He sits back in the passenger seat, looking at me through the windshield.
“I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to be able to see clearly. It’s been so long,” he says.
He lets out a contented sigh. “Amazing.”
“I didn’t even know you needed glasses.”
“Big-time,” he says. “This is actually the first time I’ve seen your face as anything but a big smudge.” He squints up at me. “I can definitely see the Mogadorian thing, now. Yeah, definitely something evil about your face.”
I laugh, giving him the finger. Teasing me for being a Mogadorian has become a running joke between us. Joking about it is really just a testament to how accepting of me Malcolm has been.
“Full tank?” I ask.
He leans over, starts the engine, peering owlishly as the gas gauge whirs up.
“Very nearly.”
He slides behind the wheel as I get into the passenger seat. We’re traveling light. Heading to New Mexico.
“You ready for this?” he asks.
“Not at all,” I reply.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”
And we’re off.
If we weren’t traveling incognito, trying to avoid detection by taking side roads, we could’ve made the trip to the base in three days. As it is, the trip takes almost a week.
I don’t mind the extra time.
Sitting beside Malcolm in the passenger seat, it occurs to me that we may be driving towards our own ends. That just as I had to say good-bye to One, I may have to say good-bye to Malcolm. Right when I thought I’d found a father figure, I now find myself embarking on what could be a suicide mission with him. I can’t be Malcolm’s son. He already has a son, and—for better or worse—I have a father. But I can help save Sam.
I remember what One said to me, that she’d pegged me for a hero, wanted me to try for “great” things.
Well, it turns out a hero’s lot is not glory or reward, but sacrifice. I’m still not sure I’m ready for that. I’d be happy if this car trip lasted forever. But soon enough we’ll cross the border into New Mexico and be only hours away from the base.
A big part of me doesn’t want to go find Sam. If I can’t have a normal life, I want to stay with Malcolm, living on the edges of society and evading the Mogs.
But I know that’s not possible.
I know what we’re doing is what must be done.
We’re at the fenced edge of the Dulce base. We parked out in the desert at dusk and crossed the still hot sands to the electrified perimeter fence, which is a quarter mile or so from the compound itself. Malcolm explained that he knew how to find the base from his alien-conspiracy days, long before he’d known anything about Mogadorians or Loric, when his awareness of extraterrestrials was limited to conspiracy newsletters and countless viewings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Dulce base was a lightning rod for crazed speculation about governmental cover-ups of alien life. The irony, he said, is that all that speculation must have predated any actual human contact with the real extraterrestrials by several years. Until recently, it probably was just a military base. “Guess me and my wacko friends were ahead of our time,” he joked.
We crouch low to the ground, figuring there are surveillance cameras surrounding the fence. We’ve approached at the rear edge of the compound, far away from the base’s entrance. Malcolm thinks security might be a little more diffuse at this end of the base.
For all of Malcolm’s knowledge from old newsletters, not to mention the tiny bit of preparatory research we did at an internet café en route, there’s only so much you can find out about a secret government base through public channels. We’re mostly going in blind.
Malcolm pulls out a crappy pair of binoculars we bought at a truck stop and scans the facility.
After a moment he taps me, pointing out a watchtower a few hundred yards down the fence. Squinting through the evening’s half-light, I can see a generator a few paces off from the watchtower. We can only hope that generator powers the fence. If I can hit it with my Legacy, it’s our one chance of getting inside.
“Tower’s got to be three hundred yards … no, four hundred yards away.”
“Yeah,” I say. I start pounding my fist into my hand, a little pre-Legacy ritual I picked up. It doesn’t make any sense that warming up my hands would help with my accuracy—the power comes from deep inside me, from my core, not from my hands—but it’s become habit by now.
“That’s like three regulation football fields, Adam. We never trained for that.”
“I got it,” I say, confidently.
I don’t actually feel confident, but figure acting confident can only help my odds.
I reach deep into myself, eyes focused tight on the area encompassing the watchtower and generator.
The trick, I’ve discovered, is anger. And it has to be my own. The first few weeks I was able to channel One’s rage at losing Hilde to access my Legacy, but its efficacy quickly waned. I needed to find my own rage.
So now I think of Kelly, too ashamed of me to even speak to me. I think of my mother, leaving me to rot in the Mog lab. I think of Ivanick, his hands at my back, pushing me down the ravine. Mostly, I think of my father: delivering the killing blow to Hannu. Sentencing me to death. And a million other, smaller injustices, perpetrated over my entire life.
I hate them. I hate everything they stand for.
And then I feel it, my power, my rage, coursing below the ground, in search of the watchtower. Like a giant stone hand, its fingers curl upward, fondling the earth, feeling.
There it is.
I let it rip.
The ground beneath me and Malcolm remains still, but I can see the watchtower rumble, erupting with tremendous force. The generator, sundered from the ground, shoots sparks. Then the tower collapses.
Malcolm turns to me, shocked, amazed. Proud.
He smiles. “Touchdown,” he says.
CHAPTER 14
We creep over the fence, no longer electrified. We know that the generator’s explosion and the collapse of the watchtower must’ve attracted the attention of the base’s perimeter guards, and in fact we’re banking on that to be able to run aboveground without interference. If they’re too distracted by the explosion to maintain sufficient ground cover along our path, we’ve got a shot.
Our optimism pays off. We make it close to the compound without anyone seeing us. Most of the guards have been drawn to the watchtower; if they’re even aware of a breach in their perimeter, they probably think it’s all the way over there.
Then I stop. On the other side of the sprawling compound, over the horizon, there is chaos. Noise. Explosions. Smoke. Weaponry firing.
I turn to Malcolm. “Weapons testing?” I ask.
Malcolm shakes his head.
Something is going down at the base. Something big.
I have a strange hunch. Something inside of me says the Garde is here.
“What do you think it is?” I ask Malcolm, wondering if he has the same feeling I do.
“I don’t know. But I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The base is massive. If some kind of battle is going down on the other side of it, that means they might be spreading their resources a bit thin on this end to compensate. We might be able to catch ’em off their game, even once we’re inside.”