With a grunt, I shoulder Adam’s pack and head towards the motel room. Apparently, there was a bond between my father and Adam that I can’t really understand, and part of me starts to feel a little jealous. But then my dad puts his hand on my shoulder as we walk and I’m reminded just how long I’ve been searching for him, how he saved me and how he left Adam behind to do it. He abandoned the Mogadorian who has somehow developed a Legacy to save me. I put aside my petty thoughts and try to think rationally about what it all means.

“How did you meet Adam?” I ask as he unlocks our door.

“He rescued me. The Mogadorians were holding me prisoner. Experimenting on me.”

The motel room is small and about as grungy as I expected. A cockroach skitters out of sight beneath the bed when we turn on the light. The place smells like mildew. There’s a small bathroom and, even though the tub is dotted by islands of mold, I’m looking forward to taking a shower. Compared to washing myself with ice-cold water from a metal bucket, this place is paradise.

“What kind of experiments?”

My dad sits down on the foot of the bed. I sit next to him and together we stare at our reflections in the smudged hotel mirror. We make quite the pair—both of us filthy and gaunt from our recent imprisonments. Father and son.

“They were trying to get into my mind. To tear out anything useful I might know about the Garde.”

“Because you were one of the ones who met the Garde when they came to Earth, right? We found your bunker in the backyard. I pieced some stuff together.”

“Greeters,” my dad says sadly. “We met the Loric when they landed, helped them to get on their feet and on the run. Those nine children, all of them so frightened. And yet, that ship landing, it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen.”

I smile, thinking back to the first time I saw John use his Legacies. It was like a curtain being pulled back revealing a universe of possibility. All the nerdy alien books I’d read, that I’d so badly wanted to be true—suddenly, they were.

“We proved easier to hunt than the Garde, I suppose. We had families. Lives that couldn’t just be uprooted. The Mogadorians found us.”

“What happened to the others?”

My dad’s hands shake a bit. He sighs. “They were all killed, Sam. I’m the last one.”

I stare in the mirror at the haunted look on his face. Imprisoned by the Mogs for all these years; I feel bad asking him to go back to what must be horrible memories.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “We don’t have to talk about it.”