The Search for Sam (3 page)

She remains silent. I stop in my tracks.

“Come on. This isn’t funny.”

“Oh,” she says, laughing bitterly. “I agree. This isn’t funny at all.” I can tell
from her voice that she’s been crying. “I didn’t want you to see me like this,” she
says.

Now I’m spooked. “See you like
what
?”

But up close I understand what she means. Her skin, her whole
being
, is strangely milky, almost translucent. I can look right through her.

“I keep disappearing,” she says. “Lately it’s been taking all my strength to keep
myself visible.”

I’m quiet, afraid to speak. But I’m also afraid to listen, afraid of what she’ll say
next.

She turns to me, staring right into my eyes. “Remember when I told you I went ‘nowhere’
when I was gone from you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I thought you were just being mysterious....”

She shakes her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I was being literal, actually. I
really do go nowhere. I disappear completely.” Now she’s crying freely. “Each time,
I can feel myself getting weaker. Less
real
. It keeps happening. I can still fight it, but it’s getting harder. It feels like
I’m dying all over again.”

She closes her eyes. As she does, she flickers in and out of visibility. I can intermittently
see the bark of the tree behind her.

“Well,” she says, opening her eyes again. “Dr. Anu never promised this would last.”

“One,” I begin. “What are you saying?” I ask the question even though a part of me—the
One part of me—already knows the answer.

“My existence … us … this …” She gestures to the empty space between us. “You’re forgetting
me, Adam.”

“That’s impossible, One. I’ll never forget you.”

She smiles sadly. “I know you’ll always
remember
me. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s one thing to remember I existed, it’s
another for me to stay alive inside of you.”

I shake my head and turn away, not following, not willing to listen.

“It’s been a while since we were connected in Anu’s lab. Too long, I guess. I’m fading.
The way we are, the way we talk to each other, the way you can see me, the way I feel
alive even though I died years ago. Maybe
forgetting
is the wrong way of putting it. But whatever you want to call it, this wasn’t built
to last. It’s breaking down.”

Seeing how upset I’m getting, she shrugs, trying to seem casual. “We’re both going
to have to accept it. My time is running out.”

“No,” I say, refusing to believe it.

But when I turn back to her, she’s already gone.

After a restless night, searching for One and eventually making my way back to the
cabin alone, I drag myself out of bed. I brush my teeth, get dressed, finish my morning
chores. I work in the village under the baking sun.

What choice do I have? It’s not like I can ask Marco for time off. “Hey Marco, a few
months ago I emerged from a three-year coma, during which I lived inside the memories
of a dead alien girl, and she’s been my constant companion ever since. But now she’s
dying, this time for good.... Any chance you could cover for me at the well today?”
Wouldn’t really fly. So I grit my teeth and keep working.

One is not as scarce today as she was yesterday. I saw her briefly when I woke up
but she stayed far away, and she’s hanging out at the edge of camp when I return from
the village, sitting against the same tree as last night.

“Don’t,” she says, as I walk over to join her. “No puppy-dog eyes, please.”

“One …” I start.

“I’m fine,” she says, interrupting me. “Yesterday was just a bad day. I’m sure I’ve
got a few more weeks.”

I’m speechless, heartbroken.

“You’ve got dinner to cook.”

I balk. Dinner? Who cares about dinner when I have so little time left with her?

“You have to leave. Elswit’s giving you funny looks for talking to a tree.” She laughs,
waving me off. “Go.”

I head to the kitchen. As we cook, Elswit tells me stories about his rich-kid misadventures,
before he got his shit together and dedicated himself to service. Usually I find Elswit’s
stories amusing, but my mind keeps drifting back to One, sitting under the tree.

This camp, the village … these have been my sanctuary the past couple months, and
it has gotten so easy to imagine a happy future for myself here. But when I look across
camp to see One, flickering in and out of sight, leaning wearily against the tree,
I imagine what this place feels like to her.

While her people are out there, fighting for survival, she’s stuck here for her last
hours, simply because I’ve found a place where I feel safe.

I realize that to her this place isn’t a home. It’s a grave.

I lean back in my airplane seat, staring at the passport in my hand as the jet hums
somewhere over the Atlantic:
ADAM SUTTON
. In the photo, I’m beaming, the tooth I lost in battle with Ivan a small black gap
in my smile. Looking at Adam Sutton’s smiling face no one would ever know how afraid
I am, what an insane risk I’m taking right now.

Elswit sits next to me, headphones on, watching some first-run blockbuster on his
tablet computer while joggling his knees. The joggling is annoying, but I’m in no
position to complain: Elswit came through for me big-time.

I didn’t even have to come up with a grand lie for him. I just told him I had a family
crisis and needed to get back to the United States. He said that was all he needed
to know: he took me to the American embassy in Nairobi, paid for my new passport,
and arranged for me to join him on his father’s private jet, already scheduled to
bring him home to Northern California for his birthday.

If I didn’t already have an active American identity, none of this would’ve worked.
Fortunately my father, “Andrew Sutton,” never bothered to report me missing. I wonder
what alarms my passport replacement might have set off at the Mogadorian headquarters,
but I guess it doesn’t make any difference. When I show up at Ashwood Estates, either
they’ll kill me or they won’t. Knowing I’m coming shouldn’t make a difference.

We touched down in London to refuel, our second refueling stop. Now we’re back in
the air, next stop Virginia, where I’ll part ways with Elswit. At that point nothing
besides a cab ride to Ashwood will stand between me and my upcoming confrontation
with my family.

I sink even deeper into my seat, dreading my arrival.

“Must be scary.” I turn to see One, sitting in the seat next to mine. She’s been gone
for most of the twenty-hour trip, off to her own private purgatory. “I can’t even
imagine.”

Yeah
, I say. I don’t need to say any more: One knows what I’m thinking.

I’m about to see my family again for the first time in months. I expect to be greeted
as a traitor. Maybe I’ll be executed for treason: killed where I stand, or fed to
a piken. Mogadorians have no particular history or protocol for handling treason;
dissent is not a problem they have much, if any, experience with.

I know my only hope is to convince the General that I’m worth more to him alive than
dead.

“You don’t have to do this,” she says, a guilty, worried expression on her face. “It’s
dangerous. When I talked about taking up the cause, I didn’t mean this....”

This is what we have to do
, I say. I sound way more certain than I feel. But I have no choice: I can’t lose
her.

“Once we land, we don’t need to go to Ashwood. We can go anywhere, try to find the
other Loric …”

Screw the others
, I say. Though my plan is vague, I know that my only hope of saving One, of keeping
her by my side, lies somewhere in the laboratory beneath Ashwood Estates.
I’m not doing this for them
.

“I know,” she says. “You’re doing this to try and save me, to find some way to keep
me alive. You think if you go back, you can
maybe
find some way into the labs. And
maybe
my body’s still there,
maybe
you can reengage the mind transfer, restore me, buy me a few more years.” She bites
her lip, worried about the risk I’m taking. “Seems like a lot of maybes to risk your
life over.”

She’s right. But I don’t have a choice: without One, I’m nothing. Even a 1 percent
chance of succeeding is worth pursuing.

In the cab on the way to Ashwood Estates, my fear is like a fist in my stomach, pushing
upwards. We’re getting close, maybe ten minutes away.

Nine minutes. Eight minutes.

I feel bile churning. I ask the driver to pull over to the side of the road and I
rush out to the tall grass at the edge of the highway and throw up what little I’ve
eaten since leaving Kenya.

I take a moment. To breathe, to look out over the grass to the open fields beyond.
I know this is it: my last chance to run.

Then I wipe my mouth and return to the cab, grateful that One isn’t around to see
me like this.

“You okay, kid?” the driver asks.

I nod. “Yeah.”

The driver just shakes his head and gets us back on the road.

Six minutes. Five minutes.

We enter the suburbs surrounding Ashwood Estates. Fast-food-glutted intersections
give way to middle-class townships, then to upscale gated communities indistinguishable
from Ashwood. The perfect hiding place.

From above we’re just another suburb: no one would imagine the strange culture inside
those tastefully bland McMansions, the world-destroying plans being hatched below.
In all my years living at Ashwood we’d never fallen under even a moment’s suspicion
from the government or the local police.

As Ashwood’s imposing gates loom into view up the road, I find myself darkly amused
by the irony that a walled fortress has been such an effective way to deflect suspicion
in suburban America.

I tell the driver to let me off across the street, passing him the last of the money
that Elswit was kind enough to give me to get home.

I approach the front gate’s intercom system, glad I threw up back on the highway:
if I hadn’t then, I would now.

There’s no point being coy. I step right in front of the security camera and press
the buzzer for my house and look right into the camera. Every house has a direct feed
to it. I will be identified immediately.

“Adamus?” It’s my mother. Her voice cracks on the second syllable, and at the sound
of it my legs almost give out.

I know she’s a monster. She wants nothing more than the destruction of the entire
Loric race and domination of this entire planet. But the sound of her voice hits me
hard: I’ve missed her. More than I realized.

“Mom,” I say, struggling to keep my voice from breaking.

But the intercom line has gone dead.

She’s probably pulled an alarm. Notified the General. Within minutes I’ll be on a
rack, or thrown into a piken’s feeding pen …

“Adamus?!”

Her voice again. It’s not coming from the intercom.

I step around the intercom panel to see my mother in the distance through the gate.
She’s run out of our house at the top of the hill. She’s in a sundress, the kind she
wears when she’s baking, running down the hill barefoot. Running towards me.

In rage? In confusion?
I steel myself for her approach.

“Adam!” she cries, getting closer and closer, her bare feet slapping against the asphalt.
Before I know it she’s swung open the pedestrian access gate and has pulled me into
her arms, hugging me, crying.

“My sweet boy, my fallen hero … you’re alive.”

I’m stunned. She’s not greeting me with anger. She’s greeting me with love.

I sit on our living-room couch, sipping the lemonade my mother brought me. She’s talking
up a storm, and I’m careful not to interrupt: I need to tread carefully, to figure
out what happened here before I commit to a particular story.

“I didn’t believe them,” she says, sitting next to me and putting a hand on my knee.
“I couldn’t believe them.”

I take another sip, buying myself some time.
Didn’t believe them about what?

“They told me everything and I knew it had happened, but I didn’t believe it … I knew
you couldn’t really be dead.”

Oh. She couldn’t believe
that
part.

“I’ve always known physical combat wasn’t your gift. I told your father a thousand
times you’d be better suited to a tactical role, but he was determined not to break
with custom, and insisted we make no distinction between combat and strategy. Everyone
must fight in the war. But when he told me you’d been killed, that that disgusting
Loric had thrown you off a cliff … it felt like my worst fears had come true.”

My mind reels. It was my adopted brother Ivan who threw me into the ravine, under
my father’s approving gaze. I hadn’t been killed by a Loric: I’d joined the Loric
cause.

“They said they searched high and low for you …”