Chapter One
Chiro wakes up, but his eyes remain closed. Everything around him feels hazy. How long has he been asleep? First, he feels grass tickling his fingers; then sunlight sneaks past his eyelids and makes his entire body warm. There's the smell of—fruit? Hopefully Sprx isn't attempting to cook again. His soups are all right, but—
Someone pats his shoulder. "C'mon, big guy. You're burnin' daylight!" A deep laugh. Otto? No.
When the boy opens his eyes, he sees a blue sky with a few stray clouds. Chiro sits up, and two adults are staring at him with wide smiles on their faces. A man and a woman. A checkered picnic blanket rests underneath them all, and small yellow leaves dance as they depart from a tree. The woman's eyes are bright and blue.
"When you were little, I used to call you Chi-Chi. Your father would go nuts." She laughs, and the boy feels like the ground will give out from under him any second. He'll go careening back into reality, the place of abnormalities—where any pleasant day out ends in a confrontation that can make the world implode.
The man replies, "I did, but only because it sounds stupid."
"You mean cute."
"In a stupid way."
No—this is all wrong. Chiro doesn't have parents. They died. He was alone until he found the monkey team, and even then he was just a scavenger who'd fallen into the hefty world-saving business due to some divine fluke. A mistake.
But something crawls in the darkest recesses of his mind. Yes, these must be—just, their voices. Is it possible for him to know how they talked when he was just a squirming infant?
The woman—his mother?—looks at Chiro, and the boy thinks that she can read him unlike anyone else. "You've grown too tall for your school outfit."
The man shakes his head. Looking away and somewhere to the horizon, he says, "Women notice everything."
As if prompted, the lady says to the boy, "You look flushed. Is it too hot out for you?"
"See what I mean?"
The boy says, "No, I'm fine." There's something else niggling in Chiro's head, some sensation. He wants to stay, but he knows he'll never be able to live like this. Like this—what does that even mean?
Beaming, his father ruffles his hair. "Glad to have you back, son."
Chiro opens his eyes to darkness. Immediately, he closes his eyes again and grumbles. Surely he can sleep for at least an extra hour or two. Not for long—just enough to dream.
His room is mundane given his unique living conditions. Action figures. Crooked picture frames. A spare Sun Riders poster he should probably take down anyway.
Groaning, Chiro gets out of bed, tossing away his bed sheets so violently that they land partly on the cold floor. He stuffs the rest of his wadded clothes back in the dresser, shutting the drawers and making sure there aren't any clothes jammed into the cracks. Once when Gibson came in here and inspected the state of an influenza-riddled Chiro, he had fussed over clothes sloppily sticking out of the drawers.
The boy remembers when he became the Chosen One. The control room looked immense, like it could engulf his entire school. Even though memories fade over time, he remembers the vivid brightness of the room and how it stung. He wasn't ready for the whole saving-the-world gig. He could barely make it out of his school without being accosted. He recalls hiding out in the room that held the janitors' supplies and the boiler room. All of these complex strategies for every day. Hiding—frightened and weak. He wouldn't have called himself completely unhappy, but he had trouble adjusting. He was the weird kid. Different. Chiro just never suspected that he derived this weirdness from some mandate that he needed to lead a group of cyborg moneys to protect his home planet.
"Is this all the cosmos could find?" Sprx says, looking at Chiro with a wry lift of one corner of his lips.
Antauri replies, "The Power Primate is strong in few. He must be the one."
"I know he's probably better than Mandarin and all," Sprx says, "but can we take him back?"
