United as One

“You forgot your lunch, baby,” the woman says.

“Thanks, Mom,” replies Daniela.

Not every scene that I encounter during my trip around the world is a sweet one. Some endings aren’t so happy.

It’s night in Montreal when I find Karen Walker. She walks across an almost-deserted airport parking lot, a trench coat drawn up to protect her from the cold evening air, a newspaper tucked under her arm, her heels clicking.

There’s only one other person in the long-term parking lot—a pale, middle-aged man with a terrible comb-over who drags an overstuffed rolling suitcase behind him.

One of the parking lot’s light poles is out, leaving a small row of cars bathed in shadows. When the man reaches that section, Walker yells to him.

“Excuse me!” she calls, waving the newspaper. “Excusez-moi! You dropped your paper!”

The man turns around, puzzled. “Huh? That’s not—”

Fft-fft.

Two silenced rounds from the gun hidden inside her newspaper, one in the chest and one in the head. The man never saw it coming. He drops, and Walker goes to him immediately. She starts dragging his body into the shadowy space between two cars.

I help her out with my telekinesis, appearing a few feet away. She jumps, points her gun at me, then quickly lowers it and pretends she wasn’t startled in the first place.

“John.”

“Karen,” I reply. “I hope you’ve got a good reason for this.”

“I do,” she replies.

Walker unzips the dead man’s suitcase and tosses aside a pile of his clothes. She digs around until she discover a dog-eared copy of the Bible. She opens the book, revealing that it’s hollowed out.

Inside are three vials of black oil. My skin crawls at the sight of it.

“How much of that is out in the world?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” Walker says. “Any amount over none is too much for me.”

Walker produces a vial of her own from within her trench coat. By the rotten-egg smell, I think hers is sulfuric acid. Carefully, she pours some into each of the Mogadorian vials, destroying the contents.

“Who was this man?” I ask her.

“Just a name on a list,” she replies, looking me in the eyes. “A really long list. You know, I could use some help working through it.”

I take out my cigar box and open it up. “We can talk about that soon.”

Seeing that sludge brings me back to our last battle with Setrákus Ra. Everything after I locked up with Setrákus Ra is like a dream. I remember how broken my body was, how destroyed, and I remember a vision of Sarah, a hallucination leaning down to kiss me, to make me keep going.

I remember flying. Up, out, leaving that heat behind, escaping the stench of death. I remember Bernie Kosar’s coat soft against my caved-in face.

I remember the sound of someone crying, and I remember us stopping short, still inside the mountain. I remember being able to open my eyes just enough to see a gray-furred creature—part wolf but with legs like a spider, covered in dried blood, motionless. A Chimæra frozen in its last form.

And I remember Adam cradling that Chimæra, Dust, and crying into the fur of his neck.

“He pulled me out. . . . He saved me . . . ,” I remember Adam saying to Six, delirious, near death himself.

I closed my eyes for good after that. I couldn’t stand to see any more.

I’d learn what happened later. How Dust dove down after Adam, took on a shape that would let him climb out of the chasm and dragged Adam as far as he could away from the caverns. He had to bite Adam to carry him to safety, and, after he died, one of Dust’s fangs was still embedded in Adam’s shoulder.

Adam wears that fang around his neck now, attached to a plain leather strap. It’s one of the few comforts he’s allowed here in Alaska.

When I find him, Adam is standing in front of a small bonfire, his hands shoved into a threadbare winter coat. It’s freezing out here. Adam’s dark hair, grown longer than before, pokes out from beneath a wool hat. Even bundled up, he shivers. Snow blows in sideways. It’s the midafternoon, and there’s no sunlight. This part of Alaska—fifty miles north of the nearest town—doesn’t get a lot of light this time of year.

This specially constructed prison camp is where the UN put the Mogadorians that surrendered. The ones that were captured. The vatborn fought to the last; they didn’t know any better. The trueborns, however, self-preservation kicked in for some of them, especially once Setrákus Ra was killed.

A dozen longhouses with spotty heating, food air-dropped in and nothing else. A village of Mogadorians in the middle of nowhere—one with a perimeter of UN soldiers who outnumber the surviving Mogs twenty-to-one at all times. There are missiles aimed here perpetually. Drones designed to withstand the elements fly overhead.