“Shut up,” I spit, sounding angrier than I even realized I was. “You don’t know him.”
I find myself studying Hilde in spite of myself. She’s in her late fifties, and her face is wrinkled, both with the natural lines of age and the premature weathering of stress. Her gray hair tightly bound in a stern braid. Her eyes have a hardness to them; her voice is steely and measured, even when just telling One—the “real” One—which cupboard the plates belong in. Truth be told, she does remind me of the General.
“I loved her like a mom, though,” says ghost-One, sadness breaking her voice. My mind drifts to the dead old woman we left to rot in Malaysia, and I feel something like guilt but quickly push it away. She’s messing with your head, Adamus.
“I wish you’d stop talking to me,” I tell her.
“Yeah? Well I wish your people hadn’t killed me.”
After Mexico, One and Hilde move to Austin, Texas. I try to push my way out of these memories, to get back to that night on the Loric airstrip where I can actually find out something useful, but One won’t let me. Somehow she’s blocking me.
I may be an uninvited guest in her mind, but it’s still hers. She can’t kick me out entirely, but she does have some control over which rooms I’m allowed to visit.
Most of the time when I try to force my way through her memory, One makes me sit through one of her and Hilde’s training sessions.
“I used to hate these,” One says, grinning. “Hope you feel the same.”
Hilde is a master martial artist, though it’s a fighting style that would never make it into Mogadorian training, where brute force is prized above all else. Hilde’s is a defensive martial art, one that uses an attacker’s own momentum, focusing strikes on nerve centers that will temporarily incapacitate the enemy.
Stuck in these memories, when boredom sets in, I find myself aping Hilde’s movements, practicing alongside young One. I know that none of this is real, that it’s all in my mind. Or One’s mind. I’m not so sure there’s a difference.
My slight frame has never served me well in Mogadorian combat training, much to the disappointment of my father and the amusement of Ivan. But in One’s memories, I never get tired. Even if this training is basically imaginary, it feels good to finally move in a way that suits me.
Besides, I’m supposed to be gathering intelligence. How the Garde fight is essential information.
In the earlier training memories, One is an eager pupil. She practices with Hilde from dawn until sunset, listening rapt as Hilde tells stories of the Loric heroes she’s helped train. Hilde is full of tales of honorable competition, of noble battles fought on Lorien. They’re meant to inspire, to demonstrate to One the Loric spirit of perseverance. Compared to the stories in the Great Book, there is a surprising lack of bloody violence and decimation in them.
“One day,” says Hilde, “you will take your place among them as a great hero to our people. You will be known as the One who protected the Eight.”
I can feel the pride Number One takes in Hilde’s words, but also the doubt. There’s a part of her that wonders how she can possibly stand alone in opposition to the Mogadorians that conquered her entire planet in a single night.
“I always wondered why I couldn’t have gotten lucky and been number nine,” muses One as I practice forms next to her younger self. “But nooo. I have to go and be the first. Otherwise known as the most doomed of nine doomed assholes. The Elders really screwed me over.”
In Austin, Hilde lets One start attending school, all the better to fit in. I’m dragged along on these memories of her classes. School seems so pointless. The General would never even consider letting us freely socialize with the humans.
And yet, as the memories go by, I find myself being drawn into One’s life. She makes some friends, takes up skateboarding. It all starts to feel like something approaching a normal life. At the same time, her training slips. She starts blowing off sessions, even after her telekinesis develops, which is when she should’ve been working extra hard. For all her rigidity, Hilde couldn’t really do anything to One if she slipped out a window to go hang out with her friends. How do you ground the last hope for a dying race?
I don’t really care about One’s freaking social life. This girl is the enemy of my people. Her death is inevitable, has already happened. And yet … drifting through her memories, I can’t help but put myself in her situation. Even though she travels the Earth under the constant threat of execution, I realize that One has gotten to see more of this planet than I have. The General has never allowed us to travel out of Washington. Hilde might be a tough Cêpan, but she still allows One to go to school, to make friends, to live a life not entirely dedicated to war.
I wonder what that’s like. I wonder what my life would be like without the need to serve Mogadorian expansion, without the drills and training, the supervised readings from Ra’s Great Book.
“This is, like, one of my all-time favorites,” says ghost-One, introducing the memory of her punching a cheerleader in the face. The cheerleader started it; she’d been picking on One since she started school in Austin. It’s weird, but I feel some of One’s sense of satisfaction.
Of course, the punch gets her kicked out of school, which is all the reason Hilde needs to relocate them again. They leave Austin in a beat-up station wagon, heading for California. One sulks in the passenger seat the whole ride, reclined all the way back, ignoring Hilde in favor of the three seashells she keeps levitated above her with her telekinesis.
We Mogadorians have been warned of the Garde’s deadly telekinesis. Watching One juggle the seashells, scrunching up her nose in concentration, it doesn’t seem all that deadly. More like mesmerizing. And it’s not just the telekinesis either. The way her blond hair is fanned beneath her …
I turn away. Was I just checking out the dead Garde whose memories I’ve stolen? I tell myself it was for research purposes, although a description of how the sun brings out the blonder streaks in One’s nice hair is likely not the intel my father expects of me.
When they arrive in California, Hilde tries to inspire One with some kind of Loric magic so that she’ll start taking her training more seriously.
“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?”