The Fall of Five (I Am Number Four) (33 page)

Marco gave me a place here, first to recover and now to volunteer, without asking any questions. All he expects in return is that I do my chores and that I fulfill the same labor requirements as the other aid-workers.

I have no idea what story he’s constructed in his head to account for my condition. I can only figure that Marco must have guessed correctly that Ivan was the one who did this to me, based on the fact that Ivan disappeared on the day of my accident without a word to anybody at camp. Perhaps Marco’s generosity is motivated by pity. He may not know exactly what happened, but he knows
I was forsaken by family. And since Marco is more or less right, I don’t mind him pitying me.

Besides, the funny thing about being forsaken by my family, by my entire race?

I’ve never been happier.

Renovating the village’s well is sweaty, tedious work, but I have an advantage the other workers don’t. I have One. I talk to her throughout my work, and though my muscles get sore and my back aches, the hours fly.

Mostly, she motivates me by teasing me. “You’re doing that wrong.” “You call
that
trowelling?” “If I had a body, I’d be done with that by now.” She mocks my efforts, reclining like a sunbathing lady of leisure at the edge of the work site.

You wanna try this?
I bark back in my mind.

“Couldn’t,” she’ll say. “Don’t want to break a nail.”

Of course I have to be careful not to actually
speak
to her while I work, not in front of the others. I’d developed a reputation as a bit of a weirdo, for talking to myself in my first few weeks here. Then I learned to silence my side of the conversation with One, to merely think
at
her, instead of actually speaking. Thankfully my reputation has recovered, and the others no longer look at me like I might be a total lunatic.

That night I have kitchen duty with Elswit, the camp’s
most recent addition. We cook
githeri
, a simple dish of corn and beans. Elswit shucks and scrapes the cobs of corn while I soak and rinse the beans.

I like Elswit. He asks a lot of questions about where I come from and what brought me here, questions I know better than to answer with the truth. Fortunately he doesn’t seem to mind that my replies are either vague or nonexistent. He’s a big talker, always racing ahead to the next question without noticing my silence, always interjecting tidbits about his own life and upbringing instead. From what I’ve gathered, he’s the son of a very wealthy American banker, a man who does not approve of Elswit’s humanitarian pursuits.

Living up to my father’s standards was difficult enough when I was a child, but after my experiences in One’s mind, it became impossible. I had grown soft, had developed sympathies and concerns that I knew would be impossible for my father to understand, let alone tolerate. Elswit and I have a certain amount in common. We’re both disappointments to our fathers.

But I quickly realized the similarities between us don’t stretch that far. Despite Elswit’s claims of “estrangement” from his family, he’s still in touch with his wealthy parents, and still has unlimited access to their wealth. Apparently his father has even arranged for a private plane to pick him up in Nairobi in a few weeks just so Elswit can be back home for his birthday.
Meanwhile my dad thinks I’m dead and I can only guess he’s happy about it.

After dinner I have a well-earned shower and get into bed. One’s curled up in a rattan chair in the corner. “Bed?
Already?
” she teases.

I give the room a once-over. No one’s around, so it’s safe to talk out loud, as long as I keep my voice down. Talking out loud feels more natural than communicating silently.

“I want to get up with the others from here on out.”

One shoots me a look.

“What? My cast’s off, my limp’s almost gone . . . I’m recovered. It’s time for me to pull equal weight around here.”

One frowns and picks at her shirt. Of course I know what’s bothering her.

Her people are out there, earmarked for extinction by my race. And here she is, stuck in Kenya. Moreover, she’s stuck inside my consciousness, disembodied, with no will or agency of her own. If she had her wish, I know she’d be somewhere else—
anywhere
else—taking up the fight.

“How long are we going to stay here?” she asks, somberly.

I play dumb, pretending I don’t know how she feels, and shrug as I pull up the covers and turn over on my side. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

I’m dreaming.

It’s the night I tried to save Hannu. I’m running from the aid camp into the jungle, towards Hannu’s hut, desperate to get there before Ivan and my father do. I know how this ends—Hannu killed, me left for dead—but in this dream all of the naïve urgency of that night comes back to me, propelling me forward through the vines and brush, the shadows, the animal sounds.

The communicator I swiped from the hut crackles at my hip, an ominous sound. I know the other Mogadorians are closing in.

I have to get there first. I
have
to.

I arrive at a clearing in the jungle. The hut where Hannu and his Cêpan lived stands right where I remembered it. My eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness.

Then I see the difference.

The hut and the clearing itself are completely overgrown with vines and foliage. Half of the hut’s façade has been blown out, and the roof sags heavily over the missing section of wall. The obstacle course at the edge of the grounds that Hannu must have used for training is so overgrown I can barely tell what it is anymore.

“I’m sorry,” comes a voice from the jungle.

I whip around. “Who’s there?”

One emerges from the trees.

“You’re sorry for what?” I’m confused, out of breath. And my feet hurt from running.

That’s when it clicks. “I’m not dreaming,” I say.

One shakes her head. “Nope.”

“You took over.” The words escape my lips before I even understand what I’m saying. But I can tell from her face I’m right: she took over my consciousness while I slept, leading me out here to the site of Hannu’s death. She’s never done this before. I had no idea she even
could
do this. But her being is so intimately enmeshed with my own at this point, I shouldn’t be surprised. “You hijacked me.”

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she says. “But I needed you to come here, to remind you . . .”

“Well, it didn’t work!” I’m confused, angered by One’s manipulation of my will.

But as soon as I say it, I know it’s a lie. It
did
work.

My adrenaline’s up, my heart is racing, and I feel it: the crushing importance of what I tried and failed to do months ago. The threat my people still pose to the Garde and to the rest of the world.

They must be stopped
.

I turn away, so One can’t see the doubt on my face.

But we share a mind. There’s no hiding from her.

“I know you feel it too,” she says.

She’s right, but I push it away, that nagging sense that I have a calling I’m ignoring out here in Kenya.
Things were just starting to get good again. I like my life in Kenya, I like that I’m making a difference, and until One dragged me out here to rub my nose in the site of Hannu’s murder, it had gotten easy for me to forget about the coming war.

I shake my head. “I’m doing good work, One. I’m helping people.”

“Yeah,” she says. “What about doing
great
? You could be helping the Garde to save the planet! Besides, do you really think the Mogadorians will spare this place when their ultimate plan takes form? Don’t you realize that any work you do in the village is just building on quicksand unless you join the fight to stop your people?”

Sensing that she’s getting through to me, she steps closer. “Adam, you could be so much more.”

“I’m not a hero!” I cry, my voice catching in my throat. “I’m a weakling. A defector!”

“Adam,” she begs, her voice catching now too. “You know I like to tease you, and I’d really hate for you to get a big head or something. But you are one in a million. One in
ten
million. You are the only Mogadorian who has ever defied Mogadorian authority. You have no idea how special you are, how useful to the cause you could be!”

All I’ve ever wanted is for One to see me as special, as a hero. I wish I could believe her now. But I know she’s wrong.

“No. The only thing that’s special about me is you. If Dr. Anu hadn’t hooked me up to your brain, if I hadn’t spent three years living inside your memories . . . I’d have been the one who killed Hannu. And I’d probably have been proud of it.”

I see One flinch.

Good
, I think. I’m getting through to her.

“You were a member of the Garde. You had powers,” I say. “I’m just a skinny, powerless ex-Mogadorian. The best I can do is survive. I’m sorry.”

I turn around and begin my long walk back to camp.

One doesn’t follow.

DESPITE MY EXHAUSTING MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT
run to Hannu’s hut, I manage to wake up with the other aid-workers the following morning.

“Look at you, getting up early,” jokes Elswit. “Sure you want to cut into your beauty sleep?”

I almost retaliate by teasing Elswit, calling him the prince like the other workers sometimes do. He earned the nickname when he arrived here with a bunch of expensive nonessentials, none more ridiculous than a luxurious pair of shiny silk pajamas. Nobody makes fun of him to his face, though: he also brought a top-of-the-line laptop with high-tech global wireless, a device he lets us all use and that no one wants to jeopardize their access to.

As I get dressed, I notice that One is nowhere to be seen. She’s usually up before I am, hanging around. I figure she’s sulking from our fight in the jungle.

That, or she’s just disappeared for a while. She does that sometimes. Once I asked her about it. “Where do you go when you’re not here?” She gave me a cryptic look. “Nowhere” was all she said.

We step outside to begin our chores, only to find a light rain is starting. It’s good for the village, but it means the water project will be suspended for the day: the soil is too difficult to work with when it’s raining. So after our chores, me, Marco, and Elswit are free to loaf around, and to read or write letters.

I ask Elswit if I can have an hour with his computer. He’s quick to say yes. Elswit might be a spoiled prince, but he’s a generous one.

I take the laptop to the hut and begin poking around on news sites. When I get time with Elswit’s laptop, I always research possible Loric or Mogadorian activities. I may have removed myself from the battle, but I’m still curious about the fate of the Garde.

It’s a slow news day. I double-check to make sure that I’m alone, then open up a program I’ve created and installed on Elswit’s laptop. I’ve hacked into the wireless signals from Ashwood Estates, my former home, and created a shadow directory that caches Ashwood IM and email chatter.

I wish I could claim I was motivated by some heroic agenda. But the truth is my motive is so pathetic I’d rather die than discuss it with One: I just want to find
out if my family misses me.

My family. They think I’m dead. The truth is, they’re probably happy about it.

I spent most of my life on earth in a gated community in Virginia called Ashwood Estates, where trueborn Mogadorians live in normal suburban houses, wearing normal American clothes, living under normal American names, hiding in plain sight. But below the granite countertops and walk-in closets and faux-marble flooring, unseen by the mortals of earth, spreads a massive network of laboratories and training facilities where trueborns and vatborn Mogs work and plot together to bring about the destruction and subjugation of the entire universe.

As the son of the legendary Mogadorian warrior Andrakkus Sutekh, I was expected to be a faithful soldier in this shadowy war. I was enlisted as a subject in an experiment to extract the memories of the first fallen Loric, the girl known as One. The plan was to use the information from those memories against her people, to help us track and exterminate the rest of her kind.

The mind-transfer experiment worked only too well: I spent three years in a coma, locked inside the memories of the dead Loric, living through her happiest and most painful moments as if they were my own.

Eventually I woke from the coma. But I came back to my Mogadorian life different, with an abiding distaste
for bloodshed, a queasy but consuming sympathy for the hunted Loric, and with the ghost of One as my constant companion.

In the first of my betrayals, I lied to my people, claiming the experiment had failed and that I had no memory of my encounter with One’s consciousness. I tried to change back, to be a normal, bloodthirsty Mogadorian. But with One always around me, whether as a voice in my head or a vision at my side, it became impossible to assist my people in their attacks on the Loric.

As if led by some inexorable force, I became a traitor, working against my people’s efforts. I attempted to save the third Loric marked for death.

This Loric died anyway, gleefully murdered by my father right before my eyes. Despite my pathetic efforts, I failed to save him. Exposed as a traitor, I was thrown from a ravine by Ivanick, and left for dead.

Excerpt from I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Forgotten Ones

CONTINUE ADAM’S STORY AS A VITAL MOGADORIAN SECRET IS REVEALED!