United as One

by Pittacus Lore

  The campus is largely deserted right now. From what I’ve heard, the only students currently training here are the ones with no place else to go. The ones who lost their families during the invasion. The rest won’t be showing up for a few months when the place opens for real.

  In the entryway, there’s a blown-up poster of an image that circulated everywhere during the cleanup effort that followed the invasion. In it, the president’s daughter stands astride a pile of rubble in New York City, using her super-strength to lift a stack of debris so that a mother clutching her two young children can safely escape from underneath. In the background, a glamorously tattered American flag waves. The news reports claimed that family was stuck down there for a week, but I always thought the whole thing looked staged. Inspiring, yeah. But staged.

  Across the bottom of the poster, the slogan reads: EARTH GARDE PEACEKEEPERS—YOU ARE THE BRAVE NEW WORLD.

  Still invisible, I walk through the halls of the Academy. It doesn’t take long until I hear the sounds of training. I head in that direction, knowing that’s where he’ll be.

  In an outsize gymnasium, a handful of kids practice their telekinesis with each other. Pairs of them toss footballs back and forth without using their hands, and, every time a whistle blows, they add another ball to the mix. When a group lets one of their balls drop, they heave a collective groan and start running laps.

  Nine observes all this from a catwalk high above. He’s dressed like a football coach—sweatpants and hoodie. One of his sleeves is pinned up on account of his missing arm. His dark hair is tied back in a ponytail. I thought maybe the government would make him cut it, but no such luck.

  “Professor Nine, how long do we have to keep doing this?” one of the kids complains, and I have to stifle my laughter.

  “Until I get tired of watching you screw up, McCarthy,” Nine barks back.

  I float up to the catwalk and land gently next to Nine. He senses the movement and turns his head just as I become visible.

  “Look at this sellout, working for the gov— Oof!”

  Nine nearly clotheslines me off the catwalk with his one-armed hug. When he’s done squeezing the life out of me, he holds me out at arm’s length, studying me like I was just secretly studying him.

  “Johnny Hero, holy shit.” Nine shakes his head. “You’re here.”

  “I’m here.”

  Detecting a lack of movement from the kids below, Nine looks down. His group of orphaned Garde have all stopped practicing to stare up at us. To stare at me in particular.

  “What the hell?” he shouts. “Back to work, you maggots!”

  Reluctantly, the kids do as they’re told. I can’t help but grin at Nine’s control over them. He turns back to me and pinches my cheek, where I realize I’ve got a patchy beard growing. It’s probably been a few months since I shaved.

  “This peach fuzz supposed to make you incognito?” Nine asks. “It ain’t working.”

  “Professor Nine, huh?” I respond, smirking.

  “That’s right,” he says, puffing out his chest.

  “You never even finished high school, man.”

  “It’s an honorary title,” he replies with a devilish smile. “Look at you, all reclusive mountain man and shit. Where you been? You know, it wasn’t cool you skipping out on us after my crippled ass spent a week nursing you back to health.”

  I snort at that. “You weren’t nursing me. You were laid up in the next bed.”

  “Yeah, providing important emotional support.”

  I know Nine’s joking, but there’s a bit of truth to what he says. After West Virginia, as soon as I was feeling well enough, I did bail on the others. I rub the back of my neck. “I feel bad about that. I needed to get my head right after . . .”

  “Ah, shut up about it,” Nine says, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re back now.” He nods his head at the kids below, many of whom are still furtively glancing at us, screwing up their telekinetic tosses, and thus running a lot of laps. “You want to say a few words to the next generation? They’d eat that shit up. These are my favorites. The messed-up ones. They remind me of us.”

  I take a step back from the catwalk’s railing and shake my head. “I’m not ready for anything like that,” I tell him. From behind my back, I pull out the small box I’ve been carrying with me since the Himalayas. “I actually came here to give you something. Lexa, too, if she’s around. . . .”

  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 st
rut 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 Chimæra frozen in its last form.

  And I remember Adam cradling that Chimæra, 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.

  When I find him, Adam is standing in front of a small bonfire, his hands shoved into a threadbare winter coat. It’s freezing out here. Adam’s dark hair, grown longer than before, pokes out from beneath a wool hat. Even bundled up, he shivers. Snow blows in sideways. It’s the midafternoon, and there’s no sunlight. This part of Alaska—fifty miles north of the nearest town—doesn’t get a lot of light this time of year.

  This specially constructed prison camp is where the UN put the Mogadorians that surrendered. The ones that were captured. The vatborn fought to the last; they didn’t know any better. The trueborns, however, self-preservation kicked in for some of them, especially once Setrákus Ra was killed.

  A dozen longhouses with spotty heating, food air-dropped in and nothing else. A village of Mogadorians in the middle of nowhere—one with a perimeter of UN soldiers who outnumber the surviving Mogs twenty-to-one at all times. There are missiles aimed here perpetually. Drones designed to withstand the elements fly overhead.

  There was talk about executing them all. There still is. For now, the captured Mogs stay here and wait.

  “I renounce the teachings of the Great Liar!” shouts a Mog with scars across his bald head from where he carved off his tattoos. He throws a copy of the Great Book into the bonfire, and a small huddle of Mogs, Adam and Rex among them, come forward to hug and congratulate him.

  Maybe there’s hope for rehabilitation.

  Another, larger contingent of Mogs watch the book burners. There’s nothing but malice in their eyes. One of them in particular stands out to me. She’s a dark-haired girl a few years younger than Adam with his same sharp features. This girl and her group seem like they want nothing more than to murder Adam’s followers, and, judging by the scrapes and bruises on the faces of some of Adam’s trueborn friends, there have been attempts.

  Adam stares back at the trueborn malcontents watching him, his chin raised in defiance.

  A siren blares overhead. A warning that the Mogs need to disperse. One of the rules here is that they aren’t supposed to gather in large numbers.

  As the chastened Mogs head back to their destitute bunks, I float down alongside Adam.

  “Probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to be seen here, huh?” I whisper to him without turning visible. The siren is loud enough to mask my voice.

  Adam’s whole body tenses, his fists ball, and for a moment I think he’s about to swing at me. He’s on edge and afraid of getting snuck up on.

  “Easy now,” I say. “It’s me.”

  Adam quickly regains his composure. He kneels down in the snow and pretends to tie his boot. The other Mogs from his group drift sullenly towards the longhouse, giving us room.

  “John,” Adam says quietly, the ghost of a smile on his face. “It’s good to see . . . ah, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  I put my hand on Adam’s shoulder without turning him invisible too. I let my Lumen trigger a bit, radiating some heat.

  “You’re going to spoil me,” he says with a sigh.

  “I could get you out of here right now,” I say. “No one would know.”

  “My people would notice when there was no one here to defend them from the others,” he replies sadly. “And besides, technically, I can leave at any time.”

  This is true. Owing to his role in fighting off the Mogadorian invasion, Adam received a pardon pushed through by General Lawson himself. He elected not to use it. When the captured trueborn started getting shipped in to Alaska, Adam was here waiting for them.

  “I saw a girl in the crowd who looked like you,” I say tentatively, not sure how nosy I should be.

  “My sister,” Adam replies gloomily. “She loved our father. I think she hates me now, but maybe one day . . .”

  “What about your mother
?” I ask.

  Adam shakes his head. “She disappeared. Maybe she died fighting in the invasion, maybe she’s in hiding. A part of me hopes she’ll show up here one day, and a part of me hopes that she doesn’t.”

  “You don’t want her to have to live here,” I say.

  “More like I’m worried whose side she would be on,” Adam says. “It’s bleak, John, but this is my duty now. I’m doing more good here than I could do anywhere else.”

  I let that sink in. I hate to see my friend up here, lumped in with the rest of them, so I don’t want to come out and agree. But he could be right.

  I take Adam’s hand and press an object from my wooden box into it. He looks down, startled at the cobalt-blue glow that radiates from his palm. Quickly, he hides what I gave him underneath his shirt.

  “For when you’re ready.”

  I’ve already gone out of my way by visiting Alaska before my next destination. It’s my last stop to make in North America. I’ve put it off long enough.

  I haven’t been back to Paradise since Sam and I snuck back into town to seek out his dad’s hidden bunker. I almost got myself killed that night, but I just had to try seeing Sarah.

  I break out in a cold sweat as soon as the small town comes into view. My eyes are drawn to the Jameses’ house. The roof is caved in, the sides still black and charred. They never rebuilt after the fire that happened there during Mark’s party, the one where I got caught jumping out his window.

  I never got along with Mark. We never liked each other. He did his best to help us, though. He did good, and he died in a horrible way that he didn’t deserve. In all the retrospectives they’ve been playing on television, no one mentions Mark James.

  Someday, I think maybe I’d like to track down his father. I did some quick internet sleuthing but could only find out that he quit his sheriff’s job and left Paradise. I’d like to tell him what happened to Mark and what he did for us before he died, even if he might not want to hear that.

  There are some things I’m not ready for. That’s one of them. The other is here too.

  I land in the Goode family’s backyard, happy to find Malcolm working in the garden. It takes me a minute of watching him to realize why the patch of earth he’s tending looks so strange—it’s where his bunker used to be hidden. Looks like Malcolm and Mrs. Goode decided to level the old well that used to lead down to Malcolm’s secret chamber. In the fresh soil, they’ve planted flowers of every conceivable color. I assume Pittacus Lore’s body is still buried underneath there, and, if so, I imagine he’d be pleased with this resting place.