The Fallen Legacies

CHAPTER 12

I stare at myself in my bedroom mirror. I’m taller than I was. I’m skinnier, too, even though I didn’t think that was possible. Whatever my parents had me hooked up to during my coma, it certainly didn’t build any muscle. I suck in a deep breath and watch my rib cage protrude through my chest’s too-pale skin.

Even standing in front of the mirror, examining my three-years-older body, takes a physical toll. I must look wobbly, because my mother grabs me by the elbow and leads me back to bed. She’s been quiet since shooing Kelly and her rapid-fire questions from the room, giving me time to gather myself. I’m grateful for that. My mother has always been the gentle one in the family, often to the General’s chagrin.

I can tell by the way she looks at me that she didn’t expect me to wake up. She strokes my hair.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Strange,” I reply. It’s true; my body feels weak and foreign, having grown up without me. But it’s more than that. It feels strange to be back here with my own people, knowing what I do now. Even my mother, here stroking my hair, is a brutal warrior at heart, intent on killing the Garde.

I picture the Mogadorians swarming One, feel her fear and anger anew. I can’t help but see my mother’s face on one of the soldiers. As she gently takes my hand in hers, I’m imagining my mother plunging a sword into One’s back.

Suddenly I don’t trust my own family.

“I don’t remember anything,” I say, even though she didn’t ask. “The machine didn’t work.”

My mother nods. “Your father will be disappointed.”

I decided to lie when I was still living in One’s memories, when we were sitting on the beach together. I won’t be telling my people anything that I saw. Not that anything I learned would help Mogadore win its war anyway. What could I even say? That unlike Mogadorians, the Loric are allowed to develop individuality? That their freedom from doctrines like those in the Great Book is simultaneously their greatest strength and ultimate weakness? That I’ve seen what our people did to Lorien and that it looks like shit?

Yeah, that would go over big.

I’m grateful for the chance to practice this lie on my mother. When it comes time to tell the General, he won’t be so gentle.

“Dr. Anu will have to go back to the drawing board, I guess,” I say, probing a bit to see if she bought it.

“That won’t be happening,” replies my mother. “When you didn’t wake up …”

She hesitates, but I don’t need her to finish telling me. I can picture the General enraged, storming into Anu’s laboratory and drawing his sword.

“Your father never liked Anu. Honestly, the way that old man talked, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

There are heavy footfalls on the staircase, approaching my room. So here comes the General at last. Here to debrief his only trueborn son, probably to rebuke me for not waking up sooner.

“What’s up, skinny?”

Ivan leans in the doorway, grinning. How old would he be now-fourteen? He looks like he could play linebacker for a college football team. Like me, Ivan has grown taller in the last three years, but he’s also grown wider in every conceivable way. I imagine all the strength and combat training he’s been doing without me, likely coached by the General himself. I wonder how his Mogadorian theory grades have fared without me around to coach him.

“Did you have a nice nap?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Thanks.”

“Awesome,” he says. “Anyway, Father wants to see you downstairs.”

I feel my mother grow tense beside me.

Since when did Ivan start calling the General “Father”?

“Adamus needs his rest,” says my mother.

Ivan snorts. “All he’s been doing is resting,” he says, then turns to me. “Come on, get dressed.”

There is a familiar note of authority in Ivan’s voice. He sounds very much like the General.