“You’ll want to see this,” ghost-One tells me, appearing at my side to watch.
Using what appear at first to be plain glass orbs, Hilde creates a floating map of the Loric galaxy. The swirling cosmos, the bright orange sun, and the dead, gray planet Lorien.
“Do you see what the Mogadorians have done?” Hilde asks young Number One.
One nods, staring at the ruined planet. Hilde steps close to the floating Lorien orb and gently blows across its surface. When she does, the smog and fire clear from the planet’s surface. Lorien looks like it must have before the First Great Expansion: rich and lush, thriving. The change fades quickly, the planet going gray again.
“This is why we fight,” says Hilde quietly, her eyes watery. “Not just to avenge our planet and our people and to one day bring life back to Lorien, but to prevent this fate from befalling Earth. Do you understand why you are so important?”
I don’t pay attention to One’s muted reply. I’m too distracted by the vision of Lorien. Its surface is a hideously charred black, the planet’s ruined atmosphere leaking into the space around it. Seeing the planet like this, my people’s greatest victory, it doesn’t look like anything to be proud of.
“Is that what you want for the entire universe?” ghost-One asks me, gesturing to her destroyed home.
“I’ve never seen this before,” I reply, trying to keep my voice neutral. The sight of Lorien disturbs me. To think such thoughts is treason, but if our coming to Earth means even half the destruction brought down on Lorien, would it still be a place worth living in?
“Is that what Mogadorian progress looks like?” ghost-One presses.
“Please,” I say, shaking my head. “Stop talking to me.”
I just want her to go away. I don’t want her to see my doubt.
CHAPTER 7
I’m standing on the beach. I can’t feel anything here in One’s memories, but if I concentrate hard, I can almost imagine what it must be like to have the Pacific Ocean lapping at my ankles and the wet sand squishing between my toes. I’ve never been in the ocean before. When I’m finally awake again, I’d like to try the real thing.
I take a second to imagine a trip to the ocean with the General. My father out of uniform, in a pair of flower-print swim trunks, pulling a cooler filled with cookout supplies out of the trunk of our family’s convertible. My mom and Kelly build a sand castle while Ivan and I see which one of us can swim out the farthest. He wins because even in my fantasy I’m a realist. I swim back to shore, and the General is waiting with a hamburger.
“Seriously?” asks ghost-One, standing on the beach beside me, and I realize I have a ridiculous, goofy grin on my face. I quickly let it fade. “You killed my entire race so you could enjoy a beach barbecue?”
“Stay out of my thoughts,” I say weakly, aware of the hypocrisy.
“Psh,” snorts One, rolling her eyes at me. “I wish that I could, dude.”
Arguing with One’s ghost certainly isn’t what my father would describe as productive reconnaissance, so I turn away, trying to ignore her.
In this memory, the real Number One has just finished up a day of surfing. Turns out she’s a natural, the only one of her crew of surfer buddies not to wipe out today. Between this and the skateboarding, she’s started to wonder if maybe enhanced balance isn’t going to be one of her Legacies. I’d never tell One this, but I’ve enjoyed the surfer memory. In fact, I’d never tell anyone that.
“Please stop checking out my past self,” ghost-One says at my side.
“I’m not,” I protest.
The memory keeps moving. One bounds out of the water, her surfboard passing right through me as she leaps into the waiting arms of a tanned and muscular young human.
Wade.
One had rededicated herself to training after Hilde’s display of the solar system. At least, until she met Wade.
Wade is sixteen years old. He has shoulder-length brown hair, strands of which he keeps in grungy little braids. He owns a beat-up Volkswagen van that he sleeps in even though his wallet contains a couple credit cards paid for by his parents-a fact One discovered while she was snooping through Wade’s things to make sure he wasn’t a secret Mogadorian.
As if.
“I felt like my parents had my whole life planned out,” explained Wade on the night he and One first met, his arm slung around her shoulders, the two of them huddled in front of a bonfire on the beach. “Go to college, get my law degree, join Dad at his practice. Such a bourgeois life plan. It just wasn’t for me, you know?”
“I get it,” replied One, way more interested in Wade’s muscular arm than in whatever he was saying. I guess she liked him, or at least liked the rush of being with him, an added bonus being that it pissed off Hilde. I didn’t get the attraction. “So I left that whole scene behind, hopped in my van and decided to surf my way down the coast. No plan at all. I’m just going to, like, be for a while.” Wade paused. “Hey, has anyone ever told you how soulful your eyes are?”
One swoons.
Oh, come on, I think, and ghost-One appears at my side.
“Cut me some slack,” she says. “He’s hot, and I was stupid. I mean, I wasn’t that stupid. I knew he was full of it, obviously. But, look at him. He’s hot.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say self-consciously.
That memory was a couple months before the one I slip into next. We’re still at the beach, and One wriggles out of her wet suit and settles on the sand next to Wade. She’s been regularly skipping training to come surfing with Wade. One and Hilde are barely speaking, except for when Hilde tries to chastise her.
I haven’t been enjoying these Wade memories. They’re of no relevance to the Mogadorian cause. Besides … I feel like One could be doing so much better.
“I was having fun,” says One, popping up to defend herself again. “I liked pretending I was normal.”
I don’t say anything.
“Didn’t you ever want to get away from it all?” asks One. She knows that I do. She’s been rummaging through my thoughts too. “You and that douche you hang out with spend a lot of time in DC, but you never talk to any other kids.”
“It’s forbidden.”
“Why?”
“To interact directly could compromise operational integrity,” I reply, quoting from the Great Book.
“You sound like a robot,” she says. “They don’t want you to know the humans because then it’d be harder for you to kill them. Just like with me.”
“What do you mean, just like with you?”
“I mean that you kind of like me,” she says, looking at me in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. “They didn’t know what they were doing sending you in here. If you knew all this about me before, would you still want to kill me?”
My head hurts thinking about it, and I wave One away. I am not ready to go back to the memory of the riverbank in Malaysia. Then I remind myself that Malaysia is in the future, not the past.
“Don’t feel too bad,” she says. “I don’t know if I’d want to kill you either.”
CHAPTER 8
This is how my people find her. The General didn’t share these details with me, but I know them now:
Wade believes in taking a stand against capitalism. He does this by shoplifting at every opportunity he gets. He also talks, sometimes endlessly, about the amazing record collection he was forced to leave behind when he left his parents’ mansion.
This puts an idea in One’s head. She’s going to shoplift some records from a store by the beach for him. Part of her wants to impress Wade, another part of her just wants to experience the thrill that he’s talked about.
But One gets caught coasting out of the store with a backpack full of merchandise. The owner of the store is a take-no-prisoners type. He calls the cops.
“How was Wade even going to listen to those?” I ask. “Does his van have a record player?”
One laughs as we watch her former self being slapped into handcuffs. “I didn’t even think of that.”