There was talk about executing them all. There still is. For now, the captured Mogs stay here and wait.
“I renounce the teachings of the Great Liar!” shouts a Mog with scars across his bald head from where he carved off his tattoos. He throws a copy of the Great Book into the bonfire, and a small huddle of Mogs, Adam and Rex among them, come forward to hug and congratulate him.
Maybe there’s hope for rehabilitation.
Another, larger contingent of Mogs watch the book burners. There’s nothing but malice in their eyes. One of them in particular stands out to me. She’s a dark-haired girl a few years younger than Adam with his same sharp features. This girl and her group seem like they want nothing more than to murder Adam’s followers, and, judging by the scrapes and bruises on the faces of some of Adam’s trueborn friends, there have been attempts.
Adam stares back at the trueborn malcontents watching him, his chin raised in defiance.
A siren blares overhead. A warning that the Mogs need to disperse. One of the rules here is that they aren’t supposed to gather in large numbers.
As the chastened Mogs head back to their destitute bunks, I float down alongside Adam.
“Probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to be seen here, huh?” I whisper to him without turning visible. The siren is loud enough to mask my voice.
Adam’s whole body tenses, his fists ball, and for a moment I think he’s about to swing at me. He’s on edge and afraid of getting snuck up on.
“Easy now,” I say. “It’s me.”
Adam quickly regains his composure. He kneels down in the snow and pretends to tie his boot. The other Mogs from his group drift sullenly towards the longhouse, giving us room.
“John,” Adam says quietly, the ghost of a smile on his face. “It’s good to see . . . ah, it’s good to hear your voice.”
I put my hand on Adam’s shoulder without turning him invisible too. I let my Lumen trigger a bit, radiating some heat.
“You’re going to spoil me,” he says with a sigh.
“I could get you out of here right now,” I say. “No one would know.”
“My people would notice when there was no one here to defend them from the others,” he replies sadly. “And besides, technically, I can leave at any time.”
This is true. Owing to his role in fighting off the Mogadorian invasion, Adam received a pardon pushed through by General Lawson himself. He elected not to use it. When the captured trueborn started getting shipped in to Alaska, Adam was here waiting for them.
“I saw a girl in the crowd who looked like you,” I say tentatively, not sure how nosy I should be.
“My sister,” Adam replies gloomily. “She loved our father. I think she hates me now, but maybe one day . . .”
“What about your mother?” I ask.
Adam shakes his head. “She disappeared. Maybe she died fighting in the invasion, maybe she’s in hiding. A part of me hopes she’ll show up here one day, and a part of me hopes that she doesn’t.”
“You don’t want her to have to live here,” I say.
“More like I’m worried whose side she would be on,” Adam says. “It’s bleak, John, but this is my duty now. I’m doing more good here than I could do anywhere else.”
I let that sink in. I hate to see my friend up here, lumped in with the rest of them, so I don’t want to come out and agree. But he could be right.
I take Adam’s hand and press an object from my wooden box into it. He looks down, startled at the cobalt-blue glow that radiates from his palm. Quickly, he hides what I gave him underneath his shirt.
“For when you’re ready.”
I’ve already gone out of my way by visiting Alaska before my next destination. It’s my last stop to make in North America. I’ve put it off long enough.
I haven’t been back to Paradise since Sam and I snuck back into town to seek out his dad’s hidden bunker. I almost got myself killed that night, but I just had to try seeing Sarah.
I break out in a cold sweat as soon as the small town comes into view. My eyes are drawn to the Jameses’ house. The roof is caved in, the sides still black and charred. They never rebuilt after the fire that happened there during Mark’s party, the one where I got caught jumping out his window.
I never got along with Mark. We never liked each other. He did his best to help us, though. He did good, and he died in a horrible way that he didn’t deserve. In all the retrospectives they’ve been playing on television, no one mentions Mark James.