The Fallen Legacies (Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files #3)(12)

The girl has a Build-a-Piken set spread out on the floor before her. Resembling one of Earth’s toy chemistry sets, it’s one of the few “games” we Mogadorians are permitted. I’m too weak to speak, still working moisture back into my desert of a mouth, so I watch in silence as the girl drags a scalpel down the belly of a wriggling earthworm. Then she fills an eyedropper with a clear solution and dribbles it into the worm’s open wound.

The worm only writhes at first, but then its body begins to contort and change. Nubs of pliable flesh begin to protrude from the wound where the solution hit. The girl grabs a pair of tweezers and carefully stretches out the flesh, helping it to form into six spindly, spider-like legs. Haltingly, the tiny piken manages to get these legs under it, hefting the twisting remains of the worm’s body. It scuttles a few steps across the floor, then collapses.

The girl watches, her head cocked, as the piken-worm tries to regain its footing. It can’t, toppling onto what would be its back, legs kicking helplessly in the air. After a few moments of futile struggling, the piken’s legs stop moving and it disintegrates into ash. The girl wipes up the ash with a damp washcloth and produces a new worm from a nearby box.

Something about this makes me feel incredibly sad. Not for the worm but more for the girl. It’s disturbing to see how casually she alters and extinguishes the worm. It makes me uncomfortable to think how little my people value life. As soon as I have this thought, I get a strange, sick feeling in my stomach. It goes against everything written in the book; everything my people believe.

An image of One impaled on a Mogadorian blade springs to mind. I push it away.

I try to shift in the bed a little bit more, and it makes a noise. The girl turns her head sharply, her eyes widening when she sees me watching her.

“You’re awake!” she shouts, excited.

Kelly. The girl is my sister. But … she’s grown up. When she springs to her feet, it’s clear that she’s almost a foot taller than when I last saw her, which should’ve been just yesterday afternoon, although it feels much longer. Was much longer, apparently.

“How—” I cough, my throat aching. “How long?” I manage.

Kelly has already sprung to the doorway, shouting downstairs for our mother. She rushes back to me.

“Three years,” she says. “By Ra, you’ve been sleeping for three years!”





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.