One frowns and picks at her shirt. Of course I know what’s bothering her.

Her people are out there, earmarked for extinction by my race. And here she is, stuck in Kenya. Moreover, she’s stuck inside my consciousness, disembodied, with no will or agency of her own. If she had her wish, I know she’d be somewhere else—anywhere else—taking up the fight.

“How long are we going to stay here?” she asks, somberly.

I play dumb, pretending I don’t know how she feels, and shrug as I pull up the covers and turn over on my side. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

I’m dreaming.

It’s the night I tried to save Hannu. I’m running from the aid camp into the jungle, towards Hannu’s hut, desperate to get there before Ivan and my father do. I know how this ends—Hannu killed, me left for dead—but in this dream all of the naïve urgency of that night comes back to me, propelling me forward through the vines and brush, the shadows, the animal sounds.

The communicator I swiped from the hut crackles at my hip, an ominous sound. I know the other Mogadorians are closing in.

I have to get there first. I have to.

I arrive at a clearing in the jungle. The hut where Hannu and his Cêpan lived stands right where I remembered it. My eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness.

Then I see the difference.

The hut and the clearing itself are completely overgrown with vines and foliage. Half of the hut’s façade has been blown out, and the roof sags heavily over the missing section of wall. The obstacle course at the edge of the grounds that Hannu must have used for training is so overgrown I can barely tell what it is anymore.

“I’m sorry,” comes a voice from the jungle.

I whip around. “Who’s there?”

One emerges from the trees.

“You’re sorry for what?” I’m confused, out of breath. And my feet hurt from running.

That’s when it clicks. “I’m not dreaming,” I say.

One shakes her head. “Nope.”

“You took over.” The words escape my lips before I even understand what I’m saying. But I can tell from her face I’m right: she took over my consciousness while I slept, leading me out here to the site of Hannu’s death. She’s never done this before. I had no idea she even could do this. But her being is so intimately enmeshed with my own at this point, I shouldn’t be surprised. “You hijacked me.”

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she says. “But I needed you to come here, to remind you . . .”

“Well, it didn’t work!” I’m confused, angered by One’s manipulation of my will.

But as soon as I say it, I know it’s a lie. It did work.