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Moments later, as I held the still-warm bread in my hand, I realized that final home-cooked meal would be the last kind and motherly thing she would ever do for me.
I threw it in the trash.
Now Zakos is prepping me for the procedure. He’s filled a syringe with some kind of anesthetic, explaining that this time he will render me unconscious before the procedure begins, which should give him greater precision over the neurological mapping. Soon I will be put under, then I will join One in her memories, and then I will be dead.
Zakos opens One’s pod, to make a couple of adjustments before the procedure begins. I think of One and all the Greeters in their pods.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Excuse me?” He’s absorbed in his preparations.
“What you did to all the Greeters, keeping them alive, raking their brains for intel all those years. ”
“Oh, I never really thought about it,” he says. “Yes, I would guess it’s quite excruciating. ”
Just then I hear her voice. “You’re not really going to let him get away with that, are you?” I turn to see One, flickering beside my chair. I had wondered if I would get to see her again before going under, if she hadn’t already flickered out of existence.
I don’t really have a choice, I say. I’m trapped here.
She leans against the counter. “You always have a choice. You had a choice to screw up today on the job, to bait your father into sentencing you to death, to do it in Zakos’s earshot so you’d end up here. . . . ”
I was afraid you were already gone. I couldn’t think of anything else. I ran out of hope, figured I was going to lose you anyway, and we could at least—
“See each other one last time?” she says, finishing my thought. She gives me a flirty, cockeyed grin.
“That’s sweet,” she says. “But that wasn’t the real reason you went haywire today. ”
She’s right. That isn’t how all this started. In the moment, I just couldn’t bring myself to rat out those humans to my people. That was the first time the work I was doing as a surveyor was clearly going to help the Mogs and hurt others, and I couldn’t do it. Over the past week I’ve had to take some crazy, on-the-fly risks, but that was the first time I acted completely without a plan, without any clear sense of what the consequences would be.
One, I say. I don’t even really understand why I did what I did.
She doesn’t answer me immediately, but instead turns back to the tiled wall, crossing her arms. I can see an idea brewing in her head. After a moment, she turns back to me and fixes me with a cryptic stare.
“Don’t worry, Adam,” she says. “You will. Seeing as you’re going out anyway,” she says, leaning close to my ear. “Don’t you want to go out swinging?”
I look at her, confused.
“A giant leap for Mogadorian technology,” she whispers, casting a glance over at the tiles where the Greeters’ bodies are kept. “Is that what you really want your legacy to be?”
It’s time.
I’m in the chair, connected to Zakos’s console by a bunch of wires and cables. The machine that will plug me back into One’s consciousness is already humming. “The parameters are in place,” Zakos says. “It will just take a moment after we administer the anesthetic to begin working. ” He gestures to a syringe on a tray of tools next to me. The syringe hasn’t escaped my attention either, though.
He approaches, towering above me in my reclined seat. As he holds my left hand against the arm of the chair and begins to pull the strap over my wrist, I know I only have a second to act.
I jerk my hand loose from Zakos’s grip and leap up, grabbing the syringe and stabbing it into Zakos’s throat before he can make another move. He punches me desperately, making contact with my face, but it’s too late: I’ve already depressed the plunger.
He staggers back in a woozy daze, the drugs already making their way into his system, and falls to the floor.
I rip the strap off my left hand and stand up.
“Why …” he says, puzzled at what I’ve done. “What could you possibly hope to accomplish …”
Then he’s out.
I rush to the lab’s door and, as quietly as possible, lock it from the inside. I’m lucky that Dr. Zakos didn’t knock anything over on his way to the ground: any noise would’ve attracted the attention of the guards on the other side of the door. But I know that once I do what I’m about to, alarms will sound, getting their attention. It won’t take them long to override the lock.
But that’s okay. I only need a little time.
I run to the steel panel controlling the containment pods. There are no buttons, no instructions. I have no idea how to imitate Doctor Zakos’s complex gestures.
“Let me,” I hear. One’s voice.
She takes over my movements, just as she did when she hijacked my body in the jungle. I’m a spectator to my own body, watching as my hand dances elegantly across the surface of the panel.
An alarm goes off. I feel One vacating my body, ceding control back to me.
I get back in the chair, reattach a couple of electrodes and grip the arms of the seat.
I turn for one last look at the wall behind me, as all of the containment pods open noisily at once, a hydraulic chorus, disgorging their captive corpses. All except One’s pod, which is still linked to me through the mainframe.
Exposed to open air, the corpses will be rendered useless to further Mogadorian experimentation within minutes.
It’s hardly an elegant sabotage. But it will keep the Mogadorians from getting any intel from the dead Greeters, and should set Zakos’s research back a few years.
The machine connecting me to One begins to thrum louder. I used up all the anesthetic to knock Zakos out, so I expect this will hurt. But I know that One has a plan for me, and it doesn’t involve dying.
That’s when I see Malcolm Goode, waking up on his slab.
“One?” I ask, nervously.
In the heat of the moment, I hadn’t even considered what would happen to Malcolm, the sole surviving Greeter. I watch as he pulls himself loose from his connecting cables and steps off his slab. His legs, unused for years, instantly give out on him.
He locks eyes with me. He’s almost three times my age, but he looks as lost and confused as a child.
One’s voice in my ear: “Don’t worry about him. He’s going to be fine. ”
That’s when the pain hits.
I’m plunged back into the moment of Hilde’s death, the blast of the Mogadorian’s gun opening up her chest right in front of my eyes. Hilde falls to her knees before me.
Red, orange, and purple swarms my vision. Everything’s faster, louder than before, pulsing and buzzing. One’s thoughts are screaming in my head again: No, she can’t, they couldn’t. It’s my fault, I failed. How could I? They will pay, we’ll make them pay. I feel it again, that ripping sensation inside me. Oh right, that’s right, that’s how, so simple. The floors start to shake, a massive rumble coming from beneath my feet but also coming from inside me and as my heart sings yes, they will pay, they WILL pay, the walls of the shack begin to shake and I stomp my foot. A wave of energy shoots through the floor. It’s a power greater than any I’ve ever wielded, and it’s coursing through us and rippling outwards.
Through the orangey blur of my vision I see the walls of the shack explode, I see four Mogadorian warriors flung out of sight by the force that’s come from within me.
As the dust settles, I look down at my hands, at my legs. I expect to see One’s body as the source of this power.
But I don’t see One’s body. I see only my own.
“That’s it,” I hear. One’s voice.
I turn around, surprised to discover I am no longer in the Malaysian shack. I am on that beautiful California beach. Our place.
One sits on the sand, waiting for me. “Pretty cool, huh?”
I nod, flabbergasted at
the sheer power of One’s Legacy. I’m dizzy from wielding it.
“Come sit with me. We don’t have much time. ”
I collapse beside her, still breathless.
It’s perfect: the sun is warm on my skin, the sand cool on my feet. And best of all, One’s here, right by my side.
Across the sea, there’s a roiling storm, the clouds as black as ink. But we’re still in the sun.
One touches me.
In this place, I can feel it. I reach out and touch her too. We’re shoulder to shoulder, staring forward at the approaching storm.
“We got what we came for,” she says. “It’s time for me to go. ”
I turn to her. What is she saying?
She bites her lip, looking at me apologetically. “You realize this was never about saving my life, right?”
My heart sinks into my stomach, but I don’t know why.
“Of course it was,” I say. “You think I came back and faced my family, went through all that for no reason? I was trying to save you. ”
“There was never any way to save me. A part of you knew that. ”
“I don’t understand. ”
“We needed to help the Garde. ” She looks away from me, like this is as hard for her to say as it is for me to hear. “But after your defeat at Ivan’s hands, you felt you had nothing to offer the cause. You said you were too weak, too skinny, that you weren’t the hero I am. That you didn’t have any power.
“But now you do. ”
Her Legacy. She’s… given it to me? I get to keep it?
“I’m sorry for tricking you, Adam. But you needed to get to this point. If you hadn’t come back here, a part of you still would’ve been attached to your family, to your people. You’ve seen how little they value you, how little they value anything but bloodshed and war. Now you’re ready to walk with the Garde, to truly fight against your own people. ”
No. I pull away, my mind reeling.
“Please Adam. Use my Legacy well. ”
Across the sea, shadows dance and crackle and writhe in the clouds. Out there I can see her moving in slow-motion combat. Her last seconds, playing out in front of us.
“One,” I plead. “Please stop. ”
“This is how it has to be. Deep down you knew it all along, Adam. I’m not real. I was never real. ” She turns to the roiling storm, to the tragic movie of her death playing in the clouds. The blade of some faceless Mogadorian’s sword penetrates her through her back, erupting from her stomach. The killing blow.
“Deep down you knew. I’ve been dead this whole time. ”
I look at One. She’s my best friend. She’s everything to me.
She turns from the scene of her death to look at me. “You created me, made me out of my memories, so you wouldn’t have to walk this path alone. ”
“That’s not possible. You’re all I have. ”
She smiles. “No. You have you. The courage it took to turn against your people, the courage it took to come back here, to risk your life to get the power you’d need to walk a hero’s path … that was always all you. ”