We need to get out of here. We need a plan. Every day I go out scavenging the base for food, and every day I’m coming back with less and less of it. It’s time to move on. But to where? I have no clue.
I wish I had a way of getting in touch with Malcolm. Assuming he made it out of here alive, he’d know what to do. But all the equipment in the base is damaged beyond repair, and I haven’t been able to dig up so much as a cell phone. Until I’m back in civilization, I’m on my own.
I try to think about what One would say if she were here. I’m so used to having her kicking around in my head that if I try hard, I can summon her image as if we still shared a mind. When I close my eyes and picture her face, I see us back in California, standing on the beach. She’s barefoot in the surf, her arms crossed against her chest, her hair pinkish in the sunset and curling in the breeze.
Rex is better. His bruises have faded and the cuts and abrasions crisscrossing his body seem to be knitting back together. The big gash on his side that was squirting all that blood when I first found him will take time to heal properly, but it’s really only a surface wound. As for his arm, it wasn’t broken after all, just a dislocated shoulder that he managed to pop back into place with a casual grimace when he put his mind to it.
His mood, though, is as bad as mine. Maybe worse. He spends most of his time sitting in the corner with a dark look on his face, sometimes muttering under his breath to himself and other times scowling silently for hours on end.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was depressed. But that’s impossible—real Mogadorians don’t get depressed. They get even.
Strangely, the only thing that seems to snap Rex out of it is Dust. They’ve reached a tentative truce with each other, and despite his attempts to appear unimpressed, Rex seems just as fascinated by the Chimæra’s transformations as I am. One day when Dust is in a playful mood and flitting from one shape to another—from rabbit to parrot to chimpanzee to Labrador—I even see Rex watching him with something approaching a smile.
It gives me an idea. “How much do you know about him?” I ask, nodding toward the Chimæra. I’m not really expecting anything, so I’m taken aback when Rex actually answers me.
“Not a lot,” he says. “I don’t know where they found him, or how long he was at Dulce. I just know that we’ve been running experiments on them.”
Experiments. I give an involuntary shudder at the word, imagining Dust in some underground lab while a Mogadorian scientist tortures him in the name of Setrákus Ra. I know all too well what that’s like. I was one of those lab rats myself once.
I don’t want to think about it, but I can’t help thinking about it. And something clicks in my mind. Something about what Rex said that strikes me as odd. I just can’t quite place what it is.
“‘Them’?” I ask.
“Huh?” Rex says quizzically. He tries to play off the mistake, but the guilty flicker in his eyes lets me know I’m on to something.
“You said they’ve been doing experiments on them. As in, more than one. Are there more Chimæra out there? Somewhere on Earth?”
His eyes shift to the ceiling. He shrugs.
“I thought all the Chimæra were killed on Lorien,” I muse, circling the question carefully, trying not to remind him that he’s supposed to be giving me the silent treatment.
He remembers. He doesn’t take my bait.
The next day, though, when I find him in his usual spot in the corner again, his chin resting on his fist, I give it one more try.
“There’s more of them out there, aren’t there?” I ask. “Dust isn’t the last Chimæra.”
Rex glares at me. His eyes are dead and distant, black holes. Dust is a cat now, snoozing under the table.
“Listen,” I say. He doesn’t even look at me. “Dust would kill you if I wanted him to. You know that, right? You’re still weak, and even if you weren’t, he’s more powerful than both of us put together.”
“So have him kill me,” Rex says dully, still not meeting my gaze. It almost sounds like he means it.
I can’t hide my surprise. “I can’t believe a trueborn would say that,” I say. The shock in my voice is genuine.
Rex’s head snaps up and he looks me right in the eye, his brow furrowed in some combination of anger and shame. It was the right thing for me to say.
I push it further. “To stop fighting—that would make you even more of a weakling than I am.”
“I’ll never stop fighting,” he snaps. “I’ll see the Loric dead if it’s the last thing I do. But killing you, Adamus Sutekh—that’s going to be the first thing I take care of.”
“Fine,” I say. “Kill me.”
He knows he can’t. Not yet, at least. Because I have Dust.
“I know my days are numbered anyway,” I tell Rex. “You’ll kill me eventually, or my father will, or some vatborn who doesn’t even know my name. But right now, I’m the one with the power. You try to leave and that cute little guy napping under the table will turn into a ten-ton gorilla and peel you like a banana.”
Rex rolls his eyes, angrily hocks a giant wad of saliva onto the cement floor and goes back to staring at the ceiling. He knows I’m right.
I push on, knowing that I’m making progress. “I need you too, Rex. There’s a reason you’re alive. It’s because I can use you. You have information. And information is what I want.”
“I don’t know anything,” he spits out.
“Tell me what I want to know,” I say, “and we’ll get out of here. There will be plenty of time for you to kill me once we’ve made it out of this wasteland. I won’t even stop you.”
I can see him considering it. I hold my breath. If this doesn’t work, I really will kill him, I decide. When I can see he’s at his most vulnerable, I lean on him with one last question. “‘They.’ You said ‘they.’ Where are the rest of the Chimæra?”
“I haven’t seen them,” he mutters. “But there are a bunch of them. At least ten. Maybe more. They came on a separate ship from the Garde—at least, that’s what I overheard some of the other officers saying.”
Suddenly it all feels incredibly important. “You said they were experimenting on them,” I say, trying to keep the sense of urgency from creeping into my voice. “What kind of experiments?”
I guess Rex doesn’t see the point in clamming up now that he’s said this much already, because this time he answers my question without hesitation. He sounds almost proud as he explains it. “They’re trying to figure out how Chimæras’ transformations work. Setrákus Ra thinks that if we can isolate the gene that gives them their abilities, we can duplicate the process with the vatborn.”
The way he says “we” chills me. I’d forgotten what it was like to live among them, to believe that your own self-worth is bound up in the messed-up glory of a warlord who chased nine teenagers across a solar system just to make sure they were all good and dead.
“Where are they?” I ask. “Tell me where they are, and we’ll go there together.”
He looks shocked at my intensity, but he takes a deep breath. “They’re not here. Dust got separated from the rest of them somehow and they were keeping him here until someone could take him back to the main facility.”
“Tell me where, Rex.”
Only now does it seem to dawn on him exactly how much he’s said and what the consequences of that could be. Revealing the secret goes against all of his training, against everything in the Good Book. His voice wavers a little, but he tells me anyway. “New York,” he says. “A place called Plum Island.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“NICE CITY,” REX REMARKS, HIS TONE HEAVY with sarcasm as we set eyes on the town. “This was all totally worth it.”
It’s been a long day for all of us. After trying and failing to find a working vehicle anywhere on the grounds of the base, we’d had no other choice but to cajole Dust into carrying us. On his back. As a donkey.
He’d brayed and stomped his feet as first Rex and then I h
ad climbed on top of him, but he’d done it, and after hours of trudging we were finally here. As civilization goes, the town we finally stumbled upon is a step up from the ruins of Dulce Base, but only barely. It’s dusty and run-down, and half the storefronts on Main Street are boarded up. The other half are just weird, junk shops and drugstores that look like they haven’t changed their window displays in about thirty years.
Still, there are paved roads, cars and working streetlights.
Not to mention hot food. When we make it to the center of town I can’t help stopping outside Celia’s Café and peering in the window to stare at people sitting in booths, looking happy as they chow down on hamburgers and pancakes and eggs and bacon. I can practically feel my mouth watering. After living on whatever canned and boxed and wrapped food we could scrounge up from the guard station’s lockers and the base’s remains, the thought of a real, proper meal is enough to make me drool.
Rex reaches for the door of the restaurant but I grab him by the shoulder. “Later.”
He makes a sour face, but drops the door handle. He knows as well as I do that we don’t have any money to pay for a meal. Food can wait. The first thing we need is cash. I’m still standing on the sidewalk, wondering how feasible it would be to rob a bank, when a stout, middle-aged couple exits the diner and brushes past me. They continue on down the street, and I watch as a skinny young guy carrying a tattered gray backpack bumps into the husband—and swipes his wallet.
It happens so fast that I almost can’t believe what I saw. For a second I consider running after the pickpocket, taking the wallet away from him and returning it to the couple.
But Rex has a different idea.
“We need money, right?” he asks, his eyes following the pickpocket, who’s now strolling down the street, the very picture of nonchalance. “Follow him, but not too close. We don’t want him seeing us.”
I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I nod, and together we start after the pickpocket. Whatever he has in mind, I hope it works.
The criminal works hard, I’ll give him that. From what I can see he swipes three more wallets and two purses over the course of the next hour, stuffing everything into his bag without pausing for a second. Somehow he never doubles back, never walks the same street twice.
At one point I spot a cop car, but the thief spots it too, and lays low until he’s well out of sight. This guy’s obviously a pro.
After the cops are gone and the guy’s just swiped his second purse, Rex nudges me. “Get ready.” He crosses the street, picks up the pace to get a block ahead of our prey and then cuts back over and starts heading towards me.
There’s an alley up ahead, and Rex times it perfectly—he’s just passing the pickpocket on the outside when they both reach the alley, and with a quick shove he sends the smaller guy tumbling sideways—right into the alley and temporarily out of sight. Or at least as close as we can manage. I hurry to catch up.
The thief doesn’t waste any time complaining, or asking what we want, or anything like that. Instead he bolts for the alley’s far side as I follow them both into the narrow brick corridor that dead-ends against a brick wall with one lonely dumpster. I can already see his plan—he’s going to spring up its side, launching himself partway up the wall, and then grab the top and lever himself over. Leaving us in the dust. Frustrated, I pick up my pace, as does Rex, but it’s obvious we’re not going to catch up to the pickpocket before he hits that dumpster.
I stop short—we don’t have much time and I can think of only one other way to stop this guy in his tracks. I channel my angry emotions, raise my hand and focus on the ground below that dumpster.
“Come on!” I mutter, gritting my teeth. And just as the thief makes that first jump, I feel a small tremor in the ground. The dumpster comes flying towards us. It slams into the pickpocket, hurling him against the alley’s side wall. He hits it hard enough that we hear the air escape his lungs as he collapses in a heap on the ground.
“What was that?” Rex says as he runs back.
“Looked to me like he was planning to go up and over,” I reply as I crouch down next to him. He’s still breathing, which is good—there’s a big difference between killing Mogs who are attacking you and killing some idiot who steals people’s wallets for a living. The impact just knocked him out. I glance over at the dumpster. “Guess he didn’t realize the dumpster was on wheels.” I rifle through his backpack, finding all of his stolen goods and passing them back to Rex one by one. “Grab the cash, leave the rest.” A minute later we’ve dropped the empty bags back in the guy’s lap and are on our way. We’ve now got about thirteen hundred dollars between us. Not too shabby.
“First things first,” I tell Rex as we exit the alley. “Supplies, a decent meal and then we’ll figure out how to get to Plum Island from here.”
Rex nods. “Supplies, food, transportation, check.”
It’s a little weird to find ourselves suddenly working together so easily—I could almost forget that we’re supposed to be enemies. And while I’m glad that Rex isn’t attacking me or trying to get in touch with Mog base command, I remind myself not to get too comfortable. It’s nice to finally have someone to talk to, but I can’t let myself think he’s my friend.
Still, it won’t hurt to get some food together, right?
We turn back towards the center of town, but as we’re looping around I’m distracted for a second by what looks like the shadow of a figure running past us. I jump a little, and Rex gives me a funny look.
I must just be tired and hungry. When I scan up and down the sidewalk, there’s no one at all in sight.
All the way back to the restaurant, though, I can’t quite shake the fear that we’re being followed. And I don’t mean by Dust, who’s currently circling overhead as a hawk.
In a booth at the diner, even the taste of French fries and a milk shake doesn’t help me shake the feeling that I’m being watched. And that can only mean one thing. Mogadorians.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO HOURS LATER, WE’RE SITTING ON HAY BALES in the back of a pickup truck, the wind whistling through our hair. We both ate well—and I got a doggie bag for Dust—and even picked up some new clothes, then rented a room at a motel to shower and change. I managed to snag a burner cell phone too when Rex wasn’t looking, but Malcolm didn’t answer his phone and I didn’t want to leave a message—just in case someone else gets their hands on his phone. I hope he and Sam are okay, but it’s impossible to know. Just another thing to worry about.
Get yourself together, I tell myself. You’ve come this far. Just put one foot in front of the other. This is important.
And what I’m doing is important. I’m sure it is. I’ve already seen how powerful Dust is just on his own. Finding the rest of the Chimæra and reuniting them with the Garde might turn the tide in their favor. It could easily mean the difference between victory and defeat, not just for the Loric but for all of Earth.
However, if my people crack the genetic code allowing them to breed an endless supply of new vatborn soldiers with the Chimæra’s shape-shifting abilities, the fight is as good as over.
One’s death will have been for nothing. My betrayal will have been for nothing too.
So even though I’m tired, lonely and feel like I’m starting to go a little bit crazy, I know that I have to get to Plum Island. I have to free the Chimæra. If I can do it without getting myself killed in the process, that will be a bonus.
Before I can do any of that, though, I have to get out of New Mexico.
It turns out that’s easier said than done. There’s a train. Unfortunately it only makes three stops—one here, one in Colorado and a final stop in Wyoming. None of that was going to bring us anywhere near New York.
The bus isn’t an option either. The nearest Greyhound station turns out to be in Colorado as well, a town named Alamosa, about forty or fifty miles from here. That’s one hell of a walk.
Rex suggested stealing a car, but besides the fact
that it’s something I have no idea how to do, it feels too risky. You can’t save the world if you’re in jail for carjacking. I briefly consider trying to rent a car, but without any credit cards or ID, I doubt we’d get very far with that plan.
That leaves hitchhiking. Rex and I have the pallid, whiter-than-white skin of Mogadorians, and Rex has his military tattoo on his skull, none of which makes us particularly appealing passengers. But we both pull the hoods of our new sweatshirts up and hope to hide our more recognizable alien features.
I’m not sure how well it works, but we also have a secret weapon: Dust has had the good sense to turn himself into the world’s most appealing golden retriever. The kind of dog people slow down just to look at.
Before long, it works. The third vehicle to pass us is a slightly battered pickup truck. It pulls right up ahead of us on the shoulder of the road. The middle-aged driver who rolls down the window has “rancher” written all over him, from the weathered skin to the callused hands to the worn flannel shirt and blue jeans. “Give you fellas a lift?” he asks.
“That’d be great, thanks,” I answer, stepping up to the passenger side. “We’re trying to get to Alamosa.”
“Easy enough,” he assures me. “Don’t think I can fit all three of you up here with me, but you’re welcome to hop in back.”
I glance down at the passenger seat, which is covered with a bunch of packed grocery bags. “Back sounds good, thanks,” I assure him. I gesture for Rex to climb in, and Dust hops over the side after him. I jump in last, and then we’re off.
We’re in Alamosa an hour later. “Where’re you going in town?” he calls back through his open window as we pull up to a stoplight. “Anywhere in particular?”
“The bus station,” I shout back, and he nods. Ten minutes later he brakes in front of a small redbrick building with a big Greyhound sign out front.
“Thanks again,” I tell him as we all clamber out. “Can I give you some money for gas?”
I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Forgotten Ones Page 3