with the doorknob hesitantly.
“You weren’t at dinner.” Over dinner my father explained that Ivan had been promoted to a new position somewhere in the Southwest—news that filled me with such relief I had to cover my mouth so the General wouldn’t see how happy I was—but I hadn’t been given a reason for Kelly’s absence.