“What is this shit they’re giving you, huh?” Nine asks. “This what you traded the planet for?”

Sanderson peers longingly at the vials but then weakly shoves them away.

“They healed me,” Sanderson explains. “More than that. They made me young again.”

“And look at you now,” Nine grunts. “Fresh as a daisy, right?”

“You know their leader has lived for centuries,” Sanderson counters, his eyes swinging wildly between me and Nine. “Of course you do. He promised us that. He promised immortality and power.”

“He lied,” I say.

Sanderson looks down at the floor. “Yes.”

“Pathetic,” Walker says, but the venom’s gone out of her. Like me, I don’t think Sanderson has turned out to be the villain Walker expected. Maybe he was once the puppet master of an international conspiracy in support of Mogs, but at this point he’s been entirely chewed up and spit out by Mogadorian Progress. This isn’t the game changer Walker was hoping for. I’m worried that we’ve wasted what precious little time we have left.

Sanderson ignores Nine and Walker. For some reason, maybe because I forced him to keep on living, he appeals directly to me. “The wonders they had to offer . . . can’t you understand? I thought I was ushering in a golden age for humanity. How could I say no to them? To him?”

“And now you have to keep taking this stuff, is that it?” I ask, glancing to the syringes that I bet contain something like the unnatural genetic brew the Mogs use to grow their disposable soldiers. “If you stop, you’ll break down like one of them.”

“Old enough to turn to dust, anyway,” Nine grumbles.

“It’s been two days, and look at me . . .” Sanderson waves a hand at himself, at his body that looks like a slug with salt poured on it. “They used me. Kept giving me treatments in exchange for favors. But you freed me. Now I can finally die.”

Nine throws up his hands and looks at me. “Dude, screw this. This guy’s a lost cause. We need to figure something else out.”

A sense of desperation begins to sink in now that Walker’s lead on the secretary of defense has turned up only a broken old man and gotten us no closer to thwarting the imminent Mogadorian invasion. But I’m not willing to give up just yet. This lump sitting in front of me used to be a powerful man—hell, the Mogs had a protection detail on him, so he still is. There has to be a way to fix him, to make him willing to fight.

I need him to see the light.

Some combination of desperation and intuition causes me to turn on my Lumen. I don’t crank it up to fire level; instead, I produce just enough juice so that a beam of pure light shoots from my hand. Sanderson’s eyes widen and he inches back on the bed away from me.

“I already told you, I’m not going to hurt you,” I say, as I lean in towards him.