I try to get comfortable. After months on a bare cot at the aid camp, my expensive pillow-top mattress should feel unbelievably fluffy and soft. But it feels like a bed of nails.
After a strained dinner, during which my father and I both pretended to be happy I was home, alone in my room I can finally let my guard down and drop the fake smile. I’m exhausted and scared. Even if I somehow manage to avoid being executed within the trial week the General has granted me, that’s no guarantee I’ll manage to break into the labs. And even if I do, that’s no guarantee I’ll find a successful means of reviving One, of keeping her imminent disappearance at bay. And even if I manage to save her, I have no plan for how to save myself, for how to escape this place once I’m done.
I’ll need to figure that out, because right now death doesn’t even feel like the worst-case scenario. Passing my father’s test and being “allowed” to remain in this place, having to indefinitely maintain the pretense of being a loyal Mogadorian, feels like the grimmest fate of all.
“That was hard to watch.” One appears, standing in the doorway.
I sigh, grateful for her presence.
“Didn’t realize you were there.”
She ambles towards me and sits at the foot of the bed. “I hung back. Tried to stay out of your line of sight. Figured you needed to focus.” She gives me an affectionate look. “Performance of a lifetime, huh?”
“You said it.”
She looks guilty, worried for my safety. “You sure I’m worth it?”
I manage to fake a confident smile. “Definitely.”
My bedroom door opens and my sister Kelly swings in.
Surprised, I hop off the bed.
“So you’re back,” she says bluntly, sizing me up.
“Yeah,” I say. I’m not sure if I should rush up and embrace her.
I decide to wait and follow her lead.
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” She fiddles with the doorknob hesitantly.
“You weren’t at dinner.” Over dinner my father explained that Ivan had been promoted to a new position somewhere in the Southwest—news that filled me with such relief I had to cover my mouth so the General wouldn’t see how happy I was—but I hadn’t been given a reason for Kelly’s absence.
“Ran late. I’m doing an afterschool program at the Nursery now.” The Nursery is what some of us call the piken pens in the underground complex. Pikens are bred in the labs down there and conditioned for combat. “I think I’m going to be a trainer when I graduate. They say I have what it takes.”
“Oh,” I reply. “That’s great.”
I can’t believe how dumb I sound, how tentative. Back in the hornets’ nest of Ashwood, and I’m scared of my own kid sister. It’s pathetic.
“Whatever,” she says. “So listen. Congratulations on surviving and stuff, and for coming back here. But, you know, having you dead was embarrassing enough. Now I have to explain to my friends that my loser brother is back. You’re basically ruining my life.”
I’m stunned by her callousness, but I understand. In Mogadorian society, dying in combat is not afforded the prestige it is among most human cultures. And failing in combat and surviving is hardly better than being a traitor. My mother’s relief at my survival won’t be shared by my sister … or anyone else at Ashwood.
“I’m just telling you this so when I ignore you in front of the others, you don’t freak out, okay?”
“Fair enough,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
She leaves, without a good night, much less that hug.
I shoot One a despairing look.
She quickly covers her expression of pity with one of her best, most sarcastic grins. “Welcome home, Adamus,” she says.
CHAPTER 7
A kid a little older than me named Serkova comes to get me in the morning. According to the General, he’s a promising young surveyor in the Media Surveillance division. My father assigned him to bring me up to speed and put me to work.
We ride the elevator down to the underground complex together. He gives me a sidelong glance. “Heard you bit it in Kenya.”
“Yeah,” I concede, feigning sheepishness.
“And now you’re angling for a position as a surveyor?”
“That’s the idea,” I say.
He snorts. Serkova has a generic trueborn face, but there is something gross and oddly piggish about his nose that’s even grosser when he snorts.
“I didn’t know we were in the business of giving failed soldiers second chances.” He turns his stare on me. “Guess there’s an exception for the General’s son.”
The elevator doors open and we stride into the hub at the center of the underground complex. The domed ceiling and orb-like fluorescent light fixture give it the feel of a massive—and massively ugly—atrium.
Trueborns and vatborns stride in every direction in and out of the various tunnels radiating out from the hub. I feel them react to my presence: the trueborns avoid my gaze, while the vatborns sneer at me with naked contempt. Word sure traveled fast, even down here.
We make our way past the entrances to the Southeast and Northeast tunnels on our way to the Northwest tunnel. With the exception of the General’s briefing room, I’ve never been granted access to any of the tunnels off the hub before. But it’s fairly common knowledge that the tunnels lead in one direction to combat training facilities, and in the other direction to weapons stores and bunkers for the vatborn. We’re heading down a third tunnel, to the R+D laboratories and the media and surveillance compounds.
I struggle to keep pace with Serkova. It’s obvious he doesn’t like me and resents being saddled with the job of babysitting me.
“What’s your problem with me?” I genuinely want to know: the Mogadorian worldview has become foreign to me so quickly. “So I’m being given a second chance. Why should you care?”
Serkova turns to me, a contemptuous sneer on his lips. “You think I don’t get enough shit as it is from the combat Mogs for being a surveyor? They already call us tech wienies. Now we’re being forced to take on a proven loser in combat. So the next time they say we’re only surveyors because we’re not good enough for combat, they’ll be right. All thanks to you.”
Great.
I follow him into the Media Surveillance facility, a large room lit only by the screens of the twenty or so computer monitors throughout the room. No one looks up as Serkova leads me to my monitor. Thanks to his outburst, I don’t have to wonder why.
He explains to me what our job is, then sits down at the console next to mine. “Good luck, Adamus,” he says, with evident sarcasm, then gets to work.
I turn to my monitor.
A steady stream of links scrolls across my screen, in color-coded text. The Mogadorian mainframe scours satellite and cable TV, radio transmissions, and every last corner of the internet, 24/7. A certain amount of automated culling occurs before these links reach our screens: most human interest stories are weeded out in advance, as are most articles or news segments devoted to U.S. or international politics. But a significant majority of what remains—weather reports, natural-disaster coverage, police blotters—makes it to our screens as a veritable geyser of hyperlinks.