Then I remember something else. I’ve seen these creatures before—in One’s memories of escaping Lorien. But I thought they were all dead now, that they’d been exterminated by my people along with the rest of her planet.
The thought that I’m wrong makes me smile. The Garde still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
And Rex isn’t as tough as he wants me to think. I’d been shocked he’d had the strength to attack me at all, but it must have taken all he had out of him, because now he sinks back to the floor. Dust is still watching him warily, ready to pounce if necessary, but I wave him off and just like that, he’s back to his bird form.
I should be getting used to it, but I’m not. It amazes me every time he transforms, and now that I know what he really is, it gives me a glimmer of hope too.
“What’s he doing here, though?” I ask, more to myself than to Rex.
A smirk flashes across his face. He knows something.
Then I get it. “You were holding him prisoner, weren’t you? Like Sam. Like Malcolm.”
Rex looks up at me with fire in his eyes. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he says. “We’re at war. It’s not a contest to see who can be the nicest. Prisoners get taken. People die. My friends have died. They should have been your friends too. If you hadn’t decided to betray them.”
I almost let his words sting me, but then I push them aside. “You’re wrong,” I say. “I do get it. Prisoners get taken. Come to think of it, it looks like I’ve taken a prisoner myself: you.”
CHAPTER SIX
I’M MORE WORRIED THAN I LET ON.
A few days after my confrontation with Rex, he’s healthier than ever. I’ve got Dust for protection—I know by now he won’t let anything happen to me—but if it weren’t for him, Rex would be able to overpower me easily. I’m starting to realize how lucky I’ve been so far, and what a mistake it could have been for me to keep Rex alive.
It’s not just that. I’m getting antsier than ever about the Mogadorians showing up again and finding us. I’ve frisked Rex at least ten times by now, looking for communications devices and weapons, but I’m still worried he could have some way of getting in touch with them, of bringing them back for us.
We need to get out of here. We need a plan. Every day I go out scavenging the base for food, and every day I’m coming back with less and less of it. It’s time to move on. But to where? I have no clue.
I wish I had a way of getting in touch with Malcolm. Assuming he made it out of here alive, he’d know what to do. But all the equipment in the base is damaged beyond repair, and I haven’t been able to dig up so much as a cell phone. Until I’m back in civilization, I’m on my own.
I try to think about what One would say if she were here. I’m so used to having her kicking around in my head that if I try hard, I can summon her image as if we still shared a mind. When I close my eyes and picture her face, I see us back in California, standing on the beach. She’s barefoot in the surf, her arms crossed against her chest, her hair pinkish in the sunset and curling in the breeze.
Rex is better. His bruises have faded and the cuts and abrasions crisscrossing his body seem to be knitting back together. The big gash on his side that was squirting all that blood when I first found him will take time to heal properly, but it’s really only a surface wound. As for his arm, it wasn’t broken after all, just a dislocated shoulder that he managed to pop back into place with a casual grimace when he put his mind to it.
His mood, though, is as bad as mine. Maybe worse. He spends most of his time sitting in the corner with a dark look on his face, sometimes muttering under his breath to himself and other times scowling silently for hours on end.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was depressed. But that’s impossible—real Mogadorians don’t get depressed. They get even.
Strangely, the only thing that seems to snap Rex out of it is Dust. They’ve reached a tentative truce with each other, and despite his attempts to appear unimpressed, Rex seems just as fascinated by the Chimæra’s transformations as I am. One day when Dust is in a playful mood and flitting from one shape to another—from rabbit to parrot to chimpanzee to Labrador—I even see Rex watching him with something approaching a smile.
It gives me an idea. “How much do you know about him?” I ask, nodding toward the Chimæra. I’m not really expecting anything, so I’m taken aback when Rex actually answers me.
“Not a lot,” he says. “I don’t know where they found him, or how long he was at Dulce. I just know that we’ve been running experiments on them.”
Experiments. I give an involuntary shudder at the word, imagining Dust in some underground lab while a Mogadorian scientist tortures him in the name of Setrákus Ra. I know all too well what that’s like. I was one of those lab rats myself once.
I don’t want to think about it, but I can’t help thinking about it. And something clicks in my mind. Something about what Rex said that strikes me as odd. I just can’t quite place what it is.
“‘Them’?” I ask.
“Huh?” Rex says quizzically. He tries to play off the mistake, but the guilty flicker in his eyes lets me know I’m on to something.
“You said they’ve been doing experiments on them. As in, more than one. Are there more Chimæra out there? Somewhere on Earth?”
His eyes shift to the ceiling. He shrugs.
“I thought all the Chimæra were killed on Lorien,” I muse, circling the question carefully, trying not to remind him that he’s supposed to be giving me the silent treatment.
He remembers. He doesn’t take my bait.
The next day, though, when I find him in his usual spot in the corner again, his chin resting on his fist, I give it one more try.
“There’s more of them out there, aren’t there?” I ask. “Dust isn’t the last Chimæra.”
Rex glares at me. His eyes are dead and distant, black holes. Dust is a cat now, snoozing under the table.
“Listen,” I say. He doesn’t even look at me. “Dust would kill you if I wanted him to. You know that, right? You’re still weak, and even if you weren’t, he’s more powerful than both of us put together.”
“So have him kill me,” Rex says dully, still not meeting my gaze. It almost sounds like he means it.
I can’t hide my surprise. “I can’t believe a trueborn would say that,” I say. The shock in my voice is genuine.
Rex’s head snaps up and he looks me right in the eye, his brow furrowed in some combination of anger and shame. It was the right thing for me to say.
I push it further. “To stop fighting—that would make you even more of a weakling than I am.”
“I’ll never stop fighting,” he snaps. “I’ll see the Loric dead if it’s the last thing I do. But killing you, Adamus Sutekh—that’s going to be the first thing I take care of.”
“Fine,” I say. “Kill me.”
He knows he can’t. Not yet, at least. Because I have Dust.
“I know my days are numbered anyway,” I tell Rex. “You’ll kill me eventually, or my father will, or some vatborn who doesn’t even know my name. But right now, I’m the one with the power. You try to leave and that cute little guy napping under the table will turn into a ten-ton gorilla and peel you like a banana.”
Rex rolls his eyes, angrily hocks a giant wad of saliva onto the cement floor and goes back to staring at the ceiling. He knows I’m right.
I push on, knowing that I’m making progress. “I need you too, Rex. There’s a reason you’re alive. It’s because I can use you. You have information. And information is what I want.”
“I don’t know anything,” he spits out.
“Tell me what I want to know,” I say, “and we’ll get out of here. There will be plenty of time for you to kill me once we’ve made it out of this wasteland. I won’t even stop you.”
I can see him considering it. I hold my breath. If this doesn’t work, I really will kill him, I decide. When I can see he’s at his most vulnerable, I lean on him with one last question. “‘They.’ You said ‘they.’ Where are the rest of the Chimæra?”
“I haven’t seen them,” he mutters. “But there are a bunch of them. At least ten. Maybe more. They came on a separate ship from the Garde—at least, that’s what I overheard some of the other officers saying.”
Suddenly it all feels incredibly important. “You said they were experimenting on them,” I say, trying to keep the sense of urgency from creeping into my voice. “What kind of experiments?”
I guess Rex doesn’t see the point in clamming up now that he’s said this much already, because this time he answers my question without hesitation. He sounds almost proud as he explains it. “They’re trying to figure out how Chimæras’ transformations work. Setrákus Ra thinks that if we can isolate the gene that gives them their abilities, we can duplicate the process with the vatborn.”
The way he says “we” chills me. I’d forgotten what it was like to live among them, to believe that your own self-worth is bound up in the messed-up glory of a warlord who chased nine teenagers across a solar system just to make sure they were all good and dead.
“Where are they?” I ask. “Tell me where they are, and we’ll go there together.”
He looks shocked at my intensity, but he takes a deep breath. “They’re not here. Dust got separated from the rest of them somehow and they were keeping him here until someone could take him back to the main facility.”
“Tell me where, Rex.”
Only now does it seem to dawn on him exactly how much he’s said and what the consequences of that could be. Revealing the secret goes against all of his training, against everything in the Good Book. His voice wavers a little, but he tells me anyway. “New York,” he says. “A place called Plum Island.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“NICE CITY,” REX REMARKS, HIS TONE HEAVY with sarcasm as we set eyes on the town. “This was all totally worth it.”
It’s been a long day for all of us. After trying and failing to find a working vehicle anywhere on the grounds of the base, we’d had no other choice but to cajole Dust into carrying us. On his back. As a donkey.
He’d brayed and stomped his feet as first Rex and then I had climbed on top of him, but he’d done it, and after hours of trudging we were finally here. As civilization goes, the town we finally stumbled upon is a step up from the ruins of Dulce Base, but only barely. It’s dusty and run-down, and half the storefronts on Main Street are boarded up. The other half are just weird, junk shops and drugstores that look like they haven’t changed their window displays in about thirty years.
Still, there are paved roads, cars and working streetlights.
Not to mention hot food. When we make it to the center of town I can’t help stopping outside Celia’s Café and peering in the window to stare at people sitting in booths, looking happy as they chow down on hamburgers and pancakes and eggs and bacon. I can practically feel my mouth watering. After living on whatever canned and boxed and wrapped food we could scrounge up from the guard station’s lockers and the base’s remains, the thought of a real, proper meal is enough to make me drool.