CHAPTER 1 I don’t know if I can. I’m too weak to speak, so I don’t say it out loud. I merely think it. But One can hear me. She can always hear me. “You have to,” she says. “You have to wake up. You have to fight.” I’m at the bottom of a ravine, my legs twisted beneath me, a boulder pushed uncomfortably between my shoulder blades. A stream laps against my thigh. I can’t see anything because my eyes are closed, and I can’t open my eyes because I don’t have the strength. But to be honest, I don’t want to open my eyes. I want to give up, to let go. Opening my eyes means facing the truth. It means realizing that I have been washed onto a dry riverbank. That the wet I feel on my legs is no river. It’s blood, from a compound fracture of my right leg, the bone now jutting out of my shin. It means knowing that I’ve been left for dead by my own father, some seven thousand miles from home. That the closest thing I have to a brother, Ivanick, is the one who nearly killed me, pushing me brutally off the edge of the steep ravine. It means facing the fact that I am a Mogadorian, a member of