My adrenaline’s up, my heart is racing, and I feel it: the crushing importance of what I tried and failed to do months ago. The threat my people still pose to the Garde and to the rest of the world.

They must be stopped.

I turn away, so One can’t see the doubt on my face.

But we share a mind. There’s no hiding from her.

“I know you feel it too,” she says.

She’s right, but I push it away, that nagging sense that I have a calling I’m ignoring out here in Kenya. Things were just starting to get good again. I like my life in Kenya, I like that I’m making a difference, and until One dragged me out here to rub my nose in the site of Hannu’s murder, it had gotten easy for me to forget about the coming war.

I shake my head. “I’m doing good work, One. I’m helping people.”

“Yeah,” she says. “What about doing great? You could be helping the Garde to save the planet! Besides, do you really think the Mogadorians will spare this place when their ultimate plan takes form? Don’t you realize that any work you do in the village is just building on quicksand unless you join the fight to stop your people?”

Sensing that she’s getting through to me, she steps closer. “Adam, you could be so much more.”

“I’m not a hero!” I cry, my voice catching in my throat. “I’m a weakling. A defector!”

“Adam,” she begs, her voice catching now too. “You know I like to tease you, and I’d really hate for you to get a big head or something. But you are one in a million. One in ten million. You are the only Mogadorian who has ever defied Mogadorian authority. You have no idea how special you are, how useful to the cause you could be!”

All I’ve ever wanted is for One to see me as special, as a hero. I wish I could believe her now. But I know she’s wrong.

“No. The only thing that’s special about me is you. If Dr. Anu hadn’t hooked me up to your brain, if I hadn’t spent three years living inside your memories . . . I’d have been the one who killed Hannu. And I’d probably have been proud of it.”

I see One flinch.

Good, I think. I’m getting through to her.

“You were a member of the Garde. You had powers,” I say. “I’m just a skinny, powerless ex-Mogadorian. The best I can do is survive. I’m sorry.”

I turn around and begin my long walk back to camp.

One doesn’t follow.

CHAPTER TWO

DESPITE MY EXHAUSTING MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT run to Hannu’s hut, I manage to wake up with the other aid-workers the following morning.