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feel nauseous. One is watching me, a small smile forming at the edges of her mouth.
    “I’m going to,” I say, feeling suddenly resolute. “I want to know why.”
    “Good,” replies One, and she squeezes my hand, even though I can sense that part of her is still sort of repulsed by me.
    A shiver goes down my spine, and without quite knowing why, I quickly pull my hand away.
    “What happens now?” I ask One.
    “Now,” she says, “you wake up.”

CHAPTER 11
    I wake up in my bedroom. My bedroom, back at Ashwood Estates. I’m not in One’s life anymore.
    It’s morning, and my eyes adjust slowly to the early light. It hurts to open them.
    My entire body feels sore and weak. I can’t sit up, but I take a few deep breaths and focus on wiggling some feeling back into my toes.
    I’m covered by two layers of blankets. One of my arms—pale, paler than usual—rests on top of the blankets, hooked up to a plastic tube that leads to a nutrient drip. Strange.
    How long have I been out that they had to hook me up to an IV?
    I hear a noise at my bedside and slowly, painfully turn my head. There’s a girl kneeling on the floor next to my bed, her back to me. She’s narrow and gawky in that almost-a-teenager sort of way. There’s something oddly familiar about her, and I struggle to place her from around the neighborhood. What’s she doing in my bedroom?
    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