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‘He lied,’ I say.
Sanderson looks down at the floor. ‘Yes.’
‘Pathetic,’ Walker says, but the venom’s gone out of her. Like me, I don’t think Sanderson has turned out to be the villain Walker expected. Maybe he was once the puppet master of an international conspiracy in support of Mogs, but at this point he’s been entirely chewed up and spit out by Mogadorian Progress. This isn’t the game changer Walker was hoping for. I’m worried that we’ve wasted what precious little time we have left.
Sanderson ignores Nine and Walker. For some reason, maybe because I forced him to keep on living, he appeals directly to me. ‘The wonders they had to offer … can’t you understand? I thought I was ushering in a golden age for humanity. How could I say no to them? To him?’
‘And now you have to keep taking this stuff, is that it?’ I ask, glancing to the syringes that I bet contain something like the unnatural genetic brew the Mogs use to grow their disposable soldiers. ‘If you stop, you’ll break down like one of them.’
‘Old enough to turn to dust, anyway,’ Nine grumbles.
‘It’s been two days, and look at me …’ Sanderson waves a hand at himself, at his body that looks like a slug with salt poured on it. ‘They used me. Kept giving me treatments in exchange for favors. But you freed me. Now I can finally die.’
Nine throws up his hands and looks at me. ‘Dude, screw this. This guy’s a lost cause. We need to figure something else out.’
A sense of desperation begins to sink in now that Walker’s lead on the secretary of defense has turned up only a broken old man and gotten us no closer to thwarting the imminent Mogadorian invasion. But I’m not willing to give up just yet. This lump sitting in front of me used to be a powerful man – hell, the Mogs had a protection detail on him, so he still is. There has to be a way to fix him, to make him willing to fight.
I need him to see the light.
Some combination of desperation and intuition causes me to turn on my Lumen. I don’t crank it up to fire level; instead, I produce just enough juice so that a beam of pure light shoots from my hand. Sanderson’s eyes widen and he inches back on the bed away from me.
‘I already told you, I’m not going to hurt you,’ I say, as I lean in towards him.
I shine my Lumen on the palsied, saggy part of his face, wanting to get a good look at what I’m dealing with. The skin is grayed and almost dead looking, fine, ash-colored veins running through it. The dark particles under Sanderson’s skin actually seem to float away from my Lumen, almost like they’re trying to burrow deeper.
‘I can heal this,’ I say, resolutely. I’m not sure if it’s actually true, but I have to try.
‘You – you can fix what they did?’ Sanderson asks, a note of hope in his gravelly voice.
‘I can make you like you were,’ I reply. ‘Not better, in the way they promised. Not younger. Just … as you should be.’
‘Old people get old,’ Nine puts in. ‘You gotta deal with it.’
Sanderson looks at me skeptically. I must sound just like the Mogadorians did years ago, when they first convinced him to join their side.
‘What do you want in exchange?’ he asks, like a high price is a foregone conclusion.
‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘You can try killing yourself again for all I care. Or maybe you can find what’s left of your conscience and do what’s right. It’ll be up to you.’
And with that, I press my palm against the side of Sanderson’s face.
Sanderson shudders as the warm healing energy of my Legacy passes into him. Normally, when using my healing powers, I get a sensation that the injury is knitting itself back together, of cells rearranging themselves beneath my fingertips. With Sanderson, it feels as if a force is pushing back against my Legacy, as if there are dark, cellular pits into which my healing light plunges down and gutters out. I still feel Sanderson healing, but it’s slow going, and I have to concentrate much harder than usual. At one point, something actually sizzles and pops beneath his skin, one of his discolored veins burning up. Sanderson flinches away from me.
‘Are you hurt?’ I ask, short of breath, my hand still poised next to his face.
He hesitates. ‘No – no, it actually feels better. Somehow … cleaner. Keep going.’
I keep going. I can feel the Mogadorian sludge burrowing deeper into Sanderson, retreating from my Legacy. I intensify my healing, chasing it through his veins. I find that I’m squinting from the exertion and a cold sweat dampens my back. I’m so focused on beating back the darkness I detect inside Sanderson that I must lose track of time or enter some kind of trance state.
When I’m finished at last, I stumble backwards, my legs wobbly, and run right into Sam. I wasn’t even aware he’d come upstairs. He’s holding out a phone – did he steal it from that bystander we knocked over? – and recording my healing of Sanderson. He stops when I bump into him and, for a moment, Sam is the only thing holding me up.
‘That was awesome,’ Sam says. ‘You were, like, glowing. Are you okay?’
I draw myself up with some effort, not wanting to show any sign of weakness in front of Walker or Sanderson, even though I feel drained. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’
I catch Walker staring at me with that same look of awe her driver had after I healed his neck. Sanderson, still sitting in front of me, looks close to tears. The black spiderwebs that crisscrossed beneath his skin have disappeared; his face no longer droops, his muscles aren’t atrophied. He’s still an old man, deep-set wrinkles lining his face, but he looks like a real old man, not one who’s slowly had the life drained out of him.
He looks human.
‘Thank you,’ Sanderson says to me, his words barely above a whisper.
Nine looks at me, checking to see how I’m holding up, then turns to Sanderson and snorts derisively. ‘It’s all for nothing, Grandpa, if you let those pasty-faced asshats land on Earth.’
‘I’m ashamed of what I’ve done, what I became …’ Sanderson says, his gaze pleading and confused. ‘But I don’t understand what you expect me to do. Let them? How can I stop them?’
‘We don’t expect you to stop them,’ I say, ‘just slow them down. You need to rally people against them. When you give your speech tomorrow at the UN, you need to make it clear that the Mogadorian fleet can’t be allowed to land on Earth.’
Sanderson stares at me, confused, then slowly swivels his gaze towards Walker. ‘Is that what your mole told you? Is that what you think will be happening tomorrow?’
‘I know what’s happening,’ Walker replies, no less caustic now that Sanderson seems to be coming around to our side. ‘You and the other leaders who the Mogs have bought off will get up onstage and convince the world we should coexist peacefully.’
‘Which is really just code for surrender,’ Nine adds.
‘Yes, that’s planned for tomorrow,’ Sanderson says, with a dark, hopeless laugh. ‘But you’ve got the order confused. You think I give some speech and then their Beloved Leader lands his ships? You think he cares about the slow-turning wheels of human politics? He’s not waiting for permission. The UN will convene to save lives, to calm a frightened population, because a military resistance is doomed against that –’
Sanderson gestures wildly through the door, at the television still buzzing in the other room. Slowly, we each turn, leaving Sanderson’s bedroom for the penthouse living room, drawn in by the ashen face of a cable news anchor. She stumbles over her words as she tries to explain the unidentified flying objects manifesting in the air over dozens of major cities. The reception goes in and out, the bursts of static getting more and more frequent, as something interferes with the signal.
‘… reports coming in that the ships have been sighted overseas as well, in places like London, Paris and Shanghai,’ the newscaster says, eyes wide as she reads from her teleprompter. ‘If you’re just joining us, something literally out of this world is happening, as ships of alien origin have appeared over Los Angeles, Washington
…’
‘It’s happening,’ Sam says, stunned, looking at me for some kind of guidance. ‘The warships are coming down. They’re making their move.’
I don’t know what to tell him. Grainy footage of a massive Mogadorian warship sliding out of the clouds in the sky over Los Angeles appears on-screen. It’s everything I dreaded, coming to pass. The Mogadorian fleet is gliding slowly towards a woefully unprepared Earth. It’s Lorien, all over again.
‘I tried to tell you,’ Sanderson calls to us. ‘It’s already too late. They’ve already won. All that’s left is surrender.’
22
‘I’m done doing what they tell me. What any of them tell me.’
My eyes snap open. I’d been in a deep sleep, one that I didn’t think would be possible in my giant Mogadorian bed with its strange, slippery sheets. I’m becoming uncomfortably adjusted to life aboard the Anubis. I thought I heard a voice in my sleep, but maybe it was just my imagination, or the remnant of some dream. Not taking any chances, I stay very still and keep my breathing even, like I’m still asleep. If there is an intruder, I don’t want them to know I’m awake.
After a few seconds of silence filled only by the ever-present hum of the warship’s engines, a voice resumes speaking.
‘One side drops us on this strange planet and basically forces us to fight for our lives. The other side, they talk about peace through progress, but that’s all just fancy talk for killing anyone who stands in their way.’
It’s Five. He’s in my room somewhere. I can’t locate him in the near darkness. I can only hear his mumbled under-the-breath rambling. I’m not even sure if he’s talking to me.
‘They all just wanted to use us,’ Five hisses. ‘But I’m not going to let them. I’m not going to fight in their stupid war.’
