Nine raises an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, let’s go say hi. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
Nine dismisses his class and leads me to an office on the building’s third floor. It looks out over the sprawling campus, or it will once the windows are put in—right now, there are a bunch of blue tarps covering the opens spaces in the wall. Lexa sits behind a desk, staring at a multiscreen computer rig. Like Nine, she’s dressed casually and seems at ease here. Her smile is wide when she recognizes me, and she immediately leaves her screens behind to give me a hug.
“So, are you a professor too?” I ask her.
Lexa scoffs. “No, Nine outpaced me there. I’m back to my favorite role: benevolent hacker.” She waves me around the desk for a look. “Check it out.”
At a glance, it’s hard to take in all the information that flows across Lexa’s screens. There are world maps with little blue dots, multiple search-bots trawling the internet, dark net forums and boxes of encrypted data speeding through processes I don’t understand.
“So, what am I looking at?”
“I’m keeping tabs on the Garde,” she explains. “Scrubbing their information if it gets made public. Keeping their families confidential. Even once they’re under the protection of the Academy, you can’t be too careful. Not to mention, some governments still aren’t super-enthusiastic about this whole initiative.”
“Is this necessary?”
“Better safe than sorry,” she responds. “Lawson and the other Earth Garde people have been good to us, but . . .”
“But then there’s shit like this that makes you wonder,” Nine interjects, handing me a piece of official-looking government stationery. I give it a quick read.
I, the undersigned, affirm that I am a naturally born human of Earth and a law-abiding citizen of an Earth Garde nation. With my signature I pledge an oath to Earth Garde, a fully sanctioned peacekeeping division created by the United Nations and administered by the United States. I do solemnly swear that I will defend the planet and the best interests of my nation and its allies against all enemies, earthly and extraterrestrial; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Earth Garde; that I will only use my Legacies in service to my planet; and that I will obey the orders of the jointly appointed Earth Garde High Command according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
I look up at Nine, feeling a little bewildered. “Is this legal?”
“I don’t know, John. I’m a professor, not a lawyer.”
“Lawson assures us that it’s just a formality,” Lexa interjects. “But we’re keeping our eyes open, just in case.”
“Well, if it ever looks like they’re not on the level . . . ,” I start to say, then show the two of them what I’ve brought with me.
In New York City, the rebuilding is still in progress. A year later and they’re still hauling away the debris from the Mogadorian bombardment. In places they’ve finished clearing out, construction crews are getting ready to put the city’s skyline back together. A similar process is happening in major cities all around the world. VH Day wasn’t without damage or casualties.
I float above a construction site, smiling at a familiar flash of silver energy. In a pit that will one day become a skyscraper, Daniela uses her stone-vision to shore up a cracked section of foundation.
“Shit,” grouses a guy in a hardhat. “You keep that up, I’m gonna be out of a job, honey.”
“I ain’t your honey, old man,” Daniela replies, and elbows her way through a crowd of construction workers. By the way they watch her strut away, grinning and exchanging glances, I think this might be a pretty common scene.
Daniela climbs out of the construction site and heads to the sidewalk, where she’s approached by a middle-aged woman who walks with a cane. The lady stops to hug Daniela, and Daniela stoops to pet the golden retriever the woman has on a leash. The woman looks familiar, and it takes me a minute to figure out why.
“You forgot your lunch, baby,” the woman says.
“Thanks, Mom,” replies Daniela.
Not every scene that I encounter during my trip around the world is a sweet one. Some endings aren’t so happy.
It’s night in Montreal when I find Karen Walker. She walks across an almost-deserted airport parking lot, a trench coat drawn up to protect her from the cold evening air, a newspaper tucked under her arm, her heels clicking.
There’s only one other person in the long-term parking lot—a pale, middle-aged man with a terrible comb-over who drags an overstuffed rolling suitcase behind him.
One of the parking lot’s light poles is out, leaving a small row of cars bathed in shadows. When the man reaches that section, Walker yells to him.
“Excuse me!” she calls, waving the newspaper. “Excusez-moi! You dropped your paper!”
The man turns around, puzzled. “Huh? That’s not—”
Fft-fft.
Two silenced rounds from the gun hidden inside her newspaper, one in the chest and one in the head. The man never saw it coming. He drops, and Walker goes to him immediately. She starts dragging his body into the shadowy space between two cars.
I help her out with my telekinesis, appearing a few feet away. She jumps, points her gun at me, then quickly lowers it and pretends she wasn’t startled in the first place.
“John.”
“Karen,” I reply. “I hope you’ve got a good reason for this.”
“I do,” she replies.
Walker unzips the dead man’s suitcase and tosses aside a pile of his clothes. She digs around until she discover a dog-eared copy of the Bible. She opens the book, revealing that it’s hollowed out.
Inside are three vials of black oil. My skin crawls at the sight of it.
“How much of that is out in the world?” I ask her.
“I don’t know,” Walker says. “Any amount over none is too much for me.”
Walker produces a vial of her own from within her trench coat. By the rotten-egg smell, I think hers is sulfuric acid. Carefully, she pours some into each of the Mogadorian vials, destroying the contents.
“Who was this man?” I ask her.
“Just a name on a list,” she replies, looking me in the eyes. “A really long list. You know, I could use some help working through it.”
I take out my cigar box and open it up. “We can talk about that soon.”
Seeing that sludge brings me back to our last battle with Setrákus Ra. Everything after I locked up with Setrákus Ra is like a dream. I remember how broken my body was, how destroyed, and I remember a vision of Sarah, a hallucination leaning down to kiss me, to make me keep going.
I remember flying. Up, out, leaving that heat behind, escaping the stench of death. I remember Bernie Kosar’s coat soft against my caved-in face.
I remember the sound of someone crying, and I remember us stopping short, still inside the mountain. I remember being able to open my eyes just enough to see a gray-furred creature—part wolf but with legs like a spider, covered in dried blood, motionless. A Chim?ra frozen in its last form.
And I remember Adam cradling that Chim?ra, Dust, and crying into the fur of his neck.
“He pulled me out. . . . He saved me . . . ,” I remember Adam saying to Six, delirious, near death himself.
I closed my eyes for good after that. I couldn’t stand to see any more.
I’d learn what happened later. How Dust dove down after Adam, took on a shape that would let him climb out of the chasm and dragged Adam as far as he could away from the caverns. He had to bite Adam to carry him to safety, and, after he died, one of Dust’s fangs was still embedded in Adam’s shoulder.
Adam wears that fang around his neck now, attached to a plain leather strap. It’s one of the few comforts he’s allowed here in Alaska.