I Am Number Four

I jump and grab hold of the edge of the floor and pull myself up. The fire has spread to the other side of the house. She and the dogs are somewhere to my right. I leap down the hallway, checking rooms. The pictures on the walls have burned in their frames, nothing more than blackened silhouettes melted to the wall. Then my foot falls through the floor and my breath catches in surprise and I breathe in. Nothing but smoke and flame enter. I begin coughing. I cover my mouth with my arm but it does little to help. Smoke and fire are burning my lungs. I drop to a knee, coughing, gasping. Then a fury surges through me and I stand back up and I move on, hunched over, gritting my teeth, determined.

And then I find them in the last room on the left. Sarah is screaming, “HELP!” The dogs are whining and crying. The door is closed and I kick it open, send it flying off its hinges. All three of them are huddled as tightly against one another as far into the corner as they can get. Sarah sees me and yells my name and starts to stand. I motion to her to stay where she is, and as I step into the room, a huge flaming support beam falls between us. I raise my hand and send it upwards, crashing through what remains of the roof. Sarah seems confused by what she’s just seen. I leap towards her, covering twenty feet in a single bound, moving straight through the flames without them affecting me at all. The dogs are at her feet. I push the bulldog into her arms and pick up the retriever. With my other arm I help her stand.

“You came,” she says.

“No one, and nothing, will ever hurt you as long as I’m alive,” I say back to her.

Another huge beam falls and takes out part of the floor, landing in the kitchen below us. We need to get out the back of the house so no one sees me, or sees what I think I’m going to need to do. I hold Sarah tight against my side and the dog against my chest. We take two steps, then leap over the flaming chasm created by the fallen beam. As we start to move down the hall, a huge explosion below takes out most of it. The hallway is gone; where it used to be are a wall and a window, quickly being consumed by flames. Our only chance is through the window. Sarah is screaming again, clutching my arm, and I can feel the dog’s claws digging into my chest. I lift my hand towards the window, stare at it, and focus—and it blows out of its frame, leaving us the opening we need. I look at Sarah, pulling her securely against my side.

“Hold on tight,” I say.

I take three steps and dive forward. The flames swallow us whole but we fly through the air like a bullet, heading straight towards the opening. I’m worried we’re not going to make it. We barely clear it, and I feel the edge of the shattered frame scrape against my arms and the tops of my legs. I hold Sarah and the dog as best as I can, and twist my body so that I’ll land on my back and everyone else will be on top of me. We hit the ground with a thud. Dozer goes rolling. Abby yelps. I hear the breath go out of Sarah. We’re about thirty feet behind the house. I feel a cut on the top of my head from the broken glass of the window. Dozer is the first one up. He seems fine. Abby is a little slower. She limps on her front paw, but I don’t think it is anything serious. I lie on my back and hold Sarah. She is starting to cry. I can smell her singed hair. Blood drips down the side of my face and gathers in my ear.

I sit in the grass to catch my breath. Sarah is in my arms. The bottoms of my shoes have melted. My shirt has completely burned away, and so have most of my jeans. Small cuts traverse the length of both arms. But I am not burned at all. Dozer walks over and licks my hand. I pet him.

“You’re a good boy,” I say between Sarah’s sobs. “Go on. Get your sister and go back up front.”

There are sirens in the distance that should be here within the next minute or two. The woods are about a hundred yards from the back of the house. Both dogs sit watching me. I nod to the front of the house and they get up as if they understand and both begin walking that way. Sarah is still in my arms. I turn her so she is cradled in them and I stand and head to the woods, carrying her as she cries on my shoulder. Just as I enter them I hear the whole crowd erupt in cheers. Dozer and Abby must have been seen.

The woods are dense. The full moon still shines but there is little light coming from it. I turn my hands on so we can see. I start to shiver. Panic sweeps through me. How will I explain this to Henri? I’m wearing what now look like singed cutoffs. My head is bleeding. So is my back, along with various cuts on my arms and legs. My lungs feel as though they are on fire with every breath I take. And Sarah is in my arms. She now must know what I can do, what I am capable of, or at least some of it. I’m going to have to explain everything to her. I’ll have to tell Henri she knows. I already have too many strikes against me. He’ll say someone will slip at some point. He’ll insist we leave. There’s no way around it.

I set Sarah down. She’s stopped crying. She looks at me, confused, scared, bewildered. I know I need to get some clothes and get back to the party so that people aren’t suspicious. I need to get Sarah back so people don’t think she’s dead.

“You’re okay to walk?” I say.

“I think so.”

“Follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“I need to get some clothes. Hopefully, one of the football players has a change of clothes for after practice.”

We start walking through the woods. I’m going to circle around and look inside people’s cars for something to wear.

“What just happened, John? What is happening?”

“You were in a fire, and I got you out of it.”

“What you did isn’t possible.”

“It is for me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I look at her. I had hoped never to have to tell her what I’m about to tell her. Even though I knew it probably wasn’t realistic, I had hoped to stay hidden in Paradise. Henri has always said never to get too close to anyone. Because if you do, at some point they’re going to notice that you’re different, and that will require an explanation. And that means we have to leave. My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking, but not because I’m cold. If I have any hope of staying, or of getting away with what I did tonight, I have to tell her.

“I am not who you think I am,” I say.

“Who are you?”

“I am Number Four.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sarah, it’s going to sound stupid and crazy, but what I’m about to say is the truth. You have to believe me.”

She touches her hand to the side of my face. “If you say it’s the truth, then I’ll believe you.”

“It is.”

“Then tell me.”

“I’m an alien. I am the fourth of nine kids sent to Earth after our planet was destroyed. I have powers, powers unlike any human, powers that allow me to do things like I did in the house. And there are other aliens here on Earth who are hunting me, the ones who attacked my planet, and if they find me they will kill me.”

I expect her to slap me, or laugh at me, or scream, or turn and run away from me. She stops and looks at me. Looks right into my eyes.

“You’re telling me the truth,” she says.

“Yes, I am.” I look into her eyes, willing her to believe me. She stares searchingly at me for a long moment, and then nods.

“Thank you for saving my life. I don’t care what you are or where you’re from. To me you’re John, the boy I love.”

“What?”

“I love you, John, and you saved my life, and that’s all that’s important.”

“I love you too. And I always will.”

I wrap my arms around her and kiss her. After a minute or so, she pulls away.

“Let’s go find you some clothes and get back so people know we’re okay.”

Sarah finds a change of clothes in the fourth car we check. They’re close enough to what I was wearing—jeans and a button-down shirt—that no one will notice the difference. When we reach the house we stand as far away as possible while still being able to see. The house has collapsed in on itself and is now nothing more than a twisted heap of blackened coals soggy with water. Wisps of smoke sporadically rise, looking ghastly in the night sky. There are three fire trucks. I count six cop cars. Nine sets of flashing lights but no sound to go with them. Few people, if any, have left. They’ve been pushed back, the house cordoned off with yellow tape. The police officers are questioning some of them. Five firemen stand in the middle of it all, sifting through the rubble.

Then I hear “There they are!” yelled from behind me. Every set of eyes in the crowd turns my way. It takes me a full five seconds to realize that it is me the person is referring to.

Four police officers walk towards us. Behind them is a man holding a notepad and tape recorder. While we were looking for the clothes, Sarah and I agreed on a story. I came around the back of the house where she was watching the fire. She had jumped out of the second-floor window with the dogs, who had run away. We had watched away from the crowd, but eventually drifted over and joined it. I explained to her that we couldn’t tell anyone about what happened, not even Sam or Henri, that if anyone found out the truth, I would have to leave immediately. We agreed that I would answer the questions and she would agree with whatever I said.

“Are you John Smith?” one of the cops asks me. The officer is of medium height, and stands with his shoulders hunched. He isn’t overweight but is far from being in shape, with a slight paunch and an overall look of softness.

“Yes, why?”

“Two people said they saw you run into that house and then come flying out the back of it like Superman, with the dogs and the girl in your arms.”

“Seriously?” I ask in disbelief. Sarah stays beside me.

“That’s what they said.”

I fake a laugh. “The house was on fire. Do I look like I was inside a burning house?”

He scrunches his eyebrows together and rests his hands on his hips. “So you’re telling me you didn’t go in there?”

“I came around the back to try and find Sarah,” I say. “She had gotten out with the dogs. We stayed back there and watched the fire and then came over here.”

The officer looks at Sarah. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Well, who ran into that house, then?” the reporter beside him chimes in. It’s his first time speaking. He watches me with shrewd, judging eyes. I can already tell that he doesn’t believe my story.

“How do I know?” I say.

He nods his head and writes something in his notebook. I can’t read what it says.

“So you’re telling me these two witnesses are liars?” the reporter asks.

“Baines,” the officer says, shaking his head at him.

I nod. “I didn’t go into the house and save her or the dogs. They were outside.”

“Who said anything about saving her or the dogs?” Baines asks.

I shrug. “I thought that’s what you were implying.”

“I didn’t imply anything.”

Sam walks up with my phone. I try to fix him with a stare to tell him the timing is bad, but he doesn’t understand and he hands me my phone anyway.

“Thanks,” I say.

“I’m happy you’re okay,” he says. The officers glare at him and he slinks away.

Baines watches with his eyes squinted. He’s chewing gum, trying to piece the information together. He nods to himself.

“So you handed your phone to your friend before you went for a walk?” he asks.

“I handed him my phone during the party. It was uncomfortable in my pocket.”

“I bet it was,” Baines says. “So where did you go?”

“All right, Baines, that’s enough questions,” the officer says.

“Can I leave?” I ask him. He nods his head. I walk away with my phone in my hand, dialing Henri’s number with Sarah at my side.

“Hello,” answers Henri.

“I’m ready to be picked up,” I say. “There’s been a terrible fire here.”

“What?”

“Can you just pick us up?”

“Yes. I’ll be right there.”

“So how do you explain the cut on the top of your head?” Baines asks from behind me. He had been following me, listening to my call to Henri.

“I cut it on a branch in the woods.”

“How convenient,” he says, and again writes something in his notebook. “You know I can tell when I’m being lied to, right?”

I ignore him, keep walking away with Sarah’s hand in mine. We head over to Sam.

“I’ll find the truth, Mr. Smith. I always do,” Baines yells behind me.

“Henri is on the way,” I say to Sam and Sarah.

“What the hell was that all about?” Sam asks.

“Who knows? Somebody thinks they saw me run in, probably somebody who drank too much,” I say more at Baines than Sam.

We stand at the end of the driveway until Henri arrives. When he pulls up he steps out of the truck and looks at the smoldering house far off in the distance.

“Ah, hell. Promise me you weren’t a part of this,” he says.

“I wasn’t,” I say.

We get into the truck. He pulls away while looking at the smoking rubble.

“You guys smell like smoke,” Henri says.

None of us reply, making the drive in silence. Sarah sits on my lap. We drop Sam off first, then Henri pulls out of the driveway and points the truck towards Sarah’s home.

“I don’t want to leave you tonight,” Sarah says to me.

“I don’t want to leave you either.”

When we arrive at her house I get out with her and walk her to the door. She won’t let go of me when I hug her good night.

“Will you call me when you get home?”

“Of course.”

“I love you.”

I smile. “I love you too.”

She goes inside. I walk back to the truck, where Henri is waiting. I have to figure out a way to keep him from finding out the truth about tonight, from making us leave Paradise. Henri pulls out and drives home.

“So what happened to your jacket?” he asks.

“It was in Mark’s closet.”

“What happened to your head?”

“I hit it trying to get out when the fire first started.”

He looks over at me doubtfully. “You’re the one who smells like smoke.”

I shrug. “There was a lot of it.”

“So what started it?”

“Drunkenness is my guess.”

Henri nods and turns down our road.

“Well,” he says. “It will be interesting to see what’s in the papers on Monday.” He turns and looks at me, studying my reaction.

I keep silent.

Yes, I think, it most certainly will be.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I CAN’T SLEEP. I LIE IN BED STARING THROUGH the darkness at the ceiling. I call Sarah and we talk until three; I hang up and lie there with my eyes wide-open. At four I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room. Henri sits at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. He looks up at me, bags beneath his eyes, hair tousled.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” he says. “Scouring the news.”

“Find anything?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure what it means to us yet. The men who wrote and published They Walk Among Us, the men we met, were tortured and killed.”

I sit across from him. “What?”

“Police found them when the neighbors called after hearing screams coming from the house.”

“They didn’t know where we lived.”

“No, they didn’t. Thankfully. But it means the Mogadorians are getting bolder. And they’re close. If we see or hear anything else out of the ordinary, we’re going to need to leave immediately, no questions asked, no discussion.”

“Okay.”

“How’s your head?”

“Sore,” I say. It took seven stitches to close the cut. Henri did it himself. I’m wearing a baggy sweatshirt. I’m certain one of the cuts on my back needs stitches as well, but that would require me to take my shirt off, and how would I explain the other cuts and scrapes to Henri? He’ll know for sure what has happened. My lungs still burn. If anything, the pain has grown worse.

“So, the fire started in the basement?”

“Yes.”

“And you were in the living room?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know it started in the basement?”

“Because all the guys came running up.”

“And you knew everyone was out of the house by the time you went outside?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I can tell he’s trying to get me to contradict myself, that he’s skeptical of my story. I’m certain he doesn’t believe that I merely stood out front watching like everyone else.

“I didn’t go in,” I say. It pains me to do so, but I look him in the eye and I lie.

“I believe you,” he says.

I wake close to noon. Birds are chirping beyond the window, and sunlight is pouring in. I breathe a sigh of relief. The fact that I was allowed to sleep this late means that there was no news to incriminate me. If there had been, I would have been pulled from bed and told to pack.

I roll off my back and that’s when the pain hits. My chest feels as though somebody is pushing down on it, squeezing me. I can’t take full breaths. When I try there is a sharp pain. It scares me.

Bernie Kosar is snoring in a ball at my side. I wake him by wrestling with him. He groans at first, then wrestles back. That is the beginning to our day. Me rousing the snoring dog beside me. His wagging tail, his dangling tongue immediately make me feel better. Never mind the pain in my chest. Never mind what the day might bring.

Henri’s truck is gone. On the table is a note that reads: “Ran to the store. Be back at one.” I walk outside. I have a headache and my arms are red and splotchy, the cuts slightly raised as though I’ve been scratched by a cat. I don’t care about the cuts, or my headache, or the burning in my chest. What I care about is that I’m still here, in Ohio, that tomorrow I’ll be going back to the same school I’ve gone to for three months now, and that I will see Sarah tonight.

Henri gets home at one. There is a haggard look in his eyes that tells me he still hasn’t slept. After he unloads the groceries he goes into his bedroom and closes the door. Bernie Kosar and I go for a walk in the woods. I try to run, and I’m able to for a little while, but after a half mile or so the pain is too great and I have to stop. We walk on for what must be five miles. The woods end at another country road that looks similar to ours. I turn around and walk back. Henri is still in his room with the door closed when I return. I sit on the porch. I tense every time a car passes. I keep thinking one of them will stop, but none of them do.

The confidence I felt when I woke up is slowly chipped away as the day wanes. The Paradise Gazette isn’t printed on Sunday. Will there be a story tomorrow? I suppose I expected a call to arrive, or the same reporter to show up at our doorstep, or one of the officers to ask more questions. I don’t know why I’m so worried about a small-time reporter, but he’d been persistent—too persistent. And I know he didn’t believe my story.

But nobody comes to our house. No one calls. I expected something, and when that something doesn’t come, a dread creeps in that I’m about to be exposed. “I’ll find the truth, Mr. Smith. I always do,” Baines said. I consider running into town, trying to find him to dissuade him from any such truth, but I know that would only encourage suspicion. All I can do is hold my breath and hope for the best.

I wasn’t in that house.

I have nothing to hide.

Sarah comes over that night. We go to my room and I hold her in my arms, lying on my back on the bed. Her head is against my chest and her leg is draped over me. She asks me questions about who I am, my past, about Lorien, about the Mogadorians. I’m still amazed at how quickly, and easily, Sarah believed everything, and how she’s accepted it. I answer everything truthfully, which feels good after all the lies I’ve told over the last few days. But when we talk about the Mogadorians, I start to get scared. I’m worried that they’ll find us. That what I did will expose us. I would do it again, for if I didn’t Sarah would be dead, but I’m scared. I’m also scared of what Henri is going to do if he finds out. Though he is not biologically, for all intents and purposes he is my father. I love him and he loves me and I don’t want to disappoint him. And as we lie there, my fear begins to reach new levels. I can’t take not knowing what the next day will bring—the uncertainty is sawing me in two. The room is dark. A flickering candle burns on the window ledge a few feet away. I take a deep breath, which is to say, as deep a breath as I can take.

“Are you okay?” Sarah asks.

I wrap my arms around her. “I miss you,” I say.

“You miss me? But I’m right here.”

“That’s the worst way to miss somebody. When they’re right beside you and you miss them anyway.”

“You’re talking crazy. She reaches up and pulls my face to hers and kisses me, her soft lips on mine. I don’t want her to stop. I don’t ever want her to stop kissing me. As long as she is, then everything is fine. Everything is right. I would stay in this room forever if I could. The world can pass by without me, without us. Just as long as we can stay here, together, in each other’s arms.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

She looks up at me. “Tomorrow, what?”

I shake my head. “I don’t really know,” I say. “I guess I’m just scared.”

She flashes a confused look at me. “Scared of what?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Just scared.”

When Henri and I get home after dropping her off I go back into my bedroom and lie in the same spot where she was. I can still smell her on my bed. I won’t sleep tonight. I won’t even try. I pace the room. When Henri goes to bed I walk out and sit at the kitchen table and write under candlelight. I write about Lorien, about Florida, about the things that I’ve seen when our training first began—the war, the animals, childhood images. I hope for some sort of cathartic release, but there isn’t one. It only makes me sadder.

When my hand cramps I walk out of the house and stand on the porch. The cold air helps ease the pain of breathing. The moon is nearly full, a side of it ever so subtly shaved away. Sunrise is two hours away, and with that sunrise comes a new day, and the news of the weekend. The paper falls on our doorstep at six, sometimes six thirty. I’ll already be at the school by the time it arrives and, if I’m in the news, I refuse to leave without seeing Sarah again, without saying good-bye to Sam.

I walk into the house, change clothes, and pack my bag. I tiptoe back through and quietly close the door behind me. I take three steps on the porch when I hear a scratching at the door. I turn around and open it and Bernie Kosar comes trotting out. Okay, I think, let us go together.

We walk, stopping often, standing and listening to the silence. The night is dark but after a while a pale glow grows in the eastern sky just as we enter the school grounds. There are no cars in the lot and all the lights are off inside. At the very front of the school, in front of the pirate mural, sits a large rock that has been painted by previous graduating classes. I sit on it. Bernie Kosar lies in the grass a few feet away from me. I’m there for half an hour before the first vehicle arrives, a van, and I assume it’s Hobbs, the janitor, arriving early to get the school in order, but I’m wrong. The van pulls up to the front doors and the driver gets out and leaves it idling. He’s carrying a stack of newspapers bound by wire. We nod at each other and he drops the stack by the door and then drives off. I stay on the rock. I glance contemptuously at the papers. In my mind I’m hurling curses at them, threatening them to deliver the bad news I’m terrified of.

“I wasn’t in that house on Saturday,” I say out loud, and as soon as I do I feel stupid. Then I look away, sigh, and jump off the rock.

“Well,” I say to Bernie Kosar. “This is it, for good or bad.”

He opens his eyes briefly, then closes them and resumes his nap on the cold ground.

I tear the binding away and lift the top paper. The story has made the front page. At the very top is a picture of the burned rubble taken the next morning at dawn. There is a gothic, foreboding feel to it. Blackened ash is forefront to naked trees and frost-covered grass. I read the headline:

JAMES HOUSE GOES UP IN SMOKE

I hold my breath, a miserable feeling centered in my gut as though horrible news is about to find me. I race through the article. I don’t read it, only look for my name. I reach the end. I blink my eyes and shake my head to rid myself of the cobwebs. A cautious smile forms. Then I scan through it again.

“No way,” I say. “Bernie Kosar, my name isn’t here!”

He pays me no attention. I run across the grass and jump back on the rock.

“My name isn’t here!” I yell again, this time as loudly as I can.

I sit back down and read the story. The headline is a play on Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, which is apparently a movie about drugs. What the police believe started the blaze was a marijuana joint being smoked in the basement. How that information was discovered, I have no idea, especially because it is so wrong. The article itself is callous and mean, almost an attack on the James family. I didn’t like the reporter. It’s apparent that he doesn’t like the Jameses. Who knows why?

I sit on the rock and read the article three times before the first person arrives to unlock the doors. I can’t stop smiling. I’m staying in Ohio, in Paradise. The town name doesn’t seem so foolish to me anymore. Through my excitement I feel as though I’m overlooking something, that I’ve forgotten a key component. But I’m so happy that I don’t care. What harm can come now? My name isn’t in the article. I didn’t run into that house. The proof is right here, in my hands. Nobody can say otherwise.

“What are you so happy about?” Sam asks in astronomy class. I haven’t stopped smiling.

“Didn’t you read the paper this morning?”

He nods.

“Sam, I wasn’t in it! I don’t have to leave.”

“Why would they put you in the paper?” he asks.

I’m dumbfounded. I open my mouth to argue with him but just then Sarah walks into the room. She comes sauntering up the aisle.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I say.

She bends down and kisses me on the cheek, something I’ll never take for granted.

“Somebody’s in a happy mood today,” she says.

“Happy to see you,” I say. “Nervous about your driver’s test?”

“Maybe a little. Just can’t wait until it’s over.”

She sits down beside me. This is my day, I think. This is where I want to be and this is where I am. Sarah on one side, Sam on the other.

I go to class as I’ve done all the other days. I sit with Sam at lunch. We don’t talk about the fire. We must be the only two in the whole school not talking about it. The same story, over and over. I never hear my name spoken once. As I expected, Mark isn’t in school. A rumor spreads that he and several of the others will be suspended for the theory the paper has spouted. I don’t know if it’s true or not. I don’t know if I care.

By the time Sarah and I enter the kitchen for eighth-period home ec, my certainty that I’m safe has taken a firm hold. Such a strong certainty that I’m confident I must be wrong, that something has been overlooked. The doubt has been creeping up throughout the day but I’ve been quick to push it back down.

We make tapioca pudding. An easy day. In the middle of class, the kitchen door opens. It’s the hall monitor. I look at him and I know immediately what it means. The harbinger of bad news. The messenger of death. He walks straight up to me and hands me a slip of paper.

“Mr. Harris wants to see you,” he says.

“Now?”

He nods.

I look at Sarah and shrug. I don’t want her to see my fear. I smile at her and walk to the door. Before I leave I turn around and look at her again. She’s bent over the table mixing our ingredients, wearing the same green apron that I tied on her my first day, the day we made pancakes and ate them off the same plate. Her hair is in a ponytail and loose strands dangle in front of her face. She tucks them behind her ear and as she does she sees me standing in the doorway watching her. I keep staring, trying to remember every minute detail of this moment, the way she grips the wooden spoon in her hand, the ivory look to her skin with the light coming in the windows behind her, the tenderness in her eyes. Her shirt has a loose button at the collar. I wonder if she knows about it. Then the hall monitor says something behind me. I wave at Sarah, shut the door, and walk down the hall. I take my time, trying to convince myself that it’s just a formality, some document we forgot to sign, some question about transcripts. But I know it’s not just a formality.

Mr. Harris sits at his desk when I enter the office. He is smiling in a way that terrifies me, the same prideful smile that he had on the day he pulled Mark from class to do the interview.

“Sit down,” he says. I sit. “So, is it true?” he asks. He glances at his computer screen, then he looks back at me.

“Is what true?”

On his desk there is an envelope with my name handwritten in black ink. He sees me looking at it.

“Oh yes, this was faxed to you about half an hour ago.”

He picks the envelope up and tosses it to me. I catch it.

“What is it?” I ask.

“No idea. My secretary sealed it in the envelope as soon as it arrived.”

Several things happen at once. I open the envelope and remove its contents. Two sheets of paper. The top is a cover page with my name on it and “CONFIDENTIAL” written in large black letters. I shuffle it behind the second sheet. A single sentence written in all capitals. No name. Just four black words on a white canvas.

“So, Mr. Smith, is it true? Did you run into that burning house to save Sarah Hart and those dogs?” Mr. Harris asks. Blood rushes to my face. I look up. He turns his computer monitor towards me so that I can read the screen. It’s the blog affiliated with the Paradise Gazette. I don’t need to look at the name of the author to know who has written it. The title is more than enough.

THE JAMES HOUSE FIRE: THE UNTOLD STORY

My breath catches in my throat. My heart races. The world stops, or at least it seems to. I feel dead inside. I look back down at the sheet of paper I’m holding. White paper, smooth in my fingertips. It reads:

ARE YOU NUMBER 4?

Both sheets fall from my hands, drift away, and float to the floor, where they lie motionless. I don’t understand, I think. How can this be?

“So is it?” Mr. Harris asks.

My mouth drops open. Mr. Harris is smiling, proud, happy. But it’s not him that I see. It’s what’s behind him, seen through the windows of his office. A blur of red coming around the corner, moving faster than what is normal, than what is safe. The squeal of tires as it zips into the lot. The pickup truck throwing gravel as it makes a second turn. Henri leaning over the wheel like some crazed maniac. He hits the brakes so forcefully that his whole body jerks and the truck comes screeching to a stop.

I close my eyes.

I place my head in my hands.

Through the window I hear the truck door open. I hear it close.

Henri will be in this office within the minute.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“ARE YOU OKAY, MR. SMITH?” THE PRINCIPAL asks. I look up at him. He attempts his best look of concern, a look that lasts only a second before the toothy grin returns to his face.

“No, Mr. Harris,” I say. “I’m not okay.”

I pick the sheet up off the floor. I read it again. Where did it come from? Are they merely screwing with us now? There is no phone number or address, no name. Nothing but four words and a question mark. I look up and out the window. Henri’s truck is parked, fumes rising from the exhaust. In and out as quickly as he can. I look back at the computer screen. The article was posted at 11:59 a.m., almost two hours ago. I’m amazed it took Henri this long to arrive. A sense of vertigo seeps in. I feel myself sway.

“Do you need the nurse?” Mr. Harris asks.

The nurse, I think. No, I don’t need the nurse. The nurse’s station is the room beside the home economics kitchen. What I need, Mr. Harris, is to go back there, fifteen minutes ago, before the hall monitor arrived. Sarah must have the pudding on the stove by now. I wonder if it’s boiling yet. Is she looking towards the door, waiting for me to return?

The faint echo of the school doors slamming shut reaches the principal’s office. Fifteen seconds until Henri is here. Then to his truck. Then home. Then where? To Maine? Missouri? Canada? A different school, a new beginning, another new name.

I haven’t slept in almost thirty hours and only now do I feel the exhaustion. But then something else enters with it, and in that split second between instinct and action, the reality that I’m going away forever without the chance to say good-bye is suddenly too much to bear. My eyes narrow, my face twists in agony, and—without thinking, without truly knowing what it is that I’m doing—I lunge over Mr. Harris’s desk and crash through the plate-glass window, which shatters into a million little pieces behind me. A scream of shock follows.

My feet land in the outside grass. I turn right and run across the schoolyard, the classrooms passing in a blur to my right, across the lot and into the woods that lie beyond the baseball field. There are cuts on my forehead and left elbow from the glass. My lungs are burning. The hell with the pain. I keep going, the sheet of paper still in my right hand. I shove it into my pocket. Why would the Mogadorians send a fax? Wouldn’t they just show up? That is their main advantage, to arrive unexpectedly, without warning. The benefit of surprise.

I take a hard left in the middle of the woods, weaving in and out of the forest’s density until it ends and a field begins. Cows chewing cud watch with blank eyes as I streak past. I beat Henri to the house. Bernie Kosar is nowhere to be seen. I burst through the door and stop dead in my tracks. My breath catches in my throat. At the kitchen table, in front of Henri’s open laptop, sits a person I immediately think is one of them. They’ve beat me here, have worked it out so that I am alone, without Henri. The person turns around and I clench my hands into fists and am ready to fight.

But it’s Mark James.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I’m trying to figure out what’s going on,” he says, a look of fright evident in his eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look,” he says, pointing to the computer screen.

I walk to him, but I don’t look at the screen, my eyes instead focusing on the white sheet of paper sitting beside the computer. It’s an exact replica of the sheet in my pocket except for the paper that it’s printed on, which is thicker than the fax. And then I notice something else. At the bottom of Henri’s, in very small handwriting, is a phone number. Surely they can’t expect us to call? “Yes, it’s me, Number Four. I am here waiting for you. We’ve been running for ten years, but please, come kill us now; we won’t put up a fight.” It makes no sense at all.

“Is this yours?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “But it was delivered by UPS at the same time that I got here. Your dad read it as I showed him the video, and then he sprinted out of the house.”

“What video?” I ask.

“Watch,” he says.

I look at the computer and see that he’s pulled up YouTube. He presses the play button. It’s a grainy video, of poor quality as though it has been shot on somebody’s cell phone. I recognize his house immediately, the front of which is in flames. The camera is shaky, but through it can be heard the dogs bark and the filtered gasps throughout the crowd. Then the person begins walking away from the crowd, to the side of the house, and eventually to the back. The camera zooms in to the rear window where the bark is coming from. The bark stops and I close my eyes because I know what is coming. About twenty seconds pass, and in the moment that I fly through the window with Sarah in one arm and the dog in the other, Mark hits the pause button on the video. The camera is zoomed in, and our faces are unmistakable.

“Who are you?” Mark asks.

I ignore his question, instead ask one of my own: “Who took this?”

“I have no idea,” he answers.

The gravel pops beneath the truck tires in the front of the house as Henri pulls in. I stand straight and my first instinct is to run, get out of the house and get back to the school, where I know Sarah will be staying late to develop photos—until her driver’s test at four thirty. Her face is just as obvious as mine is in that video, which puts her in as much danger as me. But something keeps me from fleeing, and I instead move around to the other side of the table and wait. The truck door slams shut. Henri walks into the house five seconds later, Bernie Kosar dashing in ahead of him.

“You lied to me,” he says in the doorway, his face set hard, the muscles in his jaw flexed.

“I lie to everybody,” I say. “I learned that from you.”

“We don’t lie to each other!” he screams.

Our eyes stay locked.

“What’s going on?” Mark asks.

“I’m not leaving without finding Sarah,” I say. “She’s in danger, Henri!”

He shakes his head at me. “Now isn’t the time for sentimentality, John. Do you not see this?” he says, and walks across the room and lifts the sheet of paper and begins waving it at me. “Where the hell do you think this came from?”

“What in the hell is going on?” Mark nearly bellows.

I ignore the sheet and Mark, and keep my eyes on Henri’s. “Yes, I’ve seen it, and that’s why I need to get back to the school. They’ll see her and go after her.”

Henri starts towards me. After his second step I lift my hand and stop him where he stands, ten or so feet away. He tries to keep walking but I hold him in place.

“We need to get out of here, John,” he says, a hurt, almost pleading tone in his voice.

While holding him at a distance, I begin walking backwards towards my bedroom. He stops trying to walk. He says nothing, standing there watching me with pain in his eyes, a look that makes me feel worse than I’ve ever felt before. I have to look away. When I get to my doorway our eyes meet again. His shoulders are slumped, arms at his sides as though he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He just stares at me, looking as though he may cry.

“I’m sorry,” I say, giving myself enough of a head start to get away, and turn and sprint across my bedroom, grab from my drawer a knife I used to scale fish when we still lived in Florida, and jump out the window and race into the woods. Bernie Kosar’s bark follows, nothing else. I run for a mile and stop in the big clearing where Sarah and I made snow angels. Our clearing, she had called it. The clearing in which we would have our summer picnics. A pain in my chest at the thought that I won’t be here for summer, a pain so great that I bend over and grit my teeth. If only I could call her and warn her to get out of the school. My phone, along with everything else I took to school, is in my locker. I’ll get her out of harm’s way and then I’ll get back to Henri and we’ll leave.

I turn and run towards school, run as hard as my lungs will permit me. I reach the school just as the buses have begun pulling out of the lot. I watch them from the border of the woods. At the front of the school Hobbs is standing outside the front window measuring a large sheet of plywood to cover the window I broke. I slow my breathing, try my best to clear my mind. I watch the cars trickle out until there are only a few left. Hobbs covers the hole, disappears into the school. I wonder if he has been warned about me, if he has been instructed to call the police if he sees me. I look at my watch. Though it is only 3:30, the darkness seems to have come on faster than normal, a darkness steeped in density, a darkness that is heavy, consuming. The lights in the lot have come on, but even they seem dulled and stunted.

I leave the woods and walk across the baseball field and into the lot. Ten or so cars stand alone. The door to the school is already locked. I grab hold of it and close my eyes and focus and the lock clicks. I walk inside, and I don’t see anyone. Only half of the hallway lights are on. The air is still and quiet. Somewhere I hear the floor polisher running. I turn into the lobby and the door to the photography darkroom comes into view. Sarah. She was going to develop some pictures today before her test. I pass by my locker and open it. My phone isn’t there; the locker is completely empty. Somebody, hopefully Henri, has it. By the time I reach the darkroom I haven’t seen a single person. Where are the athletes, the members of the band, the teachers who often stay late to grade papers or do whatever it is they do? A bad feeling creeps into my bones, and I’m terrified that something awful has already happened to Sarah. I press my ear against the darkroom door to listen, but hear nothing aside from the drone of the floor polisher coming from far down the hallway. I take a deep breath and try the door. It’s locked. I press my ear to it again and gently knock. There’s no answer, but I hear a slight rustling on the other side. I take a deep breath, tense myself to what I might find inside, and unlock the door.

The room is pitch-black. I turn on my lights and sweep my hands one way, then the other. I see nothing and think the room is empty, but in the corner, I see a very slight movement. I crouch down to look, and beneath the counter, trying to remain unseen, is Sarah. I dim my lights so that she can see it’s me. From the shadows, she looks up and smiles, and breathes a sigh of relief.

“They’re here, aren’t they?”

“If they aren’t yet, they will be soon.”

I help her up from off the floor and she wraps her arms around me and squeezes me so tightly that I don’t think she intends to ever let go.

“I came in here right after eighth period, and as soon as school ended, all these weird noises started coming from the halls. And it got really dark, so I locked myself in here and stayed beneath the counter, too scared to move. I just knew something was wrong, especially after I heard about you jumping through the window and you weren’t answering your phone.”

“That was smart, but now we have to get out of here, and fast.”

We leave the room, holding hands. The hallway lights flicker off, the whole school engulfed in darkness, even though dusk is still an hour or so away. After about ten seconds, they come back on.

“What’s happening?” Sarah whispers.

“I don’t know.”

We move down the hallway as quietly as we can, and any noise we do make seems deadened, muffled. The quickest way out is the back door that opens onto the teachers’ lot, and as we head that way, the sound of the floor polisher grows. I assume that we’ll run into Hobbs. I assume he knows that I’m the one who broke the window. Will he fend me off with a broomstick and call the police? I guess at this point it doesn’t matter.

When we reach the back hallway the lights turn off again. We stop and wait for them to come back on, but they don’t. The floor polisher continues, a steady hum. I can’t see it, but it is only twenty or so feet away in the impenetrable darkness. I find it odd that the machine keeps running, that Hobbs keeps polishing in the dark. I turn on my lights, and Sarah lets go of my hand and stands behind me with her hands on my hips. I find the plug in the wall first, then the cord, then the machine itself. It stands in one place, bumping against the wall, unmanned, running itself. Panic sweeps through me, with fear close behind. Sarah and I have to get out of the school.

I rip the cord from the outlet and the polisher stops, replaced by the soft hum of silence. I turn my lights off. Somewhere far down the hall a door slowly creaks open. I crouch down, my back against the wall, Sarah holding tightly to my arm. Both of us are too scared to say a word. Instinct caused me to pull the cord to stop the polisher, and I have the urge to plug it back in, but I know it’ll give us away if they’re here. I close my eyes and strain to listen. The creaking door stops. A soft wind seems to materialize from nowhere. Surely there isn’t a window open. I think that maybe the wind is entering from the window I broke. Then the door slams shut and glass breaks and shatters on the floor.

Sarah screams. Something sweeps by us but I don’t see what it is and I don’t care to find out. I pull Sarah by the hand and sprint down the hall. I shoulder the door and rush out into the parking lot. Sarah gasps and both of us stop dead in our tracks. My breath catches in my throat and chills shoot up my spine. The lights are still on but dimmed and looking ghastly in the heavy dark. Beneath the nearest light we both see it, trench coat swaying in the breeze, hat pulled low so that I can’t see its eyes. It lifts his head and grins at me.

Sarah’s grip tightens on my hand. We both take one step backwards and trip in our rush to get away. We move the rest of the way back in a crab walk until we hit the door.

“Come on,” I yell as I rush to my feet. Sarah stands. I try the latch but the door automatically locked behind us.

“Shit!” I yell.

I see another in the corner of my eye, standing still at first. I watch as it takes its first step towards me. There is another one behind it. The Mogadorians. All these years and they are finally here. I try to focus but my hands are shaking too badly to open the door. I feel them bearing down, closing in. Sarah presses close to me and I can feel her trembling.

I can’t focus to get the door unlocked. What happened to grace under pressure, to all those days of training in the backyard? I don’t want to die, I think. I don’t want to die.

“John,” Sarah says, and in her voice there is such fear that it causes my eyes to open wide, and twist in determination.

The lock clicks. The door opens. Sarah and I push through and I slam it shut. There is a thud on the other side as though one of them has kicked it. We run down the hall. Noises follow. I don’t know if any of the Mogadorians are in the school. Another window breaks off to the side and Sarah screams in surprise.

“We have to be quiet,” I say.

We try opening classroom doors but all of them are locked. I don’t think there is enough time for me to open one of them. Somewhere a door is slammed shut and I can’t tell if it was ahead of us or behind us. Noises follow close behind, closing in, filling our ears. Sarah takes my hand and we run faster, my mind rushing ahead to remember the layout of the building so I can keep my lights off, keep from being seen. Finally a door opens and we fall headlong into it. It’s the history classroom, at the left of the school overlooking a slight hill, and because of the twenty-foot drop, there are bars over the windows. Darkness is pressing firmly against the glass and no light enters. I silently shut the door and hope they didn’t see us. I sweep my lights across the room and quickly turn them off. We’re alone and we hide beneath the teacher’s desk. I try to catch my breath. Sweat runs down the sides of my face and stings my eyes. How many of them are here? I saw at least three. Surely those aren’t the only ones out there. Did they bring the beasts with them, the small weasels that the writers in Athens were so scared of? I wish that Henri were here, or even Bernie Kosar.

The door slowly opens. I hold my breath, listening. Sarah leans into me and we put our arms around each other. The door closes very quietly and clicks into place. No footsteps follow. Did they merely open the door and stick their heads in to see if we were inside? Did they move on without entering? They found me after all this time; surely they aren’t that lazy.

“What are we going to do?” Sarah whispers after thirty seconds.

“I don’t know,” I whisper back.

The room is wrapped in silence. Whatever opened the door must have left, or is out in the hall waiting. I know, though, the longer we sit, the more of them will arrive. We need to get out of here. We’ll have to risk it. I take a deep breath.

“We have to leave,” I whisper. “We’re not safe here.”

“But they’re out there.”

“I know, and they aren’t going to leave. Henri is at home, and is in just as much danger as we are.”

“But how are we going to get out?”

I have no idea, don’t know what to say. Only one way out and that’s the way we came in. Sarah’s arms stay around me.

“We’re sitting ducks, Sarah. They’ll find us, and when they do, it will be with all of them. At least we’ll have the element of surprise this way. If we can get out of the school, I think I can start a car. If I can’t, we’ll have to fight our way back.”

She nods in agreement.

I take a deep breath and move out from underneath the desk. I reach for Sarah’s hand and she stands with me. Together we take one step, quietly as possible. Then another. It takes a full minute to cross the room and nothing meets us in the darkness. A very slight glow comes from my hands, emitting almost no light, only enough to keep from running into a desk. I stare at the door. I’ll open it and have Sarah jump on my back and I’ll run as hard and as fast as I can, lights on, down the hall, out of the school and into the lot or, failing that, into the woods. I know the woods and the way home. There are more of them, but Sarah and I will have the home-field advantage.

As we near the door, I can feel my heart pounding so hard that I fear the Mogadorians can hear it. I close my eyes and slowly reach for the knob. Sarah tenses, gripping my hand as tightly as she can. When my hand is an inch away, so close to the knob that I can feel the cold coming off of it, we are both grabbed from behind and pulled to the ground.

I try to scream but a hand covers my mouth. Fear rushes through me. I can feel Sarah struggling beneath the grip and I do the same thing but the grip is too strong. I never anticipated this, the Mogadorians being stronger than I am. I’ve greatly underestimated them. There is no hope now. I’ve failed. I have failed Sarah and Henri and I’m sorry. Henri, I hope you put up a better fight than I did.

Sarah is breathing heavily and with all my might I try to free myself but I can’t.

“Shhh, stop struggling,” the voice whispers in my ear. A girl’s voice. “They’re out there waiting. Both of you have to be quiet.”

It’s a girl, every bit as strong as I am, maybe even stronger. I don’t understand. Her grip loosens and I turn and face her. We take each other in. Above the glow of my hands I see a face slightly older than mine. Hazel eyes, high cheekbones, long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, a wide mouth and strong nose, olive-toned skin.

“Who are you?” I ask.

She looks to the door, still silent. An ally, I think. Somebody besides the Mogadorians knows we exist. Somebody is here, to help.

“I am Number Six,” she says. “I tried to get here before they did.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“HOW DID YOU KNOW IT WAS ME?” I ASK.

She looks to the door. “I’ve been trying to find you ever since Three was killed. But I’ll explain it all later. First, we have to get out of here.”

“How did you get in without them seeing you?”

“I can make myself invisible.”

I smile. The same Legacy my grandfather had. Invisibility. The ability to make those things he touches invisible as well, like the house on Henri’s second day of work.

“How far do you live from here?” she asks.

“Three miles.”

I feel her nod through the darkness.

“Do you have a Cêpan?” she asks.

“Yes, of course. Don’t you?”

Her weight shifts and she pauses before speaking, as though drawing strength from some unseen entity. “I did,” she says. “She died three years ago. I’ve been on my own since then.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s a war, people are going to die. Right now we have to get out of here or we’ll die as well. If they’re in the area, then they already know where you live, which means they’re already there, so it’s pointless to try to be secretive once we’re out of here. These are only scouts. The soldiers are on the way. They have the swords. The beasts won’t be far behind. Time is short. At best we have a day. At worst they’re already here.”

My first thought: They already know where I live. I panic. Henri is at home, with Bernie Kosar, and the soldiers and beasts may already be there. My second thought: her Cêpan, dead three years now. Six has been alone that long, alone on a foreign planet since what, the age of thirteen? Fourteen?

“He’s at home,” I say.

“Who?”

“Henri, my Cêpan.”

“I’m sure he’s fine. They won’t touch him as long as you’re free. It’s you they want, and they’ll use him to try to lure you,” Six says, then lifts her head towards the barred window. We turn and look with her. Speeding around the bend coming towards the school, very faintly so that nothing else can be seen, is a pair of headlights that slow, pass the exit, then turn into the entrance and quickly disappear. Six turns back to us. “All the doors are blocked. How else can we get out?”

I think about it, figuring that one of the unbarred windows in a different classroom is our best bet.

“We can get out through the gymnasium,” Sarah says. “There’s a passageway beneath the stage that opens like a cellar door in the back of the school.”

“Really?” I ask.

She nods, and I feel a sense of pride.

“Each of you take a hand,” Six says. I take her right, Sarah her left. “Be as quiet as possible. As long as you hold my hands, you’ll both be invisible. They won’t be able to see us, but they’ll hear us. Once we’re outside we’ll run like hell. We’ll never be able to escape them, not since they’ve found us. The only way to escape is to kill them, every last one of them, before the others arrive.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Do you know what that means?” Six says.

I shake my head. I’m not sure what she is asking me.

“There’s no escaping them now,” she says. “It means you’re going to have to fight.”

I mean to respond, but the shuffling I had heard earlier stops outside the door. Silence. Then the doorknob is jiggled. Number Six takes a deep breath and lets go of my hand.

“Never mind sneaking out,” she says. “The war starts now.”

She rushes up and thrusts her hands forward and the door breaks away from the jamb and crashes across the hallway. Splintered wood. Shattered glass.

“Turn your lights on!” she yells.

I snap them on. A Mogadorian stands amid the rubble of the broken door. It smiles, blood seeping from the corner of its mouth, where the door has hit it. Black eyes, pale skin as though the sun has never touched it. A cave-dwelling creature risen from the dead. It throws something that I don’t see and I hear Six grunt beside me. I look into its eyes and a pain tears through me so that I’m stuck where I am, unable to move. Darkness falls. Sadness. My body stiffens. A haze of pictures of the day of the invasion flicker through my mind: the death of women and children, my grandparents; tears, screams, blood, heaps of burning bodies. Six breaks the spell by lifting the Mogadorian in the air and hurling it against the wall. It tries standing and Six lifts it again, this time throwing it as hard as she can against one wall and then the other. The scout falls to the ground twisted and broken, its chest rising once and then becoming still. One or two seconds pass. Its entire body collapses into a pile of ash, accompanied by a sound similar to a bag of sand being dropped to the ground.

“What the hell?” I ask, wondering how it’s possible for the body to completely disintegrate like it just did.

“Don’t look into their eyes!” she yells, ignoring my confusion.

I think of the writer of They Walk Among Us. I now understand what he went through when looking into their eyes. I wonder if he welcomed death when the time finally came, welcomed it just to be rid of the images that perpetually played in his mind. I can only imagine how intense they would have become had Six not broken the spell.

Two other scouts sweep towards us from the end of the hall. A shroud of darkness surrounds them, as though they consume everything around them and turn it into black. Six stands tall in front of me, firm, chin held high. She is two inches shorter than I am, but her presence makes her seem two inches taller. Sarah stands behind me. Both Mogadorians stop where the hallway intersects with another, their teeth bared in a sneer. My body is tense, muscles burning with exhaustion. They take deep, rasping breaths, which is what we heard outside the door, their breathing, not their walking. Watching us. And then a different noise fills the hallway, and the Mogadorians both turn their attention to it. A door being shaken as though somebody is trying to force it open. From out of nowhere there comes the sound of a gun blast, followed by the school door being kicked open. They both look surprised, and as they turn to flee, two more blasts boom through the hallway and both scouts are blown backwards. We hear the approaching sound of two sets of shoes and the click of a dog’s toenails. Six tenses beside me, ready for whatever is coming our way. Henri! It was his truck’s lights we saw enter the school grounds. He has a double-barreled shotgun I have never seen before. Bernie Kosar is at his side, and he comes sprinting towards me. I crouch down and lift him off the floor. He licks wildly at my face, and I’m so excited to see him that I almost forget to tell Six who the man with the shotgun is.

“It’s Henri,” I say. “My Cêpan.”

Henri comes walking down, vigilant, looking at the classroom doors as he passes them, and behind him, carrying the Loric Chest in his arms, is Mark. I have no idea why Henri has brought him along. There is a crazed look in Henri’s eyes, one of exhaustion, full of fear and worry. I expect the worst after the way I left the house, some sort of scolding, perhaps a slap across the face, but he instead switches the shotgun to his left hand and hugs me as tightly as he can. I hug him back.

“I’m sorry, Henri. I didn’t know this would happen.”

“I know you didn’t. I’m just happy you’re okay.” He says, “Come on, we have to get out of here. The whole damn school is surrounded.”

Sarah leads us to the safest room she can think of, which is the home economics kitchen down the hall. We lock the door behind us. Six moves three refrigerators in front of it to keep anything from entering while Henri rushes to the windows and pulls the blinds down. Sarah walks straight into the kitchen we normally use, opens the drawer, and removes the biggest butcher’s knife she can find. Mark watches her, and when he sees what she has done, he drops the Chest to the floor and grabs a knife of his own. He rifles through other drawers and removes a meat-tenderizer hammer and tucks it into the waistband of his pants.

“You guys okay?” Henri asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Aside from the dagger in my arm, yes, I’m fine,” Six says.

I turn my lights on dimly and look at her arm. She wasn’t kidding. Where the biceps meets the shoulder a small dagger is sticking out. That was why I heard her gasp before she killed the scout. It had thrown a knife at her. Henri reaches up and pulls it free. She grunts.

“Thankfully it’s just a dagger,” she says, looking at me. “The soldiers will have swords that glow with different sorts of powers.”

I mean to ask what kind of powers, but Henri interrupts.

“Take this,” he says, and holds the shotgun out for Mark to take. He accepts it in his free hand without protest, staring in awe at everything he is witnessing around him. I wonder how much Henri has told him. I wonder why Henri brought him along in the first place. I look back at Six. Henri presses a rag to her arm and she holds it in place. He steps over and lifts the Chest and sets it on the nearest table.

“Here, John,” he says.

Without explanation I help him unlock it. He throws the top open, reaches in, removes a flat rock every bit as dark as the aura surrounding the Mogadorians. Six seems to know what the rock is for. She takes her shirt off. Beneath it she is wearing a black and gray rubber suit very similar to the silver and blue suit I saw my father wear in my flashbacks. She takes a deep breath, offers Henri her arm. Henri thrusts the rock against the gash, and Six, with her teeth clenched tightly, grunts and writhes in pain. Sweat beads across her forehead, her face bright red under the strain, tendons standing out on her neck. Henri holds it there for nearly a full minute. He pulls the stone away and Six bends over at the waist, taking deep breaths to compose herself. I look at her arm. Aside from a bit of blood still glistening, the cut is completely healed, no scars, nothing aside from the small tear in the suit.

“What is that?” I ask, nodding to the rock.

“It’s a healing stone,” says Henri.

“Stuff like that really exists?”

“On Lorien it does, but the pain of healing is double that of the original pain caused by whatever has happened, and the stone only works when the injury was done with the intent to harm or kill. And the healing stone has to be used right away.”

“Intent?” I ask. “So, the stone wouldn’t work if I tripped and cut my head by accident?”

“No,” Henri says. “That’s the whole point of Legacies. Defense and purity.”

“Would it work on Mark or Sarah?”

“I have no idea,” Henri says. “And I hope we don’t have to find out.”

Six catches her breath. She stands straight, feeling her arm. The red in her face begins to fade. Behind her, Bernie Kosar is running back and forth from the blocked door to the windows, which are placed too high off the ground for him to see out of, but he stands on his hind legs and tries anyway, growling at what he feels is out there. Maybe nothing, I think. Occasionally he bites at the air.

“Did you get my phone today when you were at the school?” I ask Henri.

“No,” he says. “I didn’t grab anything.”

“It wasn’t there when I went back.”

“Well, it wouldn’t work here anyway. They’ve done something to our house and the school. The power is off, and no signals penetrate whatever sort of shield they’ve set up. All the clocks have stopped. Even the air seems dead.”

“We don’t have much time,” Six interrupts.

Henri nods. A slight grin appears while he looks at her, a look of pride, maybe even relief.

“I remember you,” he says.

“I remember you, too.”

Henri reaches out his hand and Six shakes it. “It’s shit good to see you again.”

“Damn good,” I correct him, but he ignores me.

“I’ve been looking for you guys for a while,” Six says.

“Where is Katarina?” Henri asks.

Six shakes her head. A mournful look crosses her face.

“She didn’t make it. She died three years ago. I’ve been looking for the others since, you guys included.”

“I’m sorry,” Henri says.

Six nods. She looks across the room at Bernie Kosar, who has just begun to growl ferociously. He seems to have grown tall enough so that his head is able to peek out the bottom of the window. Henri picks the shotgun up off the floor and walks to within five feet of the window.

“John, turn your lights off,” he says. I comply. “Now, on my word, pull the blinds.”

I walk to the side of the window and wrap the cord twice around my hand. I nod to Henri, and over his shoulder I see that Sarah has placed her palms against her ears in anticipation of the blast. He cocks the shotgun and aims it.

“It’s payback time,” he says, then, “Now!”

I pull the cord and the blind flies up. Henri fires the shotgun. The sound is deafening, echoing in my ears for seconds after. He cocks the gun again, keeps it aimed. I twist my body to look out. Two fallen scouts are lying in the grass, unmoving. One of them is reduced to ash with the same hollow thud as the one in the hallway. Henri shoots the other a second time and it does the same. Shadows seem to swarm around them.

“Six, bring a fridge over,” Henri says to her.

Mark and Sarah watch with amazement as the fridge floats in the air towards us and is positioned in front of the window to block the Mogadorians from entering or seeing into the room.

“Better than nothing,” Henri says. He turns to Six. “How much time do we have?”

“Time is short,” she says. “They have an outpost three hours from here, in a hollowed-out mountain in West Virginia.”

Henri snaps the gun open, slides in two new cartridges, snaps it shut.

“How many bullets does that hold?” I ask.

“Ten,” he says.

Sarah and Mark whisper to each other. I walk over to them.

“You guys okay?” I ask.

Sarah nods, Mark shrugs, neither really knowing quite what to say in the terror of the situation. I kiss Sarah on the cheek and take hold of her hand.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll get out of this.”

I turn to Six and Henri. “Why are they just out there waiting?” I ask. “Why don’t they break a window and rush in? They know they have us outnumbered.”

“They only want to keep us here, inside,” Six says. “They have us exactly where they want us, all together, confined to one place. Now they’re waiting for the others to arrive, the soldiers with the weapons, the ones who are skilled at killing. They’re desperate now because they know we’re developing our Legacies. They can’t afford to screw it up and risk us getting stronger. They know that some of us can now fight back.”

“We have to get out of here then,” Sarah pleads, her voice soft and shaky.

Six nods reassuringly to her. And then I remember something I had forgotten in all the excitement.

“Wait, your being here, us being together, that breaks the charm. All the others are fair game now,” I say. “They can kill us at will.”

I can see by the look of horror on Henri’s face that it had slipped his mind as well.

Six nods. “I had to risk it,” she says. “We can’t keep running, and I’m sick of waiting. We’re all developing, all of us are ready to hit back. Let’s not forget what they did to us that day, and I’m not going to forget what they did to Katarina. Everybody we know is dead, our families, our friends. I think they’re planning to do the same thing to Earth as they did to Lorien, and they are almost ready. To sit back and do nothing is to allow that same destruction, that same death and annihilation. Why stand back and let it happen? If this planet dies, we die with it.”

Bernie Kosar is still barking at the window. I almost want to let him outside, see what he can do. His mouth is frothing with his teeth bared, hair standing tall down the center of his back. The dog is ready, I think. The question is, are the rest of us?

“Well, you’re here now,” Henri says. “Let’s hope the others are safe; let’s hope they can fend for themselves. Both of you will know immediately if they can’t. As for us, war has come to our doorstep. We didn’t ask for it, but now that it’s here we have no choice but to meet it, head on, with full force,” he says. He lifts his head and looks at us, the whites of his eyes glistening through the dark of the room.

“I agree with you, Six,” he says. “The time has come.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

WIND FROM THE OPEN WINDOW RUSHES INTO the home economics room, the refrigerator in front of it doing little to prevent the cold air. The school is already chilly from the electricity being off. Six is now wearing only the rubber suit, which is entirely black aside from a gray band slicing diagonally down the front of it. She is standing in the middle of our group with such poise and confidence that I wish I had a Loric suit of my own. She opens her mouth to speak but is interrupted by a loud boom from outside. All of us rush to the windows but can see nothing of what is happening. The crash is followed by several loud bangs, and the sounds of tearing, gnashing, something being destroyed.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“Your lights,” Henri says over the sounds of destruction.

I turn them on and sweep them across the yard outside. They reach but ten feet before being swallowed by the darkness. Henri steps back and tilts his head, listening to the sounds in extreme concentration, and then he nods in resigned acceptance.

“They are destroying all the cars out there, my truck included,” he says. “If we survive this and escape this school, it’ll have to be on foot.”

Terror sweeps across both Mark’s and Sarah’s faces.

“We can’t waste any more time,” Six says. “Strategy or no strategy, we have to go before the beasts and soldiers arrive. She said we can get out through the gymnasium,” Six says, and nods at Sarah. “It’s our only hope.”

“Her name is Sarah,” I say.

I sit in a nearby chair, unnerved by the urgency in Six’s voice. She seems to be the steady one, the one who has remained calm under the weight of the terrors we have seen thus far. Bernie Kosar is back at the door, scratching at the fridges that are blocking it, growling and whining in impatience. Since my lights are on, Six has a good look at him for the first time. She stares at Bernie Kosar, then squints her eyes and inches her face forward. She walks over and bends down to pet him. I turn and look at her. I find it odd that she is grinning.

“What?” I ask.

She looks up at me. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

Her grin widens. She looks back at Bernie Kosar, who races away from her and charges back to the window, scratching at it, growling, the occasional bark in frustration. The school is surrounded, death imminent, almost certain, and Six is grinning. It irritates me.

“Your dog,” she says. “You really don’t know?”

“No,” says Henri. I look at him. He shakes his head at Six.

“What the hell?” I ask. “What?”

Six looks at me, then at Henri. She emits a half laugh and opens her mouth to speak. But just before any words escape something catches her eye and she rushes back to the window. We follow and, as before, the very subtle glow of a set of headlights sweeps around the bend in the road and into the lot of the school. Another car, maybe a coach or teacher. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

“It could mean nothing,” I say.

“Turn your lights off,” Henri says to me.

I turn them off, clench my hands into fists. Something about the car outside causes anger within me. The hell with the exhaustion, with the shakes that have been present ever since I jumped through the principal’s window. I can’t take being confined in this room any longer, knowing that the Mogadorians are out there, waiting, and plotting our doom. That car outside may be the first of the soldiers arriving on the scene. But just when that thought pops into my mind, we see the lights quickly retreat from the lot, and speed away in a hurry, down the same road they came.

“We have to get out of this damn school,” Henri says.

Henri sits in a chair ten feet away from the door with the shotgun aimed right at it. He is breathing slowly though he is tense and I can see the muscles flexed in his jaw. None of us say a word. Six made herself invisible and slipped out to do some exploring. We’re just waiting, and finally it comes. Three slight taps on the door, Six’s knock so that we know it’s her and not a scout trying to enter. Henri lowers the gun and she walks in and I return one of the fridges to block the door behind her. She was gone for a full ten minutes.

“You were right,” she says to Henri. “They’ve destroyed every car in the lot, and have somehow moved the wreckage to block every door from being opened. And Sarah is right; they’ve overlooked the stage hatch. I counted seven scouts outside and five inside walking the halls. There was one outside this door but it’s been disposed of. They seem to be getting antsy. I think that means the others should have been here already, which means they can’t be far.”

Henri stands and grabs the Chest and nods at me. I help him open it. He reaches in and pulls out a few small round pebbles that he sticks in his pocket. I have no idea what they are. Then he closes and locks the Chest and slides it into one of the ovens and closes the door. I move a refrigerator up against the oven to keep it from being opened. There really is no other choice. The Chest is heavy, it would be impossible to fight while carrying it, and we need every available hand to get out of this mess.

“I hate to leave it behind,” Henri says, shaking his head. Six nods uneasily. Something in the thought of the Mogadorians getting ahold of the Chest terrifies them both.

“It’ll be fine here,” I say.

Henri lifts the shotgun and pumps it once, looks at Sarah and Mark.

“This isn’t your fight,” he tells them. “I don’t know what to expect out there, but if this thing goes badly you guys get back in this school and stay hidden. They aren’t after you, and I don’t think they’ll care to come looking if they already have us.”

Sarah and Mark both look stricken with fear, both holding their respective knives with white-knuckled grips in their right hands. Mark has lined his belt with everything from the kitchen drawers that might be of use—more knives, the meat tenderizer, cheese grater, a pair of scissors.

“We go left out of this room, and when we reach the end of the hall, the gymnasium is past double doors twenty or so feet to the right,” I say to Henri.

“The hatch is in the very middle of the stage,” Six says. “It’s covered with a blue mat. There were no scouts in the gym, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be there this time around.”

“So we’re just going to go outside and try to outrun them?” Sarah asks. Her voice is full of panic. She’s breathing heavily.

“It’s our only choice,” says Henri.

I grab her hand. She is shaking badly.

“It’ll be okay,” I say.

“How do you know that?” she says in a more demanding tone than a questioning one.

“I don’t,” I say.

Six moves the fridge from the door. Bernie Kosar immediately starts scratching at the door, trying to get out, growling.

“I can’t make you all invisible,” Six says. “If I disappear, I’ll still be nearby.”

Six grabs hold of the doorknob and Sarah takes a deep, shaky breath beside me, squeezing my hand as tightly as she can. I can see the knife quivering in her right hand.

“Stay close to me,” I say.

“I’m not leaving your side.”

The door swings open and Six jumps out into the hall, Henri close behind. I follow and Bernie Kosar races ahead of us all, a ball of fury speeding away. Henri points the shotgun one way, then the other. The hallway is empty. Bernie Kosar has already reached the intersection. He disappears. Six follows suit and makes herself invisible and the rest of us run towards the gym, Henri in the lead. I make Mark and Sarah go ahead of me. None of us can really see a thing, can only hear each other’s footsteps. I turn my lights on to help guide the way, and that’s the first mistake I make.

A classroom door to my right swings open. Everything happens in a split second and, before I have a chance to react, I am hit in the shoulder with something heavy. My lights shut off. I crash straight through a glass display window. I’m cut on the top of my head and blood runs down the side of my face almost immediately. Sarah screams. Whatever it was that hit me clubs me again, a hollow thud in my ribs that knocks the wind from me.

“Turn your lights on!” Henri yells. I do. A scout stands over me, holding a six-foot-long piece of wood that it must have found in the industrial arts classroom. It raises it in the air to hit me again, but Henri, standing twenty feet away, fires the shotgun first. The scout’s head disappears, blown to pieces. The rest of its body turns to ash before it even hits the floor.

Henri lowers the gun. “Shit,” he says, catching sight of the blood. He takes a step towards me and then from the corner of my eye I see another scout, in the same doorway, a sledgehammer raised over its head. It comes charging forward and, with telekinesis, I throw the nearest thing to me without even knowing what that thing is. A golden glinting object that speeds through the air with violence. It hits the scout so hard that its skull cracks on impact, and then it falls to the ground and lies motionless. Henri, Mark, and Sarah rush over. The scout is still alive and Henri takes Sarah’s knife and thrusts it through its chest, reducing it to a pile of ash. He hands Sarah back her knife. She holds it out in front of her, between thumb and forefinger, as though she’s just been handed a pair of somebody’s dirty underwear. Mark bends down and lifts the object I had thrown, now in three separate pieces.

“It’s my all-conference trophy,” he says, and then can’t help but chuckle to himself. “It was given to me last month.”

I stand. It was the trophy case that I crashed through.

“You okay?” Henri asks, looking at the cut.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s keep going.”

We rush down the hall and into the gymnasium, sprint across the floor, jump up onto the stage. I flip my lights on to see the blue mat being moved away as though of its own volition. Then the hatch is thrown up. Only then does Six make herself visible again.

“What happened back there?” she asks.

“Ran into a little bit of trouble,” Henri says, climbing down the ladder first to make sure the coast is clear. Then Sarah and Mark go.

“Where is the dog?” I ask.

Six shakes her head.

“Go on,” I say. She goes down first, leaving only me on the stage. I whistle as loudly as I can, knowing full well that I’m giving away my position by doing so. I wait.

“Come on, John,” Henri calls up from below.

I crawl into the hatch, my feet on the ladder, but from the waist up I’m still on the stage, watching.

“Come on!” I say to myself. “Where are you?” And in that split second when I have no choice but to give up, but just before I drop down, Bernie Kosar materializes on the far side of the gym and comes sprinting my way, ears pinned to the sides of his head. I smile.

“Come on!” Henri yells this time.

“Hold on!” I yell back.

Bernie Kosar jumps onto the stage and into my arms.

“Here!” I yell, and hand the dog to Six. I drop down, close and lock the hatch and turn my lights on as brightly as they’ll go.

The walls and floor are made of concrete, reeking of mildew. We have to walk in a low crouch to keep from hitting our heads. Six leads the way. The tunnel is about a hundred feet long and I have no idea what purpose this could have served at one time. We reach the end; a short flight of steps leads to a pair of metal cellar doors. Six waits until everyone is together.

“Where does this open?” I ask.

“Behind the faculty lot,” Sarah says. “Not far from the football field.”

Six presses her ear to listen in the small crack between the closed doors. Nothing but the wind. Everyone’s face is streaked with sweat, dust, and fear. Six looks at Henri and nods. I turn my lights off.

“All right,” she says, and makes herself invisible.

She inches the door up just enough to stick her head out and have a look around. The rest of us watch with bated breath, waiting, listening, all of us wracked with nerves. She turns one way, then the other. Satisfied we’ve made it unnoticed, she pushes the door all the way open and we file out one by one.

Everything is dark and silent, no wind, the forest trees to our right standing motionless. I look around, can see the busted silhouettes of the twisted cars piled in front of the doors of the school. No stars or moon. No sky at all, almost as though we’re beneath a bubble of darkness, some sort of dome where only shadows remain. Bernie Kosar begins to growl, low at first so that my initial thought is that it’s done for reasons of anxiety only; but the growl grows into something more ferocious, more menacing, and I know that he senses something out there. All of our heads turn to see what he is growling at but nothing moves. I take a step forward to put Sarah behind me. I think to turn on my lights but I know that will give us away even more so than the dog’s growl. Suddenly, Bernie Kosar takes off.

He charges ahead thirty yards before leaping through the air and sinking his teeth deeply into one of the unseen scouts, who materializes from out of nowhere as though some spell of invisibility has been broken. In an instant, we’re able to see them all, surrounding us, no fewer than twenty of them, who begin closing in.

“It was a trap!” Henri yells, and fires twice and drops two scouts immediately.

“Get back in the tunnel!” I scream to Mark and Sarah.

One of the scouts comes charging towards me. I lift it in the air and hurl it as hard as I can against an oak tree twenty yards away. It hits the ground with a thud, quickly stands, and hurls a dagger my way. I deflect it and lift the scout again and throw it even harder. It bursts into ash at the base of the tree. Henri unloads more rounds, the shots echoing. Two hands grab me from behind. I almost deflect them until I realize that it’s Sarah. Six is nowhere to be seen. Bernie Kosar has brought a Mogadorian to the ground, his teeth now sunk deeply into its throat, hell ablaze in the dog’s eyes.

“Get into the school!” I yell.

She doesn’t let go. A clap of thunder breaks through the silence and a storm begins to brew, dark clouds now forming overhead with flashes of lighting and thunder tearing through the night sky, loud pounding thunder that makes Sarah jump each time one booms. Six has reappeared, standing thirty feet away, her eyes to the sky and her face twisted in concentration with both arms raised. She’s the one creating the storm, controlling the weather. Bolts of lightning begin raining down, striking the scouts dead where they stand, creating small explosions that form clouds of ash that drift listlessly across the yard. Henri stands off to the side, loading more shells into the shotgun. The scout that Bernie Kosar is choking finally succumbs to death and bursts into a heap of ash covering the dog’s face. He sneezes once, shakes the ash from his coat and then rushes off and chases the closest scout until they both disappear into the dense woods fifty yards away. I have this unbearable fear that I’ve seen him for the very last time.

“You have to go into the school,” I say to Sarah. “You have to go now and you have to hide. Mark!” I yell. I look up and don’t see him. I snap around. I catch sight of him sprinting towards Henri, who is still loading his gun. At first I don’t understand why, and then I see what is happening: a Mogadorian scout has snuck up on Henri without his knowing it.

“Henri,” I scream to get his attention. I lift my hand to stop the scout with its knife raised high in the air, but Mark tackles the thing first. A wrestling match ensues. Henri snaps the shotgun closed, and Mark kicks the scout’s knife away. Henri fires and the scout explodes. Henri says something to Mark. I yell for Mark again and he sprints over, breathing heavily.

“You have to take Sarah into the school.”

“I can help here,” he says.

“It’s not your fight. You have to hide! Get in the school and hide with Sarah!”

“Okay,” he says.

“You have to stay hidden, no matter what!” I yell over the storm. “They won’t come for you. It’s me they want. Promise me, Mark! Promise me you’ll stay hidden with Sarah!”

Mark nods rapidly. “I promise!”

Sarah is crying and there’s no time to comfort her. Another clap of thunder, another shotgun blast. She kisses me one time on the lips, her hands holding tightly to my face and I know she would stay like this forever. Mark pulls her off, begins leading her away.

“I love you,” she says, and in her eyes she is staring at me in the same way that I had stared at her earlier, before I left home ec, as though she may be seeing me for the final time, wanting to remember it so that this last image might last a lifetime.

“I love you too,” I mouth back just as the two of them reach the steps of the tunnel, and as soon as the words leave my lips, Henri cries out in pain. I turn. One of the scouts has thrust a knife into his gut. Terror sweeps through me. The scout pulls the knife from Henri’s side, the blade glistening with his blood. It thrusts down to stab Henri a second time. My hand reaches out for it and I rip the knife away at the last second so that it is only a fist that hits Henri. He grunts, gathers himself, and presses the barrel of the shotgun to the chin of the scout and fires. The scout drops, headless.

The rain starts, a cold, heavy rain. In no time at all I’m soaked to the bone. Blood leaks from Henri’s gut. He’s aiming the shotgun into the darkness, but all of the scouts have moved into the shadows, away from us, so that Henri can’t get a good enough aim. They’re no longer interested in attacking, knowing that two of us have retreated and a third has been wounded. Six is still reaching for the sky. The storm has grown; the wind is beginning to howl. She seems to be having trouble controlling it. A winter storm, thunder in January. As quickly as everything started, it all seems to stop—the thunder, the lightning, the rain. The wind dies away and a low groan begins to grow from off in the distance. Six lowers her arms, all of us straining to listen. Even the Mogadorians turn. The groan grows, unmistakably coming our way, some sort of deep mechanical groan. The scouts step from the shadows and begin to laugh. Despite our killing at least ten of them, there are many more than before. From far off a cloud of smoke rises over the tops of the trees as if a steam engine is coming around the bend. The scouts nod to one another, smiling their wicked smiles, and re-form their circle around us in what is an apparent attempt to get us back into the school. And it’s obvious that that is our only choice. Six walks over.

“What is it?” I ask.

Henri hobbles, the shotgun hanging limply at his side. He’s breathing heavily, a gash on his cheek below his right eye, a circular puddle of blood on his gray sweater from the knife wound.

“It’s the rest of them, isn’t it?” Henri asks Six.

Six looks at him, stricken, her hair wet and clinging to the sides of her face.

“The beasts,” she says. “And the soldiers. They’re here.”

Henri cocks the shotgun and takes a deep breath. “And so the real war begins,” he says. “I don’t know about you two, but if this is it, then this is it. I, for one…,” he says, and trails off. “Well, I’ll be damned if I’ll go down without a fight.”

Six nods. “Our people fought back till the end. And so shall I,” she says.

A mile off the smoke still rises. Live cargo, I think. That is how they transport them, by oversized semi-trucks. Six and I follow Henri back down the steps. I yell for Bernie Kosar but he’s nowhere to be seen.

“We can’t wait for him again,” Henri says. “There isn’t time.”

I look around one final time, and slam the cellar doors shut. We rush back through the tunnel, up onto the stage, across the gymnasium. We don’t see a single scout, nor do we see Mark and Sarah, and I’m relieved by that. I hope they are well hidden, and I hope Mark keeps his promise and that they stay that way. When we make it back to the home-ec room I slide the fridge out of the way and grab the Chest. Henri and I open it. Six takes the healing stone out and thrusts it against Henri’s gut. He is silent, his eyes closed, holding his breath. His face is red under the strain but not a single sound escapes. A minute of this and Six pulls the stone away. The cut has healed. Henri exhales, his forehead covered in sweat. Then it’s my turn. She presses it to the gash on my head and a pain far greater than anything I’ve ever felt before rips through me. I grunt and groan, every muscle in my body flexing. I can’t breathe until it’s over, and when it finally is, I bend over and catch my breath for a full minute.

Outside the mechanical groan has stopped. The semi is hidden from view. While Henri closes up the Chest and places it back in the same oven as before, I look out the window hoping to catch sight of Bernie Kosar. I don’t see him. Another set of headlights passes by the school. As before, I can’t tell if it’s a car or truck, and it slows as it drives by the entrance, then quickly speeds away without turning in. Henri pushes his shirt down, picks up the shotgun. As we move towards the door, a sound stops the three of us dead in our tracks.

A roar comes from outside, loud, animal-like, a sinister roar unlike anything I have ever heard before, followed by the sound of the metallic clicks of a gate being unlocked, lowered, and opened. A loud bang snaps us all back to attention. I take another deep breath. Henri shakes his head and sighs in what is an almost hopeless gesture, a gesture made when the fight is lost.

“There’s always hope, Henri,” I say. He turns and looks at me. “New developments have yet to present themselves. Not all the information is in. Don’t give up hope just yet.”

He nods and the tiniest trace of a smile forms. He looks at Six, a new development that I don’t think either of us could have imagined. Who’s to say that there aren’t more waiting? And then he picks up where I left off, quoting the exact words he spoke to me when I was the one who was discouraged, the day I asked how we could possibly expect to win this fight, alone and outnumbered, far from home—against the Mogadorians, who seem to take great joy in war and death. “It’s the last thing to go,” Henri says. “When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.”

“Exactly,” I say.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ANOTHER ROAR CUTS THROUGH THE NIGHT AIR. through the walls of the school, a roar that makes my blood turn cold. The ground begins to rumble under the footsteps of the beast that must now be on the loose. I shake my head. I saw firsthand how big they were during the flashbacks of the war on Lorien.

“For your friends’ sake and ours,” Six says, “we better get the hell out of this school while there’s still time. They’ll destroy the entire building trying to get to us.”

We nod to one another.

“Our only hope is to get to the woods,” Henri says. “Whatever that thing is, we might be able to escape it if we can stay invisible.”

Six nods. “Just keep ahold of my hands.”

Needing no other motivation than that, Henri and I each take a hand.

“As quietly as we can,” Henri says.

The hallway is dark and silent. We walk with a quiet urgency, moving as swiftly as we can while making little noise. Another roar, and in the middle of it, another roar begins. We stop. Not one beast, but two. We continue on and enter the gymnasium. No sign of the scouts. When we reach the very center of the court, Henri stops. I look over but can’t see him.

“Why are we stopped?” I whisper.

“Shh,” he says. “Listen.”

I strain to listen, but hear nothing aside from the steady hum of blood filling my ears.

“The beasts have stopped moving,” Henri says.

“So what?”

“Shh,” he says. “There’s something else out there.”

And then I hear it too, slight high-pitched yipping sounds as though coming from small animals. The sounds are muffled, though obviously growing louder.

“What the hell?” I ask.

Something begins banging at the stage hatch, the hatch we are hoping to escape through.

“Turn your lights on,” he says.

I let go of Six’s hand, snap them on, and aim them towards the stage. Henri looks down the end of the shotgun barrel. The hatch bounces up as though something is trying to force itself through but lacks the strength to do so. The weasels, I think, the stout-bodied little creatures that the guys in Athens were terrified of. One of them hits the hatch so hard that it breaks away from the stage and rattles across the floor. So much for thinking they lacked strength. Two of them come bursting forth, and upon catching sight of us, come racing our way so swiftly that I can hardly make them out. Henri stands watching with the gun aimed, an amused grin on his face. Their paths diverge and both leap from about twenty feet away, one jumping at Henri, the other coming at me. Henri fires once and the weasel explodes and covers him with its blood and guts; and just as I’m about to rip apart the second with telekinesis, it is snatched out of midair by Six’s unseen hand and spiked to the ground like a football, killing it instantly.

Henri cocks the shotgun. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” he says, and before I can respond, the entire wall along the stage is smashed in by the fist of a beast. It draws back and punches again, smashing the stage to smithereens and exposing the night sky. The impact pushes both Henri and me backwards.

“Run!” Henri yells, and he immediately unloads every shell in the shotgun into the beast. They have no effect upon it. The beast leans forward and roars so loudly that I feel my clothes flutter. A hand reaches out and grabs hold of me, turning me invisible. The beast charges ahead, moving straight for Henri, and I’m gripped with terror at what it might do.

“No!” I scream. “To Henri, get to Henri!” I twist under Six’s grip, finally grabbing hold of her and pushing her away. I become visible; she stays hidden. The beast surges towards Henri, who stands firm and watches it come. Out of bullets. Out of options. “Get to him!” I scream again. “Get to him, Six!”

“Go to the woods!” she yells back.

All I can do is watch. The beast must stand thirty feet tall, maybe forty, towering over Henri. It roars, pure wrath in its eyes. Its muscled and bulging fist rushes high in the air, so high that it breaks straight through the rafters and the roof of the school gymnasium. And then it falls, speeding down with such swiftness that it becomes a blur, like the blades of a spinning fan. I cry out in horror, knowing that Henri is about to be crushed. I can’t look away, Henri seeming tiny standing there with the shotgun limply at his side. When the fist of the beast is a split second from him, Henri disappears. The fist crashes through the gymnasium floor, the wood splintering, the impact sending me crashing into the stands twenty feet away. The beast turns to me, blocking from view the place where Henri had just stood.

“Henri!” I yell. The beast roars so that any response that might have come is drowned out. It takes one step towards me. To the woods, Six had said. Go to the woods. I stand and run as fast as I can to the back of the gym, where the beast had just broken through. I turn to see if the beast is following. It is not. Perhaps Six has done something to divert its attention. All I know is that I’m on my own now, alone.

I leap over the pile of rubble and sprint away from the school, running as hard as I can for the woods. The shadows swarm around me, following like villainous wraiths. I know that I can outrun them. The beast roars and I hear another wall crumble. I reach the trees and the swarming shadows seem to have disappeared. I stop and listen. The trees sway under a light breeze. There is a wind here! I’ve escaped whatever dome the Mogadorians have created. Something warm collects at the waistband of my pants. The cut I suffered at Mark James’s has reopened on my back.

The school’s silhouette is faint from where I stand. The entire gymnasium is gone, a pile of brick. The beast’s shadow stands tall in the rubble of the cafeteria. Why hasn’t it run after me? And where is the second beast we all heard? The beast’s fist falls again, another room demolished. Mark and Sarah are there somewhere. I told them to go back and I realize how foolish it was. I didn’t anticipate the beast destroying the school if it knew I wasn’t there. I have to do something to get the beast away. I take a deep breath to gather my strength, and as soon as I take that first step, something hard hits me in the back of the head. I fall face-first into the mud. I touch where I’ve been hit and my hand is covered in blood, drips of it falling from my fingertips. I turn around and see nothing at first, and then it steps out of the shadows and grins.

A soldier. This is what they look like. Taller than the scouts—seven, maybe eight feet tall—its muscles bulging beneath a black ragged cloak. Large, raised veins traverse the length of each arm. Black boots. Nothing covering its head, and its hair falling to its shoulders. The same pale, waxy skin as the scouts. A grin of self-assurance, of finality. In one of its hands is a sword. Long and shimmering, made of some kind of metal I’ve never seen here on Earth or in my visions of Lorien, and it appears to be pulsing, as if it is somehow alive.

I begin to crawl away, the blood dripping down my neck. The beast at the school lets out another roar, and I reach for the low branches of a nearby tree and pull myself up. The soldier is ten feet away. I grip both hands into fists. It motions the sword nonchalantly towards me, and something comes out of its tip, something that looks like a small dagger. I watch the dagger twist in an arc, leaving a slight trail behind it like smoke from a plane. The light casts a spell that I can’t look away from.

A flash of bright light devours everything, the world dimming away into a soundless void. No walls. No sound. No floor or ceiling. Very slowly the shapes of things return, the trees standing like ancient effigies whispering of the world that once was in some alternate realm where only shadows reside.

I reach out to feel the nearest tree, the only touch of gray in an otherwise white world. My hand goes through it and for a moment the tree shimmers as if it were liquid. I take a deep breath. When I exhale the pain returns to the gash on the back of my head and the tears down my arms and body from the James house fire. A sound of dripping water comes from somewhere. Slowly, the soldier takes form, twenty or thirty feet away. Giantlike. We take each other in. Its sword glowing more brightly in this new world. Its eyes narrow and my hands again clench into fists. I’ve lifted objects far heavier than it; I’ve split trees and I’ve caused destruction. Surely I can match its strength with my own. I push everything that I feel into the core of my being, everything that I am and everything that I will be, until I feels as though I’m about to burst.

“Yahhhh!” I yell, and I thrust my arms forward. The brute force leaves my body, raging towards the soldier. At the same time it sweeps the sword across its body as though swatting a fly. The power deflects into the trees, which dance for a brief moment like the grain in a wheat field waving in a light wind, and then they become still. It laughs at me, a deep, guttural laugh meant to taunt. Its red eyes begin to glow, swirling as though lava filled. It lifts its free hand and I tense myself against the unknown. And without my knowing what has happened, my throat is in its grip, the gap that had separated us closed in the blink of an eye. It lifts me, one handed, breathing with its mouth open so that I can smell the sour stench of its breath, the smell of decay. I thrash, try to pry its fingers from around my throat, but they are like iron.

And then it throws me.

I land on my back forty feet away. I stand and it charges, swinging the sword at my head, which I duck and counter by pushing it as hard as I can. It stumbles back but stays standing. I try to lift it with telekinesis but nothing happens. In this alternate world my powers are dimmed, almost ineffectual. The Mogadorian has the advantage here.

It smiles at my futility and raises the sword with both hands. The sword comes alive, turning from shimmering silver into ice blue. Blue flames lick across the blade. A sword that glows with power, just as Six had talked about. It swings the sword in my direction and another dagger comes flying off the tip, straight at me. This I can do, I think. All the hours in the backyard with Henri preparing for this very thing. Always the knives, more or less the same as a dagger. Did Henri know they would use them? Certainly, though in my flashbacks of the invasion I had never seen them. But I had never seen these creatures, either. They were different on Lorien, not quite as sinister looking. On the day of the invasion they looked sickly and starved. Is it Earth’s fault for this convalescence, have the resources here caused them to grow stronger and healthier?

The dagger literally screams as it rages towards me. It grows and becomes consumed in flames. Just when I am about to deflect it, it explodes into a ball of fire, and the flames jump to me. I’m trapped within it, consumed in a perfect sphere of fire. Anyone else would burn, but not me, and somehow it causes my strength to return. I’m able to breathe. Without the soldier knowing it, it has made me stronger. Now it’s my turn to smile at its own futility.

“Is this all you’ve got?” I yell.

Its face turns into rage. It defiantly reaches one hand over its shoulder and returns with a cannonlike gun that begins conforming to its body, the gun wrapping around its forearm. Its arm and the gun becoming one and the same. I pull the knife from my back pocket, the knife that I grabbed from home before returning to school. Small, ineffectual, but better than nothing. I open the blade and charge. The ball of fire charges with me. The soldier squares its body and brings down its sword with force. I deflect it with the pocketknife but the weight of the sword snaps the blade in two. I drop the remaining pieces and swing as hard as I can. My fist slams into the soldier’s gut. It doubles over but comes right back up and swings the sword again. I duck beneath the blade at the last second. It singes the hair on top of my head. Right behind the sword comes the cannon. No time to react. It hits me in my shoulder and I grunt and fall backwards. The soldier regroups and points the cannon in the air. I’m confounded at first. The gray from the trees is being pulled away and sucked into the gun. Then I understand. The gun. It needs to be charged before it can be fired, needs to steal Earth’s essence in order to be used. The gray in the trees isn’t shadows; the gray is the life of the trees at its most elemental level. And now those lives are being stolen, consumed by the Mogadorians. A race of aliens that depleted their planet’s resources in the quest for advancement, now doing the same thing here. That is the reason they attacked Lorien. The same reason they will attack Earth. One by one the trees fall and crumble into heaps of ash. The gun glows brighter and brighter, so bright that it hurts the eyes to look at. No time to spare.

I charge. It keeps the gun pointed at the sky and swings the sword. I duck and plow straight into it. Its body tenses and it writhes in agony. The fire surrounding me burns it where it stands. But I’ve left myself open. It swings the blade feebly, not enough to cut me, but there is nothing I can do to prevent its fall. It hits me and my body is hurled backwards fifty feet as though I’ve been struck by a bolt of lightning. I lie there, my body shaking with postelectrocution tremors. I lift my head. Thirty piles of ash from the fallen trees surround us. How many times will that allow him to fire? A slight wind kicks up and the ash begins filtering across the empty space between us. The moon returns. This world to which it has brought me is beginning to fail. It knows it. The gun is ready. I wrestle myself up from the ground. Sitting a couple feet away, still glowing, is one of the daggers it fired at me. I pick it up.

It lowers the cannon and aims. The white surrounding us is beginning to dim, color returning. And then the cannon fires, a bright flash of light containing the ghoulish forms of everyone I have ever known—Henri, Sam, Bernie Kosar, Sarah—all of them dead in this alternate realm and the light so bright that they are all I can see, trying to take me with them, raging forward in a ball of energy growing as it nears. I try to deflect the blast but it’s too strong. The white makes it as far as the fiery enclosure, and when the two touch an explosion erupts and the power sends me backwards. I land with a thud. I take inventory. I am unharmed. The ball of fire has extinguished. Somehow it has absorbed the blast, has saved me from what I am certain would have been death. Surely that is how the cannon works, the death of one thing for the death of another. The power of mind control, manipulation that plays on fear, possible through the destruction of the elements of the world. The scouts have learned to do this weakly with their minds. The soldiers rely on weapons that produce a much greater effect.

I stand, the glowing knife still in my hand. The soldier pulls some sort of lever on the side of the cannon as though to reload it. I sprint towards it. When I’m close enough, I aim for its heart and hurl the knife as hard as I can. It fires a second shot. A torpedo of orange raging its way, the certainty of a white death coming mine. They cross in midair without touching. Just when I expect that second shot to hit, to bring upon that death, something else happens instead.

My knife strikes first.

The world vanishes. The shadows fade and the cold and the dark return as though they had never left. A vertiginous transition. I take a step backwards and fall. My eyes adjust to the dearth of light. I fix them on the dark figure of the soldier hovering over me. The cannon blast didn’t travel with us. The glowing knife did, the blade sunk deeply into its heart, the handle pulsating orange beneath the moonlight overhead. The soldier staggers, and then the knife is sucked in deeper and disappears. It grunts. Spurts of black blood pump from the open wound. Its eyes go blank, then roll back into its head. It falls to the ground, lies motionless, and then explodes into a cloud of ash that covers my shoes. A soldier. I’ve killed my first. May it not be the last.

Something about being in the alternate realm has weakened me. I place my hand on a nearby tree to steady myself and catch my breath, only the tree is no longer there. I look around. All the trees surrounding us have collapsed into heaps of ash just as they did in the other realm, just as the Mogadorians do when they die.

I hear the roar of the beast and I look up to see how much of the school is left standing. But instead of the school there is something else, fifteen feet away, standing tall with a sword in one hand and a similar-looking cannon in the other. The cannon is aimed right at my heart, a cannon that has already been charged, glowing with power. Another soldier. I don’t think I have the strength to fight this one as I did the last.

There is nothing I can throw, and the gap between us is too great to charge before it fires. And then its arm twitches and the sound of a gunshot rings through the air. My body instinctively jerks, expecting the cannon to rip me in half. But I am fine, unharmed. I look up confused, and there, in the soldier’s forehead, is a hole the size of a quarter spurting its hideous blood. Then it drops and disintegrates.

“That’s for my dad,” I hear behind me. I turn. Sam, holding a silver pistol in his right hand. I smile at him. He lowers the gun. “They passed right through the center of town,” he says. “I knew it was them as soon as I saw the trailer.”

I try to catch my breath, staring in awe at Sam’s figure. Just moments before, in the first soldier’s blast, he was a decaying corpse sprung from hell to take me away. And now he just saved me.

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod. “Where did you just come from?”

“I followed them in my dad’s truck after they passed my house. I pulled in fifteen minutes ago and got swarmed by the ones that were already here. So I left and parked in a field a mile away and walked through the woods.”

The second set of lights we had seen from the window of the school came from Sam’s truck. I open my mouth to respond but a clap of thunder shakes the sky. Another storm begins to brew, and relief courses through me that Six is still alive. A bolt of lightning cuts the sky and clouds begin rushing in from all directions, being pulled together into one giant mass. An even greater darkness falls, followed by a rain so heavy that I have to squint to see Sam five feet away from me. The school is blotted out. But then a great bolt of lightning strikes and everything brightens for a split second, and I see that the beast has been hit. An agonizing roar follows.

“I have to get to the school!” I yell. “Mark and Sarah are somewhere inside.”

“If you’re going, then I’m going,” he yells back over the rumble of the storm.

We take no more than five steps before the wind comes howling, pushing us back, torrential rain stinging our faces. We’re soaked, shivering and cold. But if I’m shivering then I know I’m alive. Sam drops to a knee, then lies on his stomach to keep from being blown backwards. I do the same. Through squinted eyes I look into the clouds—heavy, dark, ominous—swirling in small concentric circles and, in the center, the center I’m trying mightily to reach, a face begins to form.

It’s an old, weathered face, bearded, tranquil looking as though it sleeps. A face that looks older than Earth itself. The clouds begin to lower, slowly nearing the surface and consuming everything, everything darkening, a dark so deep and impenetrable that it’s hard to imagine that somewhere, anywhere, a sun still exists. Another roar, a roar of anger and doom. I try to stand but am quickly knocked back down, the wind too great. The face. It’s coming alive. An awakening. The eyes opening, the face upturned into a grimace. Is this Six’s creation? The face becomes the look of rage itself, a look of revenge. Coming down fast. Everything seems to hang in the balance. And then the mouth opens, hungry, its lips curling to show teeth and its eyes squinted in what can only be described as pure malice. A complete and utter wrath.

And then the face touches down and a sonic blast shakes the ground, an explosion reaching out over the school, everything illuminated in red, orange, and yellow. I’m thrust backwards. Trees break in half. The ground rumbles. I land with a thud, branches and mud falling atop me. My ears ring as they’ve never rung before. A boom so loud that it must have been heard fifty miles away. And then the rain stops, and everything falls silent.

I lie in the mud, listening to the beat of my heart. The clouds clear away, revealing a hanging moon. Not a single gust of wind. I look around but don’t see Sam. I yell for him but get no response. I yearn to hear something, anything, another roar, Henri’s shotgun, but there is nothing.

I pull myself up off the forest floor, wipe away the mud and the twigs as best as I can. I exit the woods for the second time. The stars have reappeared, a million of them twinkling high in the night sky. Is it over? Have we won? Or is it just a lull in the action? The school, I think. I have to get to the school. I take one step forward, and that’s when I hear it.

Another roar, coming from within the woods behind me.

Sound returns. Three successive gunshots ring through the night, echoing so that I have no idea from which direction they have come. I hope with everything inside of me that they are from Henri’s shotgun, that he is still alive, still fighting.

The ground begins to shake. The beast is on the run, coming for me, no mistaking it now, trees broken and uprooted behind me. They don’t seem to slow it down at all. Is this one even bigger than the other? I don’t care to find out. I take off running for the school, but then realize that’s the absolute worst place I can go. Sarah and Mark are still there, still hiding. Or at least I hope they are.

Everything returns to the way it was before the storm, the shadows following, looming. Scouts. Soldiers. I veer to the right and sprint along the tree-lined path that leads to the football field, the beast hot on my trail. Can I really expect to outrun it? If I can make it to the woods beyond the field, maybe I can. I know those woods, the woods that lead to our house. Within them I’ll have the home-field advantage. I look around and see the figures of the Mogadorians in the schoolyard. There are too many of them. We’re greatly outnumbered. Did we ever really believe we could win?

A dagger flies by me, a flash of red missing my face by mere inches. It sticks into the trunk of a tree beside me and the tree ignites in flame. Another roar. The beast is keeping pace. Which of us has the greater endurance? I enter the stadium, sprint straight across the fifty-yard line and pass through the visiting team’s side. Another knife whizzes by, a blue one this time. The woods are near, and when I finally sprint into them a smile forms on my face. I’ve led it away from the others. If everyone else is safe then I’ve done my job. Just when a sense of triumph blooms within me, the third dagger strikes.

I cry out, fall face-first into the mud. I can feel the dagger between my shoulder blades. A pain so sharp that it paralyzes me. I try to reach to pull it free but it is up too high. It feels as though it’s moving, digging itself deeper, the pain spreading as if I’ve been poisoned. On my stomach, in agony. I can’t pull it free with telekinesis, my powers somehow failing me. I begin dragging myself forward. One of the soldiers—or maybe it’s a scout; I can’t tell which—places a foot on my back, reaches down, and pulls the knife free. I grunt. The knife is gone but the pain stays. It takes its foot off of me but I can still feel its presence, and I wrestle myself onto my back to face it.

Another soldier, standing tall and smiling with hatred. The same look as the one before, the same type of sword. The dagger that was in my back twists in its grip. That is what I felt, the blade turning while imbedded in my flesh. I lift a hand towards the soldier to move it but I know it’s in vain. I can’t focus, everything blurry. The soldier raises its sword in the air. The blade tastes death, starts glowing in the night sky behind it. I’m gone, I think. Nothing I can do. I look into its eyes. Ten years on the run and this is how easily it ends, how quietly. But behind it lurks something else. Something far more menacing than a million soldiers with a million swords. Teeth every bit as long as the soldier is tall, teeth glowing white in a mouth too small to hold them. The beast with its evil eyes hovering over us.

A sharp intake of breath catches in my throat, and my eyes open wide in terror. It’ll take us both out, I think. The soldier is oblivious. It tenses and grimaces at me and starts to bring the sword down to split me in two. But it is too slow and the beast strikes first, its jaws clamping down like a bear trap. The bite doesn’t stop until the beast’s teeth come together, the soldier’s body cut cleanly in half just below the hips, leaving nothing behind but two stumps still standing. The beast chews twice and swallows. The soldier’s legs fall hollowly to the ground, one dropping to the right, the other to the left, and quickly disintegrate.

It takes every ounce of strength I have to reach out and grab the dagger that has fallen at my feet. I tuck it into the waistband of my jeans, and begin crawling away. I feel the beast hovering over me, feel its breath upon the nape of my neck. The smell of death and rotting meat. I enter a small clearing. I expect the beast’s wrath to fall any second, expect its teeth and claws to rip me to shreds. I pull myself forward until I can go no more, my back against an oak tree.

The beast stands in the very center of the clearing, thirty feet away from me. I look at it fully for the first time. A looming figure, hazy in the dark and the cold of the night. Taller and bigger than the beast at the school, forty feet, standing upright on two hind legs. Thick, gray skin stretched tightly over slabs of bulging muscle. No neck, its head sloped so that its lower jaw protrudes farther out than its upper. A set of fangs points towards the sky, another set points to the ground, dripping blood and drool. Long, thick arms hang a foot or two above the ground even while the beast stands straight, giving it the appearance of slightly leaning forward. Yellow eyes. Round disks at the sides of its head that pulsate with the beating of its heart, the only sign that it has any sort of heart at all.

It leans forward and brings its left hand to the ground. A hand, complete with stubby short fingers with claws like a raptor, claws meant to rip apart anything they touch. It sniffs at me, and roars. An ear-splitting roar that would have pushed me backwards if I weren’t already against a tree. Its mouth opens, showing what must be fifty other teeth, each one every bit as sharp as the next. Its free hand thrusts away from its side and splits in half every tree that it strikes, ten, fifteen of them.

No more running. No more fighting. Blood from the knife wound runs down my back; my hands and legs are both shaking. The dagger is still tucked into the waistband of my jeans, but what’s the point in grabbing it? What faith is there in a four-inch blade against a forty-foot beast? It would be the equivalent of a splinter. It’ll only make it angrier. My only hope is to bleed to death before I am killed and eaten.

I close my eyes and accept death. My lights are off. I don’t want to see what is about to happen. I hear movement behind me. I open my eyes. One of the Mogadorians must be moving in for a closer look, I think at first, but I know immediately that I am wrong. There is something familiar about the loping gait, something I recognize in the sound of his breathing. And then he enters the clearing.

Bernie Kosar.

I smile, but the smile quickly fades. If I am doomed, there is no point in him dying too. No, Bernie Kosar. You can’t be here. You need to leave and you need to run like the wind, get as far away as you can. Pretend you’ve just finished our early-morning jog to school and that it’s time to return home.

He looks at me as he walks up. I am here, he seems to say. I am here and I will stand with you.

“No,” I say aloud.

He stops long enough to give my hand a reassuring lick. He looks up at me with his big, brown eyes. Get away, John, I hear in my mind. Crawl if you have to crawl, but get away now. The blood loss has made me delusional. Bernie seems to be communicating with me. Is Bernie Kosar even here, or am I imagining that as well?

He stands in front of me as though in protection. He begins to growl, low at first, but it grows to a growl every bit as ferocious as the beast’s own roar. The beast fixates on Bernie Kosar. A staredown. Bernie Kosar’s hair is raised down the center of his back, his tan ears pinned to his head. His loyalty, his bravery very nearly make me weep. He’s a hundred times smaller than the beast yet he stands tall, vowing to fight. One quick strike from the beast and all is done.

I reach my hand out to Bernie Kosar. I wish I could stand and grab him and get away. His growls are so fierce that his whole body shakes, tremors coursing through him.

And then something begins to happen.

Bernie Kosar begins to grow.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

AFTER ALL THIS TIME, ONLY NOW DO I UNDERSTAND. The morning runs when I would run too fast for him to keep pace. He would disappear into the woods, reappear seconds later in front of me. Six tried to tell me. Six took one look at him and she knew immediately. On those runs Bernie Kosar went into the woods to change himself, to turn himself into a bird. The way he would rush outside each morning, nose to the ground, patrolling the yard. Protecting me, and Henri. Looking for signs of the Mogadorians. The gecko in Florida. The gecko that used to watch from the wall while I ate breakfast. How long has he been with us? The Chimæra, the ones I watched being loaded into the rocket—did they make it to Earth after all?

Bernie Kosar continues to grow. He tells me to run. I can communicate with him. No, that’s not all. I can communicate with all animals. Another Legacy. It started with the deer in Florida on the day that we left. The shudder that ran up my spine as it passed something along to me, some feeling. I attributed it to the sadness of our leaving, but I was wrong. Mark James’s dogs. The cows I passed on my morning runs. The same thing. I feel like such a fool to discover it only now. So blatantly obvious, right in front of my face. Another of Henri’s adages: Those things that are most obvious are the very things we’re most likely to overlook. But Henri knew. That is why he said no to Six when she tried to tell me.

Bernie Kosar is done growing; his hair has fallen away, replaced by oblong scales. He looks like a dragon, but without the wings. His body is thick with muscle. Jagged teeth and claws, horns that curl like a ram’s. Thicker than the beast, but far shorter. Looking every bit as menacing. Two giants on opposite sides of the clearing, roaring at one another.

Run, he tells me. I try to tell him that I can’t. I don’t know if he can understand me. You can, he says. You must.

The beast swings. A hammer swing that starts in the clouds and pours down with brutality. Bernie Kosar blocks it with his horns and then charges before the beast can swing again. A colossal collision in the very center of the clearing. Bernie Kosar thrusts up, sinks his teeth into the beast’s side. The beast knocks him back.

Both of them so quick that it defies all logic. Bleeding gashes already down the sides of each. I watch with my back against the tree. I try to help. But my telekinesis is still failing me. Blood still pours down my back. My limbs feel heavy, as though my blood has turned to lead. I can feel myself fading.

The beast is still upright on two legs while Bernie Kosar must fight on four. The beast makes a charge. Bernie Kosar lowers his head and they smash into one another, crashing through the trees off to my right side. Somehow the beast ends up on top. It sinks its teeth deep in Bernie Kosar’s throat. It thrashes, trying to tear his throat out. Bernie Kosar twists under the beast’s bite but he can’t shake free. He tears at the beast’s hide with his paws but the beast doesn’t let go.

Then a hand reaches out behind me, grabs my arm. I try to push it away but I’m incapable of doing even that. Bernie Kosar’s eyes are closed tightly. He is straining under the beast’s jaws, his throat constricted, unable to breathe.

“No!” I yell.

“Come on!” the voice yells behind me. “We need to get out of here.”

“The dog,” I say, not comprehending whose voice it is. “The dog!”

Bernie Kosar is being bitten and choked, about to die, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I won’t be far behind. I would sacrifice my own life for his. I scream out. Bernie Kosar twists his head around and looks at me, his face scrunched tightly in pain and agony and the oncoming death he must feel.

“We have to go!” the voice behind me yells, the hand pulling me up from off the forest floor.

Bernie Kosar’s eyes stay fixed on mine. Go, he says to me. Get out of here, now, while you can. There isn’t much time.

I somehow reach my feet. Dizzy, the world cast in a haze around me. Only Bernie Kosar’s eyes remain clear. Eyes that scream “Help!” even while his thoughts say otherwise.

“We have to go!” the voice yells again. I don’t turn to face it, but I know whose it is. Mark James, no longer hiding in the school, trying to save me from this clash. His being here must mean that Sarah is okay, and for a brief moment I allow myself to be relieved, but then that relief vanishes as quickly as it came. In this exact moment only one thing matters. Bernie Kosar, on his side, looking at me with glassy eyes. He saved me. It’s my turn to save him.

Mark reaches his hand across my chest, begins pulling me backwards, out of the clearing, away from the fight. I twist myself free. Bernie Kosar’s eyes slowly begin to close. He’s fading, I think. I won’t watch you die, I tell him. I’m willing to watch many things in this world but I’ll be damned if I’ll watch you die. There’s no response. The beast’s bite hardens. It can sense that death is near.

I take one wobbly step and pull the dagger from the waistband of my jeans. I close my fingers tightly around it and it comes alive and starts glowing. I’ll never be able to hit the beast by throwing the dagger, and my Legacies have all but vanished. An easy decision. No choice but to charge.

One deep, shaky breath. I rock my body backwards, everything tensing through the ache of exhaustion, not an inch anywhere on me that doesn’t feel some sort of pain.

“No!” Mark yells behind me.

I lunge forward and sprint for the beast. The beast’s eyes are closed, jaws clamped tightly around Bernie Kosar’s throat so that the moonlight glows in the pools of blood around it. Thirty feet away. Then twenty. The beast’s eyes snap open at the exact moment I jump. Yellow eyes that twist in rage the second they focus upon me, sailing through the air towards them, dagger in both hands held high over my head as though in some heroic dream I never want to wake from. The beast lets go of Bernie Kosar’s throat and moves to bite, but surely it knows that it has sensed me too late. The blade of the dagger glows in anticipation, and I jam it deeply into the eye of the beast. A liquid ooze immediately bursts out. The beast lets out a blood-curdling scream so loud that it’s hard to imagine the dead being able to sleep through it.

I fall flat on my back. I lift my head and watch the beast totter over me. It tries in vain to pull the dagger from its eye, but its hands are too big and the dagger is too small. The Mogadorian weapons function in some way that I don’t think I’ll ever understand, because of the mystical gateways between the realms. The dagger is no different, the black of the night rushing into the eye of the beast in a vortexlike funnel cloud, a tornado of death.

The beast falls silent as the last of the great black cloud enters its skull, and the dagger is sucked in with it. The beast’s arms fall limply to its sides. Its hands begin to shake. A violent shake that reverberates throughout the entirety of its massive body. When the convulsions end the beast hunches over and then falls to the ground with its back against the trees. Sitting, but yet still towering some twenty-five feet over me. Everything silent, hanging in anticipation of what is to come. A gun fires once, very close so that my ears ring for seconds afterward. The beast takes a great breath and holds it in as though in meditation, and suddenly its head explodes, raining down pieces of brain and flesh and skull over everything, all of which quickly turn to ash and dust.

The woods fall silent. I turn my head and look at Bernie Kosar, who still lies motionless on his side, his eyes closed. I can’t tell if he’s alive or not. As I look at him, he begins to change again, shrinking down to his normal size, while remaining lifeless. I hear the sound of crunching leaves and snapping twigs nearby.

It takes all the strength I have just to lift my head an inch off the ground. I open my eyes and peer up into the haze of night, expecting to see Mark James. But it’s not him standing over me. My breath catches in my throat. A looming figure, indistinct with the moon’s light hovering just over it. Then he takes one step forward, blotting out the moon, and my eyes widen in anticipation and dread.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE HAZY IMAGE SHARPENS. THROUGH THE exhaustion and pain and fear, a smile comes to my face, coupled with a sense of relief. Henri. He throws the shotgun into the bushes and drops to one knee beside me. He face is bloodied, his shirt and jeans in tatters, cuts down the length of both arms and on his neck, and beyond that I see that his eyes are fear-stricken from what he sees in mine.

“Is it over?” I ask.

“Shhh,” he says. “Tell me, have you been stabbed by one of their daggers?”

“My back,” I say.

He closes his eyes and shakes his head. He reaches into his pocket and removes one of the small round stones I watched him grab from the Loric Chest before we left the home-ec room. His hands are shaking.

“Open your mouth,” he says. He inserts one of the stones. “Keep it under your tongue. Don’t swallow it.” He hefts me up with his hands beneath my armpits. I get to my feet and he keeps an arm on me while I regain balance. He turns me around to look at the gash on my back. My face feels warm. A sort of rejuvenation blooms through me from the stone. My limbs still ache with exhaustion, but enough strength has returned so that I’m able to function.

“What is this?”

“Loric salt. It’ll slow and numb the dagger’s effects,” he says. “You’ll feel a burst of energy, but it won’t last long and we have to get back to the school as quickly as we can.”

The pebble is cold in my mouth, tastes nothing like salt—tastes like nothing at all, actually. I look down and take inventory, and then brush off with my hands the ashen residue left from the fallen beast.

“Is everyone okay?” I ask.

“Six has been badly hurt,” he says. “Sam is carrying her back to the truck as we speak; then he is going to drive to the school to pick us up. That’s why we have to get back there.”

“Have you seen Sarah?”

“No.”

“Mark James was just here,” I say, and look at him. “I thought you were him.”

“I didn’t see him.”

I look past Henri at the dog. “Bernie Kosar,” I say. He is still shrinking, the scales fading away—tan, black, and brown hair taking their place—returning to the form in which I have known him most recently: floppy ears, short legs, long body. A beagle with a cold wet nose always ready to run. “He just saved my life. You knew, didn’t you?”

“Of course I knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because he watched over you when I couldn’t.”

“But how is he here?”

“He was on the ship with us.”

And then I remember what I thought was a stuffed animal that used to play with me. It was really Bernie Kosar I was playing with, though back then his name was Hadley.

We walk to the dog together. I crouch down and run my hand along Bernie Kosar’s side.

“We have to hurry,” Henri says again.

Bernie Kosar isn’t moving. The woods are alive, swarming with shadows that can only mean one thing, but I don’t care. I move my head to the dog’s rib cage. Ever so faintly I hear the th-tump of his beating heart. Some glimmer of life is still left. He is covered in deep cuts and gashes, and blood seems to seep from everywhere. His front leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, broken. But he is still alive. I lift him as gently as I can, cradling him like a child in my arms. Henri helps me up, then reaches into his pocket, grabs another salt pebble, and plops it into his own mouth. It makes me wonder if he was talking about himself when he said there was little time. Both of us are unsteady. And then something catches my eye in Henri’s thigh. A wound glowing navy blue through the gathering blood around it. He’s also been stabbed by a soldier’s knife. I wonder if the salt pebble is the only reason he’s now standing, as it is for me.

“What about the shotgun?” I ask.

“I’m out of ammo.”

We walk out of the clearing, taking our time. Bernie Kosar doesn’t move in my arms but I can feel that life hasn’t left him. Not yet. We exit the woods, leaving behind us the overhanging branches and bushes and the smell of wet and rotting leaves.

“Do you think you can run?” Henri asks.

“No,” I say. “But I’ll run anyway.”

Up ahead of us we hear a great commotion, several grunts followed by clanking of chains.

And then we hear a roar, not quite as sinister as the others, but loud enough so that we know it can only mean one thing: another beast.

“You’re kidding me,” Henri says.

Twigs snap behind us, coming from the woods. Henri and I both twist around, but the woods are too dense to see. I snap the light on in my left hand and sweep it through the trees to see. There must be seven or eight soldiers standing at the entrance of the woods, and when my light hits them they all draw their swords, which come alive, glowing their various colors the second they do.

“No!” Henri yells. “Don’t use your Legacies; it’ll weaken you.”

But it’s too late. I snap the light off. Vertigo and weakness return, then the pain. I hold my breath and wait for the soldiers to come charging at us. But they don’t. There follows no sound aside from the obvious struggle happening straight ahead of us. Then an uproar of yells behind us. I turn to look. The glowing swords begin swaggering forward from forty feet away. A confident laugh comes from one of the soldiers. Nine of them armed and full of strength versus three of us broken and battered and armed with nothing more than our valor. The beast one way, the soldiers the other. That is the choice that we now face.

Henri seems unfazed. He removes two more pebbles from his pocket and hands one to me.

“The last two,” he says, his voice shaky as though it requires a great effort just to speak.

I plop the new pebble into my mouth and bury it beneath my tongue despite a small bit of the first still remaining. Renewed strength rushes through me.

“What do you think?” he asks me.

We are surrounded. Henri and Bernie Kosar and I are the only three left. Six badly hurt and carried away by Sam. Mark just here but now nowhere to be found. And that leaves Sarah, who I pray is tucked away safely in the school that lies a tenth of a mile ahead of us. I take a deep breath and I accept the inevitable.

“I don’t think it matters, Henri,” I say, and look at him. “But the school is ahead of us, and that is where Sam will be shortly.”

What he does next catches me off guard: he smiles. He reaches his hand out and gives my shoulder a squeeze. His eyes are tired and red but in them I see relief, a sense of serenity as though he knows it’s all about to end.

“We’ve done all we could. And what’s done is done. But I’m damn proud of you,” he says. “You did amazing today. I always knew you would. There was never a doubt in my mind.”

I drop my head. I don’t want him to see me cry. I squeeze the dog. For the first time since I grabbed him he shows a slight sign of life, lifting his head just enough so that he can lick the side of my face. He passes one word to me and one word only, as if that is all his strength will allow. Courage, he says.

I lift my head. Henri steps forward and hugs me. I close my eyes and bury my face in his neck. He is still shaking, his body frail and weak beneath my grip. I’m sure mine is no stronger. So this is it, I think. With our heads held high we will walk across the field to whatever awaits there. At least there is dignity in that.

“You did damn good,” he says.

I open my eyes. From over his shoulder I see the soldiers are near, twenty feet away now. They have stopped walking. One of them is holding a dagger that pulsates silver and gray. The soldier tosses it in the air, catches it, and hurls it at Henri’s back. I lift my hand and deflect it away and it misses by a foot. My strength leaves me almost immediately even though the pebble is only half dissolved.

Henri takes my free arm and drapes it over his shoulders and places his right arm around my waist. We stagger forward. The beast comes into view, looming just ahead in the center of the football field. The Mogadorians follow behind us. Perhaps they are curious to see the beast in action, to see the beast kill. Each step I take becomes more of an effort than the one that preceded it. My heart thuds in my chest. Death is forthcoming and of that I am terrified. But Henri is here. And so is Bernie Kosar. I’m happy not to have to face it alone. Several soldiers stand on the other side of the beast. Even if we could get past the beast, we would then have to walk straight into the soldiers, who stand with drawn swords.

We have no choice. We reach the field and I expect the beast to pounce at any moment. But nothing happens. When we are within fifteen feet of it we stop. We stand leaning against each other for support.

The beast is half the size of the other but still big enough to kill us all with no great effort of its own. Pale, almost translucent skin stretched over protruding ribs and knobby joints. Various pinkish scars down its arms and sides. White, sightless eyes. It shifts it weight and lowers itself, then swings its head low over the grass to smell what its eyes fail to see. It can sense us in front of it. It lets out a low groan. I feel none of the rage and malice that the other beasts radiated, no desire for blood and death. There is a sense of fear, a sense of sadness. I open myself to it. I see images of torture and starvation. I see the beast locked up for all its life here on Earth, a damp cave where little light reaches. Shivering through the night to stay warm, always cold and wet. I see the way the Mogadorians pit the beasts against one another, force them to fight in order to train, to toughen them and make them mean.

Henri lets go of me. I can’t hold Bernie Kosar any longer. I gently place him in the grass at my feet. I haven’t felt him move in minutes and I can’t tell if he’s still alive. I take one step forward and drop to my knees. The soldiers yell around us. I don’t understand their language but I can tell by their tones that they are impatient. One swings his sword and a dagger just misses me, a flash of white that flutters and tears the front of my shirt. I stay on my knees and I look up at the beast hovering over me. Some weapon is fired but it sails over our heads. A warning shot, meant to move the beast to action. The beast quivers. A second dagger darts through the air and hits the beast below the elbow of its left arm. It lifts its head and roars in pain.

I am sorry, I try to tell it. I am sorry for the life you’ve been forced to live. You’ve been wronged. No living creature deserves such treatment. You’ve been forced to endure hell, plucked from your own planet to fight a war that isn’t yours. Beaten and tortured and starved. The blame for all the pain and agony you’ve experienced lies with them. You and I share a common bond. Both wronged by these monsters.

I try with everything to pass along my own images, the things that I’ve seen and felt. The beast doesn’t look away. My thoughts, on some level, are reaching it. I show it Lorien, the vast ocean and thick forests and verdant hills teeming with life and vitality. Animals drinking from the cold blue waters. A proud people content to pass the days in harmony. I show it the hell that followed, the slaying of men, women, and children. The Mogadorians. Cold-blooded murderers. Draconian killers destroying all that lies within their path due to their own recklessness and pathetic beliefs. Destroying even their own planet. Where does it end? I show it Sarah, show it every emotion that I’ve ever felt with her. Happiness and bliss, this is how I feel with her. And this is the pain I feel in having to leave her, all because of them. Help me, I say. Help me end this death and slaughter. Let us fight together. I have so little left but if you stand with me, I’ll stand with you.

The beast lifts its head to the sky and it roars. A roar both long and deep. The Mogadorians can sense what is happening and have seen enough. Their weapons begin firing. I look over and one of the cannons is aimed right at me. It fires and the white death surges forth, but the beast drops its head in time and absorbs the shot instead. Its face twists in pain, its eyes squeeze tightly shut, but almost immediately they snap back open. This time I see the rage.

I fall face-first in the grass. I’m grazed by something but I don’t see what it is. Henri cries out in pain behind me and he is flung thirty feet away, his body lying in the mud, face up, smoking. I have no idea what has hit him. Something big and deadly. Panic and fear hit me. Not Henri, I think. Please not Henri.

The beast throws a hard sweeping blow that takes out several of the soldiers and quiets many of their guns. Another roar. I look up and see the beast’s eyes have turned red, ablaze with fury. Retribution. Mutiny. It looks my way once and swiftly rushes off to follow its captors. Guns blaze but many of them are quick to be silenced. Kill them all, I think. Fight nobly and honorably and may you kill them all.

I lift my head. Bernie Kosar is motionless in the grass. Henri, thirty feet away, is motionless as well. I place a hand in the grass and pull myself forward, across the field, inch by inch, dragging myself to Henri. When I get there his eyes are open slightly; each breath is a fight. Trails of blood run from his mouth and nose. I take him into my arms and I pull him into my lap. His body is frail and weak and I can feel him dying. His eyes flutter open. He looks at me and lifts his hand and presses it to the side of my face. The second he does I begin to cry.

“I’m here,” I say.

He tries to smile.

“I’m so sorry, Henri.” I say. “I’m so sorry. We should have left when you wanted to.”

“Shh,” he says. “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say between sobs.

“You did great,” he says in a whisper. “You did so great. I always knew you would.”

“We have to get you to the school,” I say. “Sam could be there.”

“Listen to me, John. Everything,” he says. “Everything you need to know, it’s all in the Chest. The letter.”

“It’s not over. We can still make it.”

I can feel him begin to go. I shake him. His eyes reluctantly reopen. A trail of blood runs from his mouth.

“Coming here, to Paradise, it wasn’t by chance.” I don’t know what he means. “Read the letter.”

“Henri,” I say, and reach down and wipe the blood off his chin.

He looks me in the eye.

“You are Lorien’s Legacy, John. You and the others. The only hope the planet has left. The secrets,” he says, and is gripped by a fit of coughs. More blood. His eyes close again. “The Chest, John.”

I pull him more tightly to me, squeezing him. His body is going slack. Breaths so shallow that they are hardly breaths at all.

“We’ll make it back together, Henri. Me and you, I promise,” I say, and close my eyes.

“Be strong,” he says, and is overtaken by slight coughs, though he tries to speak through them. “This war…Can win…Find the others…. Six…. The power of…,” he says, and trails off.

I try to stand with him in my arms but I have nothing left, hardly enough strength to even breathe. Off in the distance I hear the beast roar. Cannons are still being fired, the sounds and lights of which reach out over the stadium bleachers, but as each minute passes less and less of them are being fired until there is only one. I lower Henri in my arms. I place my hand to the side of his face and he opens his eyes and looks at me for what I know will be the final time. He takes a weak breath and exhales and then slowly closes his eyes.

“I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, kiddo. Not for all of Lorien. Not for the whole damn world,” he says, and when that last word leaves his mouth I know that he is gone. I squeeze him in my arms, shaking, crying, despair and hopelessness taking hold. His hand drops lifelessly to the grass. I cup his head in my hand and hold it close to my chest, and I rock him back and forth and I cry like I’ve never cried before. The pendant around my neck glows blue, grows heavy for just a split second, and then dims to normal.

I sit in the grass and I hold Henri while the last cannon falls silent. The pain leaves my own body and with the cold of the night I feel my own self begin to fade. The moon and the stars shine overhead. I hear a cackle of laughter carried on the wind. My ears attune to it. I turn my head. Through the dizziness and blurry vision I see a scout fifteen feet away from me. Long trench coat, hat pulled to its eyes. It drops the coat and takes off the hat to reveal a pale and hairless head. It reaches to the back of its belt and removes a bowie knife, the blade of which is no less than twelve inches long. I close my eyes. I don’t care anymore. The scout’s raspy breathing comes my way, ten feet, then five. And then the footsteps end. The scout grunts in pain, and begins gurgling.

I open my eyes, the scout so close that I can smell it. The bowie knife falls from its hand, and there in its chest, where I assume its heart must be, is the end of a butcher’s knife. The knife is pulled free. The scout drops to its knees, falls to its side, and explodes into a puff of ash. Behind it, holding the knife in her shaky right hand, with tears in her eyes, stands Sarah. She drops the knife and rushes over to me, wrapping her arms around me with my arms around Henri. I hold Henri as my own head falls and the world dims away into nothingness. The aftermath of war, the school destroyed, the trees fallen and heaps of ash piled in the grass of the football field and I still hold Henri. And Sarah holds me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IMAGES FLICKER, EACH ONE BRINGING ITS own sorrow or its own smile. Sometimes both. At the very worst an impenetrable and sightless black and at best a happiness so bright that it hurts the eyes to see, coming and going on some unseen projector perpetually turned by an invisible hand. One, then another. The hollow click of the shutter. Now stop. Freeze this frame. Pluck it down and hold it close and be damned by what you see. Henri always said: the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.

A warm summer day in the cool grass with the sun high in the cloudless sky. The air coming off the water, carrying the freshness of the sea. A man walks up to the house, briefcase in hand. A younger man, brown hair cut short, freshly shaven, dressed casually. A sense of nervousness by the way he switches his briefcase from one hand to the other and the thin layer of sweat glistening on his forehead. He knocks at the door. My grandfather answers, opens the door for the man to enter, then closes it behind him. I resume my romping in the yard. Hadley changing forms, flying, then dodging, then charging. Wrestling with one another and laughing until it hurts. The day passing as time only can under the reckless abandon of childhood’s invincibility, of its innocence.

Fifteen minutes pass. Maybe less. At that age a day can last forever. The door opens and closes. I look up. My grandfather is standing with the man I had seen approach, both of them looking down at me.

“There is somebody I would like you to meet,” he says.

I stand from the grass and clap my hands together to knock away the dirt.

“This is Brandon,” my grandfather says. “He is your Cêpan. Do you know what that means?”

I shake my head. Brandon. That was his name. All these years and only now does it come back to me.

“It means he’s going to be spending a lot of time with you from here on out. The two of you, it means you are connected. You are bound to one another. Do you understand?”

I nod and walk to the man and I offer him my hand as I have seen done many times by grown men before. The man smiles and drops to one knee. He takes my small hand in his right and he closes his fingers around it.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I say.

Bright, kind eyes full of life look into mine as though offering a promise, a bond, yet I’m too young to know what that promise or bond really means.

He nods and brings his left hand on top of his right, my tiny hand lost somewhere in the middle. He nods at me, still smiling.

“My dear child,” he says. “The pleasure is all mine.”

I am jolted awake. I lie on my back, my heart racing, breathing heavily as though I had been running. My eyes stay closed but I can tell the sun has just risen by the long shadows and the crispness of air in the room. Pain returns, my limbs still heavy. With the pain comes another pain, a pain far greater than any physical ailment I could ever be afflicted with: the memory of the hours before.

I take a deep breath and exhale. A single tear rolls down the side of my face. I keep my eyes closed. An irrational hope that if I don’t find the day then the day won’t find me, that the things in the night will be nullified. My body shudders, a silent cry turning into a hard one. I shake my head and let it in. I know that Henri is dead and that all the hope in the world won’t change it.

I feel movement beside me. I tense myself, try to remain motionless so as not to be detected. A hand reaches up and touches the side of my face. A delicate touch done with love. My eyes come open, adjusting to the postdawn light until the ceiling of a foreign room comes into focus. I have no idea where I am, nor how I could have gotten here. Sarah is sitting next to me. She brings her hand to the side of my face and traces my brow with her thumb. She leans down and kisses me, a soft lingering kiss that I wish I could bottle and save for all time. She pulls away and I take a deep breath and close my eyes and kiss her on the forehead.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“A hotel thirty miles from Paradise.”

“How did I get here?”

“Sam drove us,” she says.

“I mean from the school. What happened? I remember that you were with me last night, but I don’t remember a thing after,” I say. “It almost seems like a dream.”

“I waited on the field with you until Mark arrived and he carried you to Sam’s truck. I couldn’t stay hidden any longer. Being in the school without knowing what was happening out there was killing me. And I felt like I could help somehow.”

“You certainly helped,” I say. “You saved my life.”

“I killed an alien,” she says, as though the fact still hasn’t settled in.

She wraps her arms around me, her hand resting on the back of my head. I try to sit up. I make it halfway on my own and then Sarah helps me the rest of the way, pushing on my back but being careful not to touch the wound left by the knife. I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and reach down and feel the scars around my ankle, counting them with the tips of my fingers. Still only three, and in this way I know that Six has survived. I had already accepted the fate of the rest of my days being spent alone, an itinerant wanderer with no place to go. But I won’t be alone. Six is still here, still with me, my tie to a past world.

“Is Six okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “She’s been stabbed and shot but she seems to be doing okay now. I don’t think she would have survived had Sam not carried her to the truck.”

“Where is she?”

“In the room next door, with Sam and Mark.”

I stand. My muscles and joints ache in protest, everything stiff and sore. I am wearing a clean T-shirt, a pair of mesh shorts. My skin is fresh with the smell of soap. The cuts have been cleaned and bandaged, a few of them stitched.

“Did you do all of this?” I ask.

“Most of it. The stitches were hard. We only had the ones Henri put in your head to go on as an example. Sam helped with them.”

I look at Sarah sitting on the bed, her legs pulled underneath her. Something else catches my eye, a small mass that has shifted beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. I tense, and immediately my mind returns to the weasels that sped across the gym. Sarah sees what I am looking at and smiles. She crawls to the bottom of the bed on her hands and knees.

“There’s somebody here who wants to say hello,” she says, then takes the corner of the blanket and gently peels it back to reveal Bernie Kosar, sleeping away. A metal splint goes the length of his front leg, and his body is covered with cuts and gashes that, like mine, have been cleaned and are already beginning to heal. His eyes slowly open and adjust, eyes rimmed with red, full of exhaustion. He keeps his head on the bed but his tail gives a subtle wag, softly thumping against the mattress.

“Bernie,” I say, and drop to my knees before him. I place my hand softly on his head. I can’t stop smiling and tears of joy surface. His small body is curled into a ball, head resting on his front paws, his eyes taking me in, battle scarred and wounded but still here to tell the tale.

“Bernie Kosar, you made it through. I owe my life to you,” I say, and kiss the top of his head.

Sarah runs her hand down the length of his back.

“I carried him to the truck while Mark carried you.”

“Mark. I’m sorry I ever doubted him,” I say.

She lifts one of Bernie Kosar’s ears. He turns and sniffs at her hand and then licks it. “So, is it true what Mark said, that Bernie Kosar grew to thirty feet tall and killed a beast almost double his size?”

I smile. “A beast triple his size.”

Bernie Kosar looks at me. Liar, he says. I look down and wink at him. I stand back up and look at Sarah.

“All of this,” I say. “All of this has happened so fast. How are you handling it?”

She nods. “Handling what? The fact that I’ve fallen in love with an alien, which I only found out about three days ago, and then just happened to walk headlong into the middle of a war? Yeah, I’m handling that okay.”

I smile at her. “You’re an angel.”

“Nah,” she says. “I’m just a girl crazy in love.”

She gets up from the bed and wraps her arms around me and we stand in the center of the room holding one another.

“You really have to leave, don’t you?”

I nod.

She takes a deep breath and exhales shakily, willing herself not to cry. More tears in the past twenty-four hours than I have ever witnessed in all the years of my life.

“I don’t know where you have to go or what you have to do, but I’ll wait for you, John. Every bit of my heart belongs to you, whether you ask for it or not.”

I pull her to me. “And mine belongs to you,” I say.

I walk across the room. Sitting on top of the desk are the Loric Chest, three packed bags, Henri’s computer, and all the money from the last withdrawal he made at the bank. Sarah must have rescued the Chest from the home-ec room. I place my hand on it. All the secrets, Henri had said. All of them contained within this. In time I’ll open it and discover them, but that time is certainly not now. And what did he mean about Paradise, that our coming wasn’t by chance?

“Did you pack my bags?” I ask Sarah, who is standing behind me.

“Yes, and it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

I lift my bag from the table. Beneath it is a manila envelope carrying my name across the front of it.

“What is this?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I found it in Henri’s bedroom. We went there after leaving the school and tried to grab everything we could; then we came here.”

I open the envelope and pull out the contents. All of the documents Henri had created for me: birth certificates, social security cards, visas, and so on. I count through them. Seventeen different identities, seventeen different ages. On the very front sheet is a sticky note in Henri’s writing. It reads, “Just in case.” After the last sheet is another sealed envelope, across which Henri has written my name. A letter, the one he must have been talking about just before he died. I don’t have the heart to read it now.

I look out the window of the hotel room. A light snow sifts down from the low, gray clouds overhead. The ground is too warm for any of it to stick. Sarah’s car and Sam’s father’s blue truck are parked beside each other in the lot. As I stand looking down at them a knock sounds at the door. Sarah opens it and Sam and Mark walk into the room; Six limps behind them. Sam hugs me, says he’s sorry.

“Thank you,” I say.

“How do you feel?” Six asks. She is no longer wearing the suit but is now dressed in the pair of jeans she wore when I first saw her, and one of Henri’s sweatshirts.

I shrug. “I’m okay. Sore and stiff. My body feels heavy.”

“The heaviness is from the dagger. It’ll eventually wear off, though.”

“How badly were you stabbed?” I ask.

She lifts her shirt and shows me the gash in her side, then a different one on her back. All told, she was stabbed three times last night, and that’s not to mention the various cuts along the rest of her body, or the shot that left a deep gash in her right thigh, now wrapped tightly with gauze and tape, the reason for her limp. She tells me that by the time we made it back it was too late to be healed by the stone. It amazes me that she is even alive.

Sam and Mark are wearing the same clothes as the day before, both filthy and covered in mud and dirt with smatterings of blood mixed in. Both with heavy eyes as though they’ve yet to sleep. Mark stands behind Sam, shifting his weight uncomfortably.

“Sam, I always knew you were a wrecking machine,” I say.

He laughs uncertainly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “How about you?”

“Doing okay.”

I look over his shoulder at Mark.

“Sarah told me you carried me off the field last night.”

Mark shrugs. “I was happy to help.”

“You saved my life, Mark.”

He looks me in the eye. “I think every one of us saved somebody at some point last night. Hell, Six saved me on three separate occasions. And you saved my two dogs on Saturday. I say we’re even.”

I somehow manage to smile. “Fair enough,” I say. “I’m just happy to find out you’re not the dick I thought you were.”

He half grins. “Let’s just say that had I known you were an alien and could kick my ass at will, I might have been a little nicer to you that first day.”

Six walks across the room and looks at my bags atop the table.

“We really should get going,” she says, and then looks at me with implicit concern, her face softening. “There’s really only one thing left undone. We weren’t sure what you wanted us to do.”

I nod. I don’t need to ask to know what she is talking about. I look at Sarah. It’s going to happen much sooner than I thought. My stomach turns. I feel as though I could vomit. Sarah reaches out and takes hold of my hand.

“Where is he?”

The ground is damp with the melting snow. I hold Sarah’s hand in mine and we pass through the woods in silence, a mile away from the hotel. Sam and Mark walk in the lead, following the muddy footprints they created a few hours before. Up ahead I see a slight clearing, in the center of which Henri’s body has been laid out on a slab of wood. He is wrapped in the gray blanket pulled from his bed. I walk to him. Sarah follows and places a hand on my shoulder. The others stand behind me. I pull the blanket down to see him. His eyes are closed, his face is ashen gray, and his lips are blue from the cold. I kiss his forehead.

“What do you want to do, John?” Six asks. “We can bury him if you want. We can also cremate him.”

“How can we cremate him?”

“I can create a fire.”

“I thought you could only control the weather.”

“Not the weather. The elements.”

I look up at her soft face, concern written upon it but also the stress of time at our having to leave before reinforcements arrive. I don’t answer. I look away and squeeze Henri a final time with my face close to his and I lose myself to grief.

“I’m so sorry, Henri,” I whisper in his ear. I close my eyes. “I love you. I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, either. Not for anything,” I whisper. “I’m going to take you back yet. Somehow I am going to get you back to Lorien. We always joked about it but you were my father, the best father I could have ever asked for. I’ll never forget you, not for a minute for as long as I live. I love you, Henri. I always did.”

I let go of him, pull the blanket back over his face, and lay him gently on the wooden slab. I stand and hug Sarah. She holds me until I stop crying. I wipe the tears away with the back of my hand and I nod at Six.

Sam helps me clear away the sticks and leaves and then we lay Henri’s body on the ground so as not to dilute his ash with anything else. Sam lights an edge of the blanket and Six makes the fire rage from there. We watch it burn, not a dry eye among us. Even Mark cries. Nobody says a word. When the flames end I gather the ashes in a coffee can that Mark was astute enough to bring from the hotel. I’ll get something better the second we stop. When we walk back I put the can on the dashboard of Sam’s dad’s truck. I feel comforted to know that Henri will still travel with us, that he’ll look out over the roads while we leave another town as the two of us have done so many times before.

We load our belongings into the back of the truck. Along with Six’s things and mine, Sam has also loaded in two bags of his own. At first I’m confused, but then I realize that between him and Six some agreement has been made that Sam will come with us. And I’m happy for that. Sarah and I walk back into the hotel room. The second the door closes she takes my hand and turns me towards her.

“My heart is breaking,” she says. “I want to be strong for you right now but the thought of you leaving is killing me inside.”

I kiss her on the head.

“My heart is broken already,” I say. “The second I get settled I’ll write. And I’ll do my best to call when I know it is safe.”

Six pokes her head in the doorway.

“We really have to go,” she says.

I nod. She closes the door. Sarah lifts her face to mine and we kiss standing there in the hotel room. The thought of the Mogadorians returning before we’ve left, and thus putting her in danger yet again, is the only source of strength I can find. Else I might collapse. Else I might stay forever.

Bernie Kosar still lies waiting at the foot of the bed. He wags his tail when I carefully take him into my arms and carry him outside to the truck. Six starts the truck and lets it idle. I turn and look up at the hotel and am saddened that it’s not the house, and that I know I’ll never see it again. Its peeling wooden clapboards, broken windows, black shingles warped from excessive sun exposure and rain. It looks like Paradise, I once told Henri. But that will no longer hold true. Paradise lost.

I turn and nod to Six. She climbs into the truck, closes the door, and waits.

Sam and Mark shake hands but I don’t hear what they say to each other. Sam climbs into the truck and waits with Six. I shake Mark’s hand.

“I owe you more than I’ll ever be able to repay,” I say to Mark.

“You don’t owe me a thing,” Mark says.

“Not true,” I say. “Someday.”

I look away. I can feel myself wanting to collapse under the sadness of leaving. My resolve is being held by a tattered string ready to snap.

I nod. “I’ll see you again someday.”

“Be safe out there.”

I take Sarah into my arms and squeeze her tightly, never wanting to let go.

“I’ll come back to you,” I say. “I promise you, if it’s the last thing I do I’ll come back to you.”

Her face is buried in my neck. She nods.

“I’ll count the minutes until you do,” she says.

One last kiss. I set her on the ground and I open the door to the truck. My eyes never leave hers. She covers her mouth and her nose with her hands pressed together, neither one of us able to look away. I close the door. Six puts the truck in reverse and pulls out of the parking lot, comes to a stop, puts it in gear. Mark and Sarah walk to the end of the lot to watch us on our way, tears streaming down both sides of Sarah’s face. I turn in my seat and watch from the rear window. I lift my hand to wave and Mark waves back but Sarah just watches. I watch her for as long as I can, growing smaller, one indistinct blur fading in the distance. The truck slows and turns and both of them vanish from sight. I turn back around and I watch the fields pass and I close my eyes and I picture Sarah’s face and I smile. We’ll be together yet, I tell her. And until that day you’ll be in my heart and my every thought.

Bernie Kosar lifts his head and rests it in my lap and I place my hand upon his back. The truck bounces down the road, driving south. The four of us, together, heading for the next town. Wherever that might be.

About the Author

PITTACUS LORE is Lorien’s ruling Elder. He has been on Earth for the last twelve years, preparing for the war that will decide Earth’s fate. His whereabout’s are unknown.