The Search for Sam

CHAPTER 4

I lean back in my airplane seat, staring at the passport in my hand as the jet hums somewhere over the Atlantic: ADAM SUTTON. In the photo, I’m beaming, the tooth I lost in battle with Ivan a small black gap in my smile. Looking at Adam Sutton’s smiling face no one would ever know how afraid I am, what an insane risk I’m taking right now.

Elswit sits next to me, headphones on, watching some first-run blockbuster on his tablet computer while joggling his knees. The joggling is annoying, but I’m in no position to complain: Elswit came through for me big-time.

I didn’t even have to come up with a grand lie for him. I just told him I had a family crisis and needed to get back to the United States. He said that was all he needed to know: he took me to the American embassy in Nairobi, paid for my new passport, and arranged for me to join him on his father’s private jet, already scheduled to bring him home to Northern California for his birthday.

If I didn’t already have an active American identity, none of this would’ve worked. Fortunately my father, “Andrew Sutton,” never bothered to report me missing. I wonder what alarms my passport replacement might have set off at the Mogadorian headquarters, but I guess it doesn’t make any difference. When I show up at Ashwood Estates, either they’ll kill me or they won’t. Knowing I’m coming shouldn’t make a difference.

We touched down in London to refuel, our second refueling stop. Now we’re back in the air, next stop Virginia, where I’ll part ways with Elswit. At that point nothing besides a cab ride to Ashwood will stand between me and my upcoming confrontation with my family.

I sink even deeper into my seat, dreading my arrival.

“Must be scary.” I turn to see One, sitting in the seat next to mine. She’s been gone for most of the twenty-hour trip, off to her own private purgatory. “I can’t even imagine.”

Yeah, I say. I don’t need to say any more: One knows what I’m thinking.

I’m about to see my family again for the first time in months. I expect to be greeted as a traitor. Maybe I’ll be executed for treason: killed where I stand, or fed to a piken. Mogadorians have no particular history or protocol for handling treason; dissent is not a problem they have much, if any, experience with.

I know my only hope is to convince the General that I’m worth more to him alive than dead.

“You don’t have to do this,” she says, a guilty, worried expression on her face. “It’s dangerous. When I talked about taking up the cause, I didn’t mean this....”

This is what we have to do, I say. I sound way more certain than I feel. But I have no choice: I can’t lose her.

“Once we land, we don’t need to go to Ashwood. We can go anywhere, try to find the other Loric …”

Screw the others, I say. Though my plan is vague, I know that my only hope of saving One, of keeping her by my side, lies somewhere in the laboratory beneath Ashwood Estates. I’m not doing this for them.

“I know,” she says. “You’re doing this to try and save me, to find some way to keep me alive. You think if you go back, you can maybe find some way into the labs. And maybe my body’s still there, maybe you can reengage the mind transfer, restore me, buy me a few more years.” She bites her lip, worried about the risk I’m taking. “Seems like a lot of maybes to risk your life over.”

She’s right. But I don’t have a choice: without One, I’m nothing. Even a 1 percent chance of succeeding is worth pursuing.

In the cab on the way to Ashwood Estates, my fear is like a fist in my stomach, pushing upwards. We’re getting close, maybe ten minutes away.

Nine minutes. Eight minutes.

I feel bile churning. I ask the driver to pull over to the side of the road and I rush out to the tall grass at the edge of the highway and throw up what little I’ve eaten since leaving Kenya.

I take a moment. To breathe, to look out over the grass to the open fields beyond. I know this is it: my last chance to run.

Then I wipe my mouth and return to the cab, grateful that One isn’t around to see me like this.

“You okay, kid?” the driver asks.

I nod. “Yeah.”

The driver just shakes his head and gets us back on the road.

Six minutes. Five minutes.

We enter the suburbs surrounding Ashwood Estates. Fast-food-glutted intersections give way to middle-class townships, then to upscale gated communities indistinguishable from Ashwood. The perfect hiding place.

From above we’re just another suburb: no one would imagine the strange culture inside those tastefully bland McMansions, the world-destroying plans being hatched below. In all my years living at Ashwood we’d never fallen under even a moment’s suspicion from the government or the local police.

As Ashwood’s imposing gates loom into view up the road, I find myself darkly amused by the irony that a walled fortress has been such an effective way to deflect suspicion in suburban America.

I tell the driver to let me off across the street, passing him the last of the money that Elswit was kind enough to give me to get home.

I approach the front gate’s intercom system, glad I threw up back on the highway: if I hadn’t then, I would now.

There’s no point being coy. I step right in front of the security camera and press the buzzer for my house and look right into the camera. Every house has a direct feed to it. I will be identified immediately.

“Adamus?” It’s my mother. Her voice cracks on the second syllable, and at the sound of it my legs almost give out.

I know she’s a monster. She wants nothing more than the destruction of the entire Loric race and domination of this entire planet. But the sound of her voice hits me hard: I’ve missed her. More than I realized.

“Mom,” I say, struggling to keep my voice from breaking.

But the intercom line has gone dead.

She’s probably pulled an alarm. Notified the General. Within minutes I’ll be on a rack, or thrown into a piken’s feeding pen …

“Adamus?!”

Her voice again. It’s not coming from the intercom.

I step around the intercom panel to see my mother in the distance through the gate. She’s run out of our house at the top of the hill. She’s in a sundress, the kind she wears when she’s baking, running down the hill barefoot. Running towards me.

In rage? In confusion? I steel myself for her approach.

“Adam!” she cries, getting closer and closer, her bare feet slapping against the asphalt. Before I know it she’s swung open the pedestrian access gate and has pulled me into her arms, hugging me, crying.

“My sweet boy, my fallen hero … you’re alive.”

I’m stunned. She’s not greeting me with anger. She’s greeting me with love.