She smirks. “We’re sharing a brain, Mog-boy. Guess that means I know a thing or two about you, too.”
Around us, the fleeing Garde have all boarded their ship, the engines now rumbling to life. I should be scanning the ship for any helpful details, but I’m too distracted by the dead girl sneering at me.
“Your scary-ass pops is going to be so disappointed when you wake up with nothing juicy to tell him.” She grabs me by the elbow, and the feeling is so real that I have to remind myself that this is basically just a dream.
A dream that Number One is suddenly in control of.
“You want my memories?” she asks. “Come on. I’ll give you a guided tour.”
As the scene changes again, I start to understand what’s happened.
I’m trapped in here with my sworn enemy. And she seems to be in charge.
CHAPTER 6
This time the memory shift is different. Before, I was falling through time, falling through memory. Now I feel still, and suddenly I’m standing outside a secluded ranch in Coahuila, Mexico. In this memory, One and her Cêpan are carrying boxes into the house. It’s moving day. This is the first place One and her Cêpan—Hilde, her Cêpan’s name was Hilde—settled after the Garde landed on Earth and parted ways.
Wait—how do I know all this?
It’s strange. In addition to finding myself existing here, observing this particular moment in One’s life, I also have a general sense of her memories of the time. I know the things that she knows and remember what she remembers. The memories are so vivid, it’s like they’re my own.
It’s like I’m her.
Ghost-One appears next to me, watching with me as the younger version of herself and Hilde unpack dishes in the kitchen. It’s creepy to have her here, gives me a feeling like vertigo. I try to ignore her, but she just keeps talking to me.
“We stayed here for a while,” she says, sounding almost wistful. “Then Hilde thought she saw some of your peeps snooping around the city, so we had to leave.”
The Garde move a lot, city to city, country to country, their movements unpredictable. My father will want to know this. It’s completely the opposite of the way we Mogadorians have done it, consolidating our power in bases across the globe. That’s why they’re so difficult to track.
“She was sort of a drag sometimes,” says One, watching her Cêpan. “Probably a lot like your dickbag dad. Except, you know, not eeee-vil.” She rubs her fingers together and cackles an eeee-vil cackle in punctuation.
“Shut up,” I spit, sounding angrier than I even realized I was. “You don’t know him.”
I find myself studying Hilde in spite of myself. She’s in her late fifties, and her face is wrinkled, both with the natural lines of age and the premature weathering of stress. Her gray hair tightly bound in a stern braid. Her eyes have a hardness to them; her voice is steely and measured, even when just telling One—the “real” One—which cupboard the plates belong in. Truth be told, she does remind me of the General.
“I loved her like a mom, though,” says ghost-One, sadness breaking her voice. My mind drifts to the dead old woman we left to rot in Malaysia, and I feel something like guilt but quickly push it away. She’s messing with your head, Adamus.
“I wish you’d stop talking to me,” I tell her.
“Yeah? Well I wish your people hadn’t killed me.”
After Mexico, One and Hilde move to Austin, Texas. I try to push my way out of these memories, to get back to that night on the Loric airstrip where I can actually find out something useful, but One won’t let me. Somehow she’s blocking me.
I may be an uninvited guest in her mind, but it’s still hers. She can’t kick me out entirely, but she does have some control over which rooms I’m allowed to visit.
Most of the time when I try to force my way through her memory, One makes me sit through one of her and Hilde’s training sessions.
“I used to hate these,” One says, grinning. “Hope you feel the same.”
Hilde is a master martial artist, though it’s a fighting style that would never make it into Mogadorian training, where brute force is prized above all else. Hilde’s is a defensive martial art, one that uses an attacker’s own momentum, focusing strikes on nerve centers that will temporarily incapacitate the enemy.
Stuck in these memories, when boredom sets in, I find myself aping Hilde’s movements, practicing alongside young One. I know that none of this is real, that it’s all in my mind. Or One’s mind. I’m not so sure there’s a difference.
My slight frame has never served me well in Mogadorian combat training, much to the disappointment of my father and the amusement of Ivan. But in One’s memories, I never get tired. Even if this training is basically imaginary, it feels good to finally move in a way that suits me.
Besides, I’m supposed to be gathering intelligence. How the Garde fight is essential information.
In the earlier training memories, One is an eager pupil. She practices with Hilde from dawn until sunset, listening rapt as Hilde tells stories of the Loric heroes she’s helped train. Hilde is full of tales of honorable competition, of noble battles fought on Lorien. They’re meant to inspire, to demonstrate to One the Loric spirit of perseverance. Compared to the stories in the Great Book, there is a surprising lack of bloody violence and decimation in them.
“One day,” says Hilde, “you will take your place among them as a great hero to our people. You will be known as the One who protected the Eight.”
I can feel the pride Number One takes in Hilde’s words, but also the doubt. There’s a part of her that wonders how she can possibly stand alone in opposition to the Mogadorians that conquered her entire planet in a single night.
“I always wondered why I couldn’t have gotten lucky and been number nine,” muses One as I practice forms next to her younger self. “But nooo. I have to go and be the first. Otherwise known as the most doomed of nine doomed assholes. The Elders really screwed me over.”
In Austin, Hilde lets One start attending school, all the better to fit in. I’m dragged along on these memories of her classes. School seems so pointless. The General would never even consider letting us freely socialize with the humans.
And yet, as the memories go by, I find myself being drawn into One’s life. She makes some friends, takes up skateboarding. It all starts to feel like something approaching a normal life. At the same time, her training slips. She starts blowing off sessions, even after her telekinesis develops, which is when she should’ve been working extra hard. For all her rigidity, Hilde couldn’t really do anything to One if she slipped out a window to go hang out with her friends. How do you ground the last hope for a dying race?
I don’t really care about One’s freaking social life. This girl is the enemy of my people. Her death is inevitable, has already happened. And yet … drifting through her memories, I can’t help but put myself in her situation. Even though she travels the Earth under the constant threat of execution, I realize that One has gotten to see more of this planet than I have. The General has never allowed us to travel out of Washington. Hilde might be a tough Cêpan, but she still allows One to go to school, to make friends, to live a life not entirely dedicated to war.
I wonder what that’s like. I wonder what my life would be like without the need to serve Mogadorian expansion, without the drills and training, the supervised readings from Ra’s Great Book.