“Easy,” Sam says quietly.

“You want us to just sit around here and do nothing?” I ask Adam, trying to keep my cool. I know I should hear him out, but this whole situation has me feeling cornered. And now I’m supposed to take advice from a guy whose species has been hunting me for my entire life?

“Of course not,” Adam replies, looking up at me with those coal-colored Mogadorian eyes.

“Then what?” I snap. “Give me one good reason we shouldn’t go to Florida.”

“I’ll give you two,” Adam replies. “First, if the rest of the Garde are in danger or captured as you suspect, then their continued survival hinges on luring you in. They are useful only as bait.”

“You’re saying it could be a trap,” I reply through gritted teeth.

“If they are captured, then yes, of course it is a trap. On the other hand, if they are free, what good will your heroic intervention do? Aren’t they highly trained and perfectly capable of getting themselves out of trouble?”

What can I say to that? No? Six and Nine, pretty much the two most badass people I know, aren’t capable of escaping from Florida and tracking us down? But what if they’re down there waiting for us to come get them? I shake my head, still feeling like I want to throttle Adam.

“So what’re we supposed to do in the meantime?” I ask him. “Just sit around and wait for them?”

“We can’t do that,” Sam jumps in. “We can’t just leave them. They have no way of finding us.”

Adam spins his laptop around so I can see the screen.

“Between kidnapping Ella and killing a Garde in Florida, my people will believe they have you on the run once again. They won’t be expecting a counterstrike.”

On the laptop, Adam has pulled up satellite photographs of an expanse of suburbia. It looks like a totally generic, wealthy community. When I look a little closer, I notice a paranoid number of security cameras mounted on the imposingly tall stone wall that encircles the entire property.

“This is Ashwood Estates, just outside of Washington, D.C.,” Adam continues. “It’s home to the top-ranking Mogadorians assigned to North America. With the Plum Island facility wrecked and the Chimærae recovered, I think we should focus our attack here.”

“What about the mountain base in West Virginia?” I ask.

Adam shakes his head. “That is a military installation only, kept out of sight so my people’s forces can mass there. We’d have a hard time taking it down now. And anyway, the real power, the trueborn Mogadorians, the leaders—they reside in Ashwood.”

Malcolm clears his throat. “I tried to relay everything you told me about trueborns, Adam. But maybe it’d be better if you explained it?”

Adam looks around at us, a bit apprehensive. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“You can skip the whole Mogadorian birds-and-the-bees speech,” Sam says, and I stifle a smile.

“It has to do with the bloodlines, right?” I say, prompting him.