The Fallen Legacies (Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files #3)(9)

Wade is sixteen years old. He has shoulder-length brown hair, strands of which he keeps in grungy little braids. He owns a beat-up Volkswagen van that he sleeps in even though his wallet contains a couple credit cards paid for by his parents—a fact One discovered while she was snooping through Wade’s things to make sure he wasn’t a secret Mogadorian.

As if.

“I felt like my parents had my whole life planned out,” explained Wade on the night he and One first met, his arm slung around her shoulders, the two of them huddled in front of a bonfire on the beach. “Go to college, get my law degree, join Dad at his practice. Such a bourgeois life plan. It just wasn’t for me, you know?”

“I get it,” replied One, way more interested in Wade’s muscular arm than in whatever he was saying. I guess she liked him, or at least liked the rush of being with him, an added bonus being that it pissed off Hilde. I didn’t get the attraction. “So I left that whole scene behind, hopped in my van and decided to surf my way down the coast. No plan at all. I’m just going to, like, be for a while.” Wade paused. “Hey, has anyone ever told you how soulful your eyes are?”

One swoons.

Oh, come on, I think, and ghost-One appears at my side.

“Cut me some slack,” she says. “He’s hot, and I was stupid. I mean, I wasn’t that stupid. I knew he was full of it, obviously. But, look at him. He’s hot.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say self-consciously.


That memory was a couple months before the one I slip into next. We’re still at the beach, and One wriggles out of her wet suit and settles on the sand next to Wade. She’s been regularly skipping training to come surfing with Wade. One and Hilde are barely speaking, except for when Hilde tries to chastise her.

I haven’t been enjoying these Wade memories. They’re of no relevance to the Mogadorian cause. Besides … I feel like One could be doing so much better.

“I was having fun,” says One, popping up to defend herself again. “I liked pretending I was normal.”

I don’t say anything.

“Didn’t you ever want to get away from it all?” asks One. She knows that I do. She’s been rummaging through my thoughts too. “You and that douche you hang out with spend a lot of time in DC, but you never talk to any other kids.”

“It’s forbidden.”

“Why?”

“To interact directly could compromise operational integrity,” I reply, quoting from the Great Book.

“You sound like a robot,” she says. “They don’t want you to know the humans because then it’d be harder for you to kill them. Just like with me.”

“What do you mean, just like with you?”

“I mean that you kind of like me,” she says, looking at me in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. “They didn’t know what they were doing sending you in here. If you knew all this about me before, would you still want to kill me?”

My head hurts thinking about it, and I wave One away. I am not ready to go back to the memory of the riverbank in Malaysia. Then I remind myself that Malaysia is in the future, not the past.

“Don’t feel too bad,” she says. “I don’t know if I’d want to kill you either.”





CHAPTER 8


This is how my people find her. The General didn’t share these details with me, but I know them now:

Wade believes in taking a stand against capitalism. He does this by shoplifting at every opportunity he gets. He also talks, sometimes endlessly, about the amazing record collection he was forced to leave behind when he left his parents’ mansion.

This puts an idea in One’s head. She’s going to shoplift some records from a store by the beach for him. Part of her wants to impress Wade, another part of her just wants to experience the thrill that he’s talked about.

But One gets caught coasting out of the store with a backpack full of merchandise. The owner of the store is a take-no-prisoners type. He calls the cops.

“How was Wade even going to listen to those?” I ask. “Does his van have a record player?”

One laughs as we watch her former self being slapped into handcuffs. “I didn’t even think of that.”

Number One is taken to the police station. Her “grandmother” is contacted. The police are going to let her off with a warning, but a particularly overzealous detective notices the Loric charm on One’s ankle. He mistakes the charm for a brand and starts asking One about gang affiliation.

“Yeah,” sneers One, “I’m in a gang called the Space Invaders. We do surf-by shootings. No lifeguard can stop us.”

The detective doesn’t seem to think it’s a very funny joke.

He takes a picture of One. He takes a picture of the Loric charm. He uploads both images to a statewide database. As soon as the flash on the camera goes off, I know that this is how it happened.

My people have teams working around the clock patrolling the internet, even the internal government sites, for tips just like this. We have artificial intelligences set up that do nothing but scan image feeds for anything resembling the Loric charm.

After four years of searching, One is on our radar.

Hilde doesn’t lecture One when she picks her up from the police station. She doesn’t need words to express her disappointment. One knows what it means to have had her picture taken by the police.