My last rank of the day is number two. Right ahead of Serkova at three.
“Better luck tomorrow, Serkova,” I say, wearing a bright, fake-friendly smile.
He curses me and heads out of the lab.
After work, I head upstairs to my room to wash up before dinner. My mother told me Kelly’s skipping dinner again for her afterschool program in the Nursery. Yeah, right. I know the real reason: she doesn’t want to share a table with me.
But not even that can get me down: beating Serkova, even just the once, was too big a victory. I find myself racing up the stairs to my room, three steps at a time.
I open the door to my room, hoping to find One. I can’t wait to crow to her about kicking Serkova’s ass. When I enter, I see her feet peeking out from behind the corner of the bed.
“One?”
I step closer.
She’s flat on her back on the carpet. Mouth and eyes open. She looks glazed, and her skin is doing that milky flickering thing that it did back under the baobab tree. Only much, much worse.
“What happened?” I crouch beside her on the floor. She’s silent. “One?”
After a moment’s silence, she speaks. “Nothing.” Her lips barely move and her voice is raspy. “It’s just that each time it’s darker than the last time. It hurts more, it’s more … obliterating.” Her eyes swim around in her head, searching for me.
Her gaze finally finds mine. “It’s like, what’s blacker than black, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say.
But I don’t know. She’s going through something I have no experience with. She’s going through the End.
I hear my mother call me for dinner.
I turn back to One. “I’m going to stay with you.”
She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly.
“No,” she says. “You should go.” Her eyes drift back to the ceiling as she lies there, flickering in and out of view.
Heartbroken, I leave.
My father joins my mother and me for dinner. He barely speaks, except to ask my mother for seconds—he has a true warrior’s appetite—and to give us an update on Ivan. “His superior officer says Ivan is doing excellent work. Says he has the makings of a general, himself.”
“That’s wonderful,” says my mother, beaming approvingly. “Does he know the good news about Adamus?”
My father and I exchange a quick, uneasy glance.
The General wipes his mouth with a napkin. “No.”
“Why not?” she says, looking back and forth between the two of us. “I think he’d be happy to hear his brother is alive.”
“Adamus is not Ivanick’s brother,” my father says, silencing her.
Technically that’s true—I’m their biological son and Ivanick was adopted, raised by my parents—but I catch the General’s subtext. Saying I am not Ivanick’s brother is my father’s way of saying that I am unworthy of being honored that way, that I am less their son than even Ivan. My father steps into the kitchen, leaving me and my mother alone in awkward silence.
The truth is, I’m too upset about One’s worsening fades to even care about the hateful soap opera of my family life.
“You’ve barely touched your plate, Adamus.” My mother looks at me with concern. “Is something upsetting you?”
The question is so ridiculous, given the circumstances, I almost laugh. I almost say, “Yes, Mother. Everything is upsetting me.” But I bite my tongue.
I hear One’s voice from last night. “We need to get back in that lab.”
She’s right. She’s fading so fast I need to convince Dr. Zakos to try the procedure again if she’s going to have any hope of living. But how can I convince my father to let me go, to grant me leave of my temporary position in the surveillance facility?
“Adamus?”
“I’m just afraid,” I say. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I see it, the dim outline of a new card to play.
“Afraid?” my mother asks. “Afraid of what?”
“Of Father. I’m afraid he’ll make me …” My voice trails off dramatically. I force myself to look as stricken, as ghostly with fear, as I can.
“What are you saying—”
And then I blurt it out. I explain to my mother that I ran into Dr. Anu’s replacement in the Northwest tunnel the other day and he said that he could do the mind-transfer procedure again.
“He says it’ll work this time. That they can’t do it to just anyone, it has to be me. And I’m afraid, I don’t want to go back into the labs and be hooked up to machines. I’m afraid I’ll go into another coma or—or … worse!” I will tears to my eyes. “He says he can dig up real information about the Garde if they do it, and I think the General will make me …”
“Oh Adamus, I doubt that—”
I interrupt her, louder than before. “But he will! If the General finds out, I’m sure he will!”
Then I hear his low deep voice, coming from behind me.
“If he finds out what, exactly?”
It’s the General. Taking my bait.
CHAPTER 9
“Have a seat, get comfortable.” Dr. Zakos has positioned a large curved chair in the center of the room and gestures for me to get in. Nervously I take a seat.
“I was delighted to hear from your father last night,” he says, flitting around the laboratory, putting monitors in place, booting up scary-looking medical equipment. “But with the short notice, it might take me a while to get this equipment up and running.”
I can tell he’s ecstatic to use the equipment on me. Adamus, the Mogadorian lab rat.
I sink into the chair, trying to get comfortable while Zakos sets up. I should be happy: my ruse worked. I deliberately let my father overhear that I didn’t want to be used in Zakos’s mind-transfer experiments, and he had Zakos on the phone within minutes, giving him the go ahead to plug my brain into One’s corpse.
The General still hates me, and seeing me weak and afraid, as I’d pretended to be at the dinner table, gave his meager conscience whatever license it needed to risk my life again in the lab.
The General is free to hate me. I hate him too. And now that I’ve succeeded in tricking him again, my hatred has a new depth, a new dimension: contempt. I fooled him.
The machines begin to whir.
I’m afraid of what will happen while I’m under, but push that aside. More than anything else, I’m relieved to know that One may have a chance of survival. If the technology has improved, maybe I can get through the procedure unharmed, rescuing One in the process.
“The transfer rig will take about twenty minutes to warm up,” Zakos announces.
I nod as I watch the doctor approach the steel console beside the tile containing One’s body. He presses a few buttons and the slab comes out with the same hydraulic whoosh as before.
From where I’m sitting I can’t see One’s body. Zakos presses a few buttons on the edge of One’s slab, then presses the console again. The slab whooshes shut.
“You don’t need …” I start, then catch myself before I call her One. “You don’t need to connect the body to me?”
“No,” he says, with professional pride. “All of the containment pods are linked to this mainframe terminal,” he says, pointing at the largest monitor. “Everything besides the pods’ hydraulics are controlled through here: brain scans, vitals, preservation protocols …”