It takes until the pistol’s report stops echoing for the secretary of defense to realize his suicide
attempt didn’t work. He blinks his watery eyes at me¸ not quite understanding why he’s still alive.
‘How –?’
Before Sanderson can pull the trigger again, Nine lunges forward and slaps the gun out of his hand.
I exhale very slowly and allow my body to uncoil.
‘That’s not right,’ Sanderson says to me accusingly, his lower lip shaking as he rubs his wrist
where Nine struck him. ‘Just let me die.’
‘Seriously,’ Walker interjects, her hands tightening around her own gun. ‘Why’d you stop him?
Could’ve solved all our problems right there.’
‘It wouldn’t have solved anything,’ I say, shooting her a look as I let the bullet drop harmlessly on
to Sanderson’s unmade bed.
‘He’s right,’ Sanderson says to Walker, his shoulders slumping. ‘Killing me won’t change anything.
But keeping me alive is simply cruel.’
‘You don’t get to decide when you check out, old man,’ I tell Sanderson. ‘When we win this war,
we’ll let the people of Earth decide how they deal with traitors.’
Sanderson chuckles dryly. ‘The optimism of youth.’
I crouch down to look him in the face. ‘There’s still time to redeem yourself,’ I say. ‘To do
something of value.’
Sanderson raises an eyebrow, and his eyes seem to focus up a bit. But then the right side of his
mouth droops and he has to wipe away a blob of drool with the cuff of his robe. Looking utterly
defeated, Sanderson averts his eyes.
‘No,’ he says quietly. ‘I think not.’
Nine sighs from boredom and picks up the kit of syringes laid out next to Sanderson. He studies the
tar-colored sludge inside the injector for a moment, then waves it in Sanderson’s face.
‘What is this shit they’re giving you, huh?’ Nine asks. ‘This what you traded the planet for?’
Sanderson peers longingly at the vials but then weakly shoves them away.
‘They healed me,’ Sanderson explains. ‘More than that. They made me young again.’
‘And look at you now,’ Nine grunts. ‘Fresh as a daisy, right?’
‘You know their leader has lived for centuries,’ Sanderson counters, his eyes swinging wildly
between me and Nine. ‘Of course you do. He promised us that. He promised immortality and power.’
‘He lied,’ I say.
Sanderson looks down at the floor. ‘Yes.’
‘Pathetic,’ Walker says, but the venom’s gone out of her. Like me, I don’t think Sanderson has
turned out to be the villain Walker expected. Maybe he was once the puppet master of an international
conspiracy in support of Mogs, but at this point he’s been entirely chewed up and spit out by
Mogadorian Progress. This isn’t the game changer Walker was hoping for. I’m worried that we’ve
wasted what precious little time we have left.
Sanderson ignores Nine and Walker. For some reason, maybe because I forced him to keep on
living, he appeals directly to me. ‘The wonders they had to offer … can’t you understand? I thought I
was ushering in a golden age for humanity. How could I say no to them? To him?’
‘And now you have to keep taking this stuff, is that it?’ I ask, glancing to the syringes that I bet
contain something like the unnatural genetic brew the Mogs use to grow their disposable soldiers. ‘If
you stop, you’ll break down like one of them.’
‘Old enough to turn to dust, anyway,’ Nine grumbles.
‘It’s been two days, and look at me …’ Sanderson waves a hand at himself, at his body that looks
like a slug with salt poured on it. ‘They used me. Kept giving me treatments in exchange for favors.
But you freed me. Now I can finally die.’
Nine throws up his hands and looks at me. ‘Dude, screw this. This guy’s a lost cause. We need to
figure something else out.’
A sense of desperation begins to sink in now that Walker’s lead on the secretary of defense has
turned up only a broken old man and gotten us no closer to thwarting the imminent Mogadorian
invasion. But I’m not willing to give up just yet. This lump sitting in front of me used to be a powerful man – hell, the Mogs had a protection detail on him, so he still is. There has to be a way to fix him, to make him willing to fight.
I need him to see the light.
Some combination of desperation and intuition causes me to turn on my Lumen. I don’t crank it up
to fire level; instead, I produce just enough juice so that a beam of pure light shoots from my hand.
Sanderson’s eyes widen and he inches back on the bed away from me.
‘I already told you, I’m not going to hurt you,’ I say, as I lean in towards him.
I shine my Lumen on the palsied, saggy part of his face, wanting to get a good look at what I’m
dealing with. The skin is grayed and almost dead looking, fine, ash-colored veins running through it.
The dark particles under Sanderson’s skin actually seem to float away from my Lumen, almost like
they’re trying to burrow deeper.
‘I can heal this,’ I say, resolutely. I’m not sure if it’s actually true, but I have to try.
‘You – you can fix what they did?’ Sanderson asks, a note of hope in his gravelly voice.
‘I can make you like you were,’ I reply. ‘Not better, in the way they promised. Not younger. Just …
as you should be.’
‘Old people get old,’ Nine puts in. ‘You gotta deal with it.’
Sanderson looks at me skeptically. I must sound just like the Mogadorians did years ago, when they
first convinced him to join their side.
‘What do you want in exchange?’ he asks, like a high price is a foregone conclusion.
‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘You can try killing yourself again for all I care. Or maybe you can find what’s
left of your conscience and do what’s right. It’ll be up to you.’
And with that, I press my palm against the side of Sanderson’s face.
Sanderson shudders as the warm healing energy of my Legacy passes into him. Normally, when
using my healing powers, I get a sensation that the injury is knitting itself back together, of cells
rearranging themselves beneath my fingertips. With Sanderson, it feels as if a force is pushing back
against my Legacy, as if there are dark, cellular pits into which my healing light plunges down and
gutters out. I still feel Sanderson healing, but it’s slow going, and I have to concentrate much harder than usual. At one point, something actually sizzles and pops beneath his skin, one of his discolored
veins burning up. Sanderson flinches away from me.
‘Are you hurt?’ I ask, short of breath, my hand still poised next to his face.
He hesitates. ‘No – no, it actually feels better. Somehow … cleaner. Keep going.’
I keep going. I can feel the Mogadorian sludge burrowing deeper into Sanderson, retreating from
my Legacy. I intensify my healing, chasing it through his veins. I find that I’m squinting from the
exertion and a cold sweat dampens my back. I’m so focused on beating back the darkness I detect
inside Sanderson that I must lose track of time or enter some kind of trance state.
When I’m finished at last, I stumble backwards, my legs wobbly, and run right into Sam. I wasn’t
even aware he’d come upstairs. He’s holding out a phone – did he steal it from that bystander we
knocked over? – and recording my healing of Sanderson. He stops when I bump into him and, for a
moment, Sam is the only thing holding me up.
‘That was awesome,’ Sam says. ‘You were, like, glowing. Are you okay?’
I draw myself up with some effort, not wanting to show any sign of weakness in front of Walker or
Sanderson, even though I feel drained. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’